Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II to step down Jan. 14 after 50 years on the throne : NPR

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II introduced Sunday that she plans to depart the throne to make approach for her son, Crown Prince Frederik.

The queen introduced throughout her New 12 months’s speech that she would abdicate on Jan. 14th, which is the 52nd anniversary of her personal accession to the throne at age 31 following the loss of life of her father, King Frederik IX.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen paid tribute to the 83-year-old monarch, providing a “heartfelt thanks to Her Majesty the Queen for her lifelong dedication and tireless efforts for the Kingdom.”

Margrethe is the “epitome of Denmark” Frederiksen’s assertion learn, and “all through the years has put phrases and emotions into who we’re as a individuals and as a nation.”

The 6-foot-tall, chain-smoking Margrethe has been one of the crucial standard public figures in Denmark, the place the monarch’s function is essentially ceremonial. She typically walked the streets of Copenhagen nearly unescorted and received the admiration of Danes for her heat manners and for her abilities as a linguist and designer.

A eager skier, she was a member of a Danish ladies’s air pressure unit as a princess, collaborating in judo programs and endurance assessments within the snow. Margrethe remained robust whilst she grew older. In 2011, at age 70, she visited Danish troops in southern Afghanistan sporting a army jumpsuit.

As monarch, she crisscrossed the nation and usually visited Greenland and the Faeroe Islands, the 2 semi-independent territories that are a part of the Danish Realm, and was met in every single place by cheering crowds.

Denmark has Europe’s oldest ruling monarchy, which traces its line again to the Viking king Gorm the Previous, who died in 958. Though Magrethe is head of state, the Danish Structure strictly dominated out her involvement in occasion politics.

But the queen was clearly well-versed in regulation and knew the contents of the laws she was referred to as upon to signal.

She acquired coaching in French and English from her earliest years, in addition to Swedish from her mom. Along with archaeology, she studied philosophy, political science and economics at universities in Copenhagen, Aarhus and Cambridge together with the London Faculty of Economics and the Sorbonne in Paris.

Ever since his delivery on Could 26, 1968, Frederik André Henrik Christian has been the inheritor to the Danish throne.

He’s the oldest son of Queen Margrethe and her late French-born husband, Prince Henrik, who died February 2018. Frederik, 55, has a youthful brother, Prince Joachim.

For the reason that age of 18, he has served as regent at any time when his mom was outdoors the dominion and carried out official duties, shaking palms with hundreds and receiving international dignitaries.

“Within the new yr, Crown Prince Frederik might be proclaimed king. Crown Princess Mary will change into queen. The dominion can have a brand new regent and a brand new royal couple. We will stay up for all of this within the information that they’re prepared for the accountability and the duty,” the prime minister’s assertion stated.