Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen: the new queen of Denmark's left?

At a time when much of the European left is in despair over its inability to convert the three-year financial crisis into electoral success, Denmark is now the exception.

Two weeks ago Helle Thorning-Schmidt won the right to become the country's first female prime minister after her Social Democratic-led coalition topped parliamentary polls to oust the rightwing Liberal-Conservative government. Thorning-Schmidt, 44, has also earned headlines in Britain as the daughter-in-law of Neil Kinnock, the former Labour party leader.

For many young Danes, however, by far the bigger story is the extraordinary influence and popularity of a woman 17 years younger, who has emerged as a potential power broker. Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen has been described as the "new queen of the Red-Green Alliance", the party on whose executive committee she serves. At 27, she is young, beautiful, radical and received significantly more personal votes than the new prime minister in the recent election, which allows voters to express preferences for individual politicians. The British equivalent would be a young activist for Respect or the Green party outpolling the Labour leader. It was an amazing result.

"I was really surprised about the [personal votes] result," she told the Observer, in one of her first interviews with the foreign media. "Perhaps you should ask the voters."

As recently as 2007 Schmidt-Nielsen was known more for activist stunts than party politics. She dumped 200kg of pasta and 40 litres of tomato sauce inside the finance ministry in protest at student grant cuts. She strung red suspenders from the social affairs ministry in a protest for women's equality, and planted bushes in a park as part of a protest for gay rights.

In her offices on the top floor of Denmark's parliament, stuck in the middle of the difficult party negotiations over the new government, it's clear that she has moved a long way from her activist beginnings. The only visible hint of street radicalism is a discreet metal stud in the inner part of one ear.

However, she dismisses the focus on her as a person as an attempt to explain away the success of her party. "The pundits are in shock. They think, 'Oh, the Socialist party has grown so much', and then they say, 'Oh, the people, they don't really agree with the policies, they just voted for Johanne because she's young and beautiful.'"

This is exactly the line taken by Michael Ulveman, press secretary for the former prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who believes Schmidt-Nielsen's popularity will be short-lived: "I think the population is going to have a wake-up call, because they don't have many figures like her. There will be a lot of members of parliament now who have very extreme leftwing opinions."

Schmidt-Nielsen scoffs at this: "The right wing have been trying to mount this scare campaign against us, saying Johanne is really a dangerous communist and she will make us like North Korea or Albania. But it didn't really work. It's difficult for people to blame me for the Soviet Union. I was born in 1984."

Schmidt-Nielsen is skilled at using her youth like this, to deflect criticism or make her opponents look out of touch. When, at 23, she fronted for her party in the 2007 televised election debates, Bendt Bendtsen, leader of the Conservative party, asked her for coffee, thinking she was a production assistant. The story overshadowed everything else in the press coverage afterwards. "I do not think they would do that now," she laughs. "They would be afraid to end up on the front pages of the newspapers like that sexist old man. I know I'm young, but parliament should reflect society and there are also young people in society. We are not all men of 55 years old, wearing suits, who have our own company."

In fact, Schmidt-Nielsen almost ranks as a veteran. She has been in politics for 15 years. "I was 12 when I got involved. There were a lot of children at school whose parents didn't really have the ability to help them, and I thought, why's the school not helping them?"

This led to her becoming vice-president of the secondary school students' association, standing as a Social Democrat. "But then, when I was 15, I thought, that's too rightwing for me," she says. So she joined the anti-globalisation movement, protesting in Prague, Gothenburg, Brussels and Rostock.

She's unapologetic about how far she now sits to the left. "I'm an anti-capitalist and a socialist, is that so radical? It's just so obvious that the climate can't deal with this way of producing goods. This obsession with blind growth, it can't continue. I don't believe that the task for the rich countries is to get more growth; it is to redistribute the wealth that we already have."

She believes this election marks an opportunity to reclaim the country after a decade of rightwing rule. Top of her agenda is to undo the draconian migration laws that the far-right Danish People's party has pushed on to the statutes during its backing of the Liberal-Conservative coalition. She's also determined to block moves to limit unemployment benefits and raise the retirement age.

"For 10 years, there has been this logic that if you just keep whipping the unemployed, suddenly a lot of new workplaces will come up in Denmark, like magic, and it's not happening of course, because the problem isn't that they don't want to work, the problem is that there's no place for them to work."

Schmidt-Nielsen also has more radical goals: she wants to nationalise the energy industry, set up a state-owned bank, impose a Tobin tax on the financial sector and withdraw from the EU.

But unlike some of the Marxists in her party, she refuses to offer grandiose solutions to Denmark's problems. "We know that we can't get everything that we want," she concedes, seeing her role as bringing the demands of the activist movement into parliament.

But her agitprop days may be over. "Perhaps I'm not going to throw 200kg of pasta again," she says. "I mean, if you knew how much time it takes to make 200kg of pasta. It's hard work."