But on a recent Friday afternoon, just weeks before Sunday’s parliamentary election, violence came close. At the upscale Emporia mall, a 15-year-old shot and killed a woman in front of families shopping over the weekend. “I just went into some kind of survival mode and tried to get out as quickly as possible,” said Louise Heegaard, a 40-year-old mother of two who witnessed the shooting. “But when I realized I wasn’t going to die, the shock came and I was scared and sad.” The event made her rethink her policy ahead of Sunday’s national elections. “I was so angry afterwards, thinking that so many innocent people would have to go through something like this. I voted solely on that basis,” he told the Telegraph. An unprecedented rise in violent gang crime threatens to topple the ruling left-wing Social Democrats after eight years in power as voters turn to right-wing parties to address their concerns about law and order. The issue has become one of the most important to many, according to polls, an unusual development in a largely safe country where residents are typically more concerned with employment, education and health care. But their concerns are not unfounded.
