Gert Petersen

Gert Verner Petersen (19 August 1927 – 1 January 2009) was a journalist and politician who helped found and represent the Socialist People's Party. He was born in Nykøbing Falster, Denmark, as the son of the factory worker Karen Rolandsen. He got a high school diploma from Nykøbing Katedralskole in 1945 and studied history at the University of Copenhagen.

In 1940 At thirteen years old he was a member of the youth movement of the Nazi National Socialist Workers' Party of Denmark for ten months but changed his political views and was from 1943 an active member of the resistance and was captured by the Gestapo in 1944 and incarcerated in the Frøslev camp until the end of the German occupation of Denmark

He became a member of the Communist Party of Denmark in 1945. He was among those members who wanted to change the party line to a democratic form of socialism. He took part in this debate through the publication "Dialog". When the party line was not changed he followed Aksel Larsen out of the communist party and became a co-founder of the Socialist People's Party on 15 February 1959.

He was a member of the party leadership of the party since 1961 and in periods the party's executive committee and its secretariat. He was party chairman in the period 1974 to 1991 where he showed great ability to combine a Marxist analysis with day-to-day politics. Thus his influence was not limited to the Socialist People's Party but reached wide parts of the Danish left wing.

Petersen has influenced his party in three ways: I. As a person who made a great effort to formulate the political ideology of popular socialism and demarcate the party from the Social Democrats to the right and the Communist Party of Denmark and differing left-wing groups on the left, especially concerning the relationship between socialism and democracy. He took an unconditional stance for a democratic path to socialism.

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