Helle Thorning-Schmidt, an EU expert cultivating compromise

(COPENHAGEN) - Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt is known as a European connoisseur and a consensus builder: qualities that should come in handy when her country takes the helm Sunday of a crisis-torn EU.

The 45-year-old tall, elegant blonde with piercing green-blue eyes sometimes has a stiff and formal air about her, not unlike the Desperate Housewives character Brie played by Marcia Cross, and due to her taste for designer clothes and handbags finds herself stuck with the nickname "Gucci Helle."

But Denmark's first woman prime minister, who led an unlikely left-wing coalition to victory in September elections and brought an end to a decade of right-wing rule under heavy influence of the anti-immigration far-right, is more than a pretty face.

The Danish newspaper of reference, Politiken, has described her as "slender as a hare" but also "strong as a silk thread."

In 2005, at the tender age of 38 and with only a few months in parliament under her belt, the charismatic Thorning-Schmidt rose to become the first woman to rule the Social Democrats, which had dominated Danish politics for most of the 20th century.

She has a reputation for being tough but also a team player credited with uniting the party she inherited in a state of disarray after its 2005 election loss.

"She overcame wounds going back to the early 1990s," Rune Subager, a political science professor Aarhus University, told AFP.

But before turning her focus to Denmark and helping put the Social Democrats on the road to recovery, Thorning-Schmidt's sights were set squarely on Europe.

After earning a political science degree from the University of Copenhagen, she worked as a consultant on EU issues for Denmark's main trade union before serving as a member of the European parliament from 1999 to 2004.

Her marriage to Britain's Stephen Kinnock, whom she met during a semester at the Bruges College of Europe in 1993 and with whom she has two daughters, also made her the daughter-in-law of former British Labour Party leader and longtime European Commission member Neil Kinnock.

In Denmark, Thorning-Schmidt is known for striving towards the political middle ground, saying for instance during her campaign that she wanted more "humane" immigration policies than those pushed through by her predecessors, but stressing she would not roll back a number of the laws they introduced.

When it comes to the economy, her minority three-party government, which relies on the support of the far-left Red Greens, has meanwhile moved significantly to the left, with its first budget proposal entailing increased spending and taxes and a deeper deficit.

"We are not jumping on the austerity wagon," she said after her election victory.

That runs counter to the direction most of the crisis-hit eurozone is moving in, but the Danish prime minister has insisted Copenhagen during its six-month presidency will try to "be a bridge" between the 17 eurozone countries and the 10 EU members not part of the common currency bloc like her own, stressing that consensus "is a Danish speciality."

Thorning-Schmidt's consensus-building skills were not enough to secure her party victory in 2007 snap polls, and she has spent the past four years fighting to overcome her polished and wealthy image and prove she can be the natural leader of the traditional workers' party, and of Denmark.

She has insisted on her average Danish childhood, growing up as the youngest of three children in the working-class Copenhagen suburb Ishoj, but her family today lives in the capital's poshest neighbourhood and it has been hard to shake the "Gucci Helle" nickname.

Ann Linde, the international secretary for the Social Democrats in neighbouring Sweden, told Swedish radio that Thorning-Schmidt nonetheless had managed to earn the respect of her working-class base.

Describing a meeting a few years ago where a Danish working-class party member jumped up and asked how a Gucci-clad Thorning-Schmidt would connect with voters, Linde fondly recalled the party leader's answer: "We can't all look like shit!"