Morten Messerschmidt

Morten Messerschmidt MEP
Member of the European Parliament
In office 1 July 2009 – 30 June 2019
Constituency	Denmark
Member of the Folketing
In office 8 February 2005 – 18 June 2009
Constituency	Aarhus
Personal details
Born	(1980-11-13) 13 November 1980 Frederikssund, Denmark
Political party	Denmark Danish People's Party EU ECR
Alma mater	University of Copenhagen

Morten Messerschmidt (born 13 November 1980) is a Danish politician and previous Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Denmark. He is a member of the Danish People's Party (DPP).

He won his seat in a landslide in the 2009 elections with 284,500 personal votes, and 465,758 personal votes in the 2014 election.

Messerschmidt was convicted in 2002 for publishing material that attempted to link Islamic societies to rape, violence and forced marriages.

Political career

Before taking his seat in the European Parliament, he was a member of the Danish parliament (Template:Lang-da) from 8 February 2005, having won his seat with 3,812 personal votes.

In August 2016, Messerschmidt resigned as EU parliament group leader for the DPP, as a result of a scandal involving the related foundations FELD and MELD that he had managed. OLAF launched an investigation into misuse of EU funds, and Messerschmidt was reported to the police for identity theft by MEP Rikke Karlsson, who had left the DPP in 2015 in protest against Messerschmidt's alleged withholding of information about the foundations. Karlsson and then-fellow DPP MEP Jøhrn Dormann had been elected to the board of MELD without their knowledge. Ekstra Bladet was nominated for a European Press Prize for investigative reporting in 2017 for their coverage of the scandal.

On 1 March 2018 Messerschmidt was one of three Danish MEPs who voted against a motion to encourage national parliaments to ban "gay conversion therapies".