Aksel Larsen (5 August 1897 – 10 January 1972) was a Danish politician who was chairman of the Communist Party of Denmark and chairman and founder of the Socialist People's Party. Larsen became leader of the Communist Party in 1932, and was elected to the Danish Parliament (Rigsdagen) in 1932. Together with other Danish communists Larsen had to go into hiding in 1941 when the Danish police began arresting all party members.
After the liberation in 1945 Larsen served as a minister in the interim government, and subsequently led his party to its best-ever result in the October 1945 election, in which it took 10% of the vote. The election, however, brought a Liberal government into office, and Larsen's party was mostly shunned by the other party leaders.
Following the rising in Hungary in 1956, Larsen condemned the Soviet Union's action. This led him into conflict with the members of the party leadership who were more loyal to Moscow; a conflict that ended with his being expelled in November 1958.
Larsen's reaction was to form the Socialist People's Party (Socialistisk Folkeparti), which, thanks to Larsen's personal popularity, entered parliament at the 1960 election at the expense of the Communists, who from then on played only a very peripheral role in Danish politics.
Aksel Larsen, who was especially in later years highly respected among politicians, even if his party was seen as somewhat irresponsible, remained as leader of the Socialists until 1968, when he handed over to Sigurd Ømann. He remained an MP until his death in 1972.
The Danish Institute for International Studies, concluded in 2005, that Larsen held a secret working relationship between 1958 and 1964 with one of Denmark's allied partners in the Cold War, stating that "Larsen... obviously was an agent of a Western intelligence service."
Read more about Aksel Larsen: Early Life, Time As A Social Democrat, Early Political Career, The International Lenin School, Back in Denmark, Opposition To Moscow, Surviving Stalin’s Purges, Enacting The Popular Front Policy, World War II and Sachsenhausen, After The War, The Last Years As A Communist, As CIA Agent, Founding A New Party, Later Years, Legacy