Unherd: How populism went mainstream in Denmark

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the DPP were consistent in their attitudes: they never advocated for the use of violence as a political tool, and argued for the extension of equal rights to all citizens. So long as people lived up to the provisions of the citizenship laws of the country, they did not advocate for discrimination along racial or confessional lines. But they were early in raising the central question that was going to keep returning to Danish (as in all European) politics during the 2000s: how much immigration is enough? [...]

And in the wake of that incident, Denmark got a dose of international attention of a kind it was unused to. As a result, the country’s politicians — and the country itself — were startled into a discussion centred not just on questions of free speech but of integration. Polls showed almost full opposition among the country’s Muslim population to the portrayal of Mohammed. In wider Danish society there was a split but it was fairly even, one Gallup poll showed 48% against the publication and 43% in favour. [...]

So in January 2016, the Danes passed legislation stating that any arrivals who had travelled through multiple safe European countries in order to reach Denmark should expect to help pay for themselves in the country, and not simply expect to rely on the Danish taxpayer. The law was passed with the support of all the main parties, including the Social Democrats. [...]

Throughout this period, the Danish People’s Party did increasingly well in the polls. Their success peaked at the 2015 election in which they became the second largest party in the Folketing, the Danish Parliament, winning 37 of 179 seats. Unlike in neighbouring Sweden, the party had never been excommunicated from politics, in the way that the Sweden Democrats have been. Indeed, within three elections of the party’s founding, it was providing support to the government. [...]

Earlier this month the Danish government released an 800-page report from the Ministry of Justice which concluded that while the Danish public are strongly committed to freedom of speech, immigrant communities have far less of an attachment to the principle. The report found that among immigrants and descendants of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Pakistan, 76% thought that it should be illegal to criticise Islam. Just 18% of the Danish population as a whole thought the same thing — and in response to these findings, Tesfaye announced that immigrants who didn’t respect Danish values should leave the country.

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Jacobin Magazine: Danes First, Welfare Last

This can seem like a paradox. “Defending” the welfare state from “outside” abuse in principle should make it possible to maintain the existing or higher levels of welfare for native citizens. But instead, we see a general retrenchment affecting all recipients.[...]

In power from 2011-2015, S implemented cuts in educational support and the lowest social benefit for the unemployed. In essence, all those who were singled out as unproductive and a “burden” for the state were prone to cutbacks. This can be regarded as the Danish version of austerity policies and logically follows on from the introduction of workfare in the mid-1990s.[...]

Corydon framed neoliberal policies as “the politics of necessity,” according to which technocratic decisions are the only possible ones. The government’s cutbacks on unemployment benefits or the continuous privatization as the sale of shares of Dong Energy to American investors, among others Goldman Sachs, showed this broad orientation. [...]

In 2017, 3,500 people applied for asylum in Denmark. At that time, S was also supporting the temporary stop for refugees arriving under UN quotas, again invoking the need to deal with the challenges we have before we can accept any new refugees. The two first months of 2018 had shown similarly low numbers of asylum-seekers, with less than 300 people arriving each month. At the peak of the “refugee crisis,” the Ministry of Finance estimated that the total costs of receiving refugees in 2016 amounted to 11 billion DKK (€1.47 billion). This corresponded to 0.6 percent of GDP; about 1 percent of the total public budget of 1100 billion DKK. It is difficult to see how this expenditure could undermine the welfare state. [...]

This plan is part of the “cultural” or “values” struggle initiated by the Liberal Party and DF in the early 2000s. However, there is also a strong class component in the plan. The proposals also include the possibility of demolishing buildings, of removing inhabitants (e.g. people without employment) to secure a “better” composition of residents, and of privatizing council estates. Hence, although the plan is racialized, the target group is not only ethnic minorities but poor people in general.[...]

For the Social Democrats, too, in order to receive, people first have to contribute. Solidarity is thus not articulated around oppression, inequality or the reshaping of class. but around belonging to Denmark and the Danish way of living and contributing. Abandoning an alliance that unites working people on a class basis, S thus instead produces a misplaced alliance based primarily on nationality, with the main intention of recovering the space left in recent years to the far right.

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