Reuters: Danes make welfare a hot election issue as cracks show in Nordic model

The erosion of the welfare state has now become a defining issue in the June 5 general election in a country where people hand over an average 36% of their personal income to the state each month.

Opinion polls indicate Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen of the Liberal Party will lose power to Mette Frederiksen of the center-left Social Democratic Party. [...]

Denmark itself spends a higher proportion of its wealth on public welfare than most European countries, at 28% of GDP, behind only France, Belgium and Finland. [...]

A recent survey showed that more than half of Danes don’t trust the public health service to offer the right treatment. As a consequence the proportion of the 5.7 million Danish population taking out private health insurance has jumped to 33% from 4% in 2003, according to trade organization Insurance & Pension Denmark.

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Quartz: In Denmark and throughout Europe, assimilation is becoming mandatory

Critics claim the measures essentially represents a parallel system of laws that overwhelmingly target poor, Muslim migrants—an interesting choice of language, given the government’s policy of calling the ghettos “parallel societies.” Sociologist Amro Ali, writing in Time Magazine, claims that “the legislation reads like a 19th century missionary enterprise, a colonial experiment to civilize the brown folks.” One thing is clear: Denmark’s new laws are part of a broader European trend of attempts to use the law to make assimilation mandatory.

Key to Denmark’s plan are early childhood development measures that attempt to assimilate the children of immigrants into Danish culture and public life. Proposals include mandatory day care for a minimum of 30 hours a week for children up to six years old living in one of the 25 residential areas, which includes courses in Danish values “​​such as gender equality, community, participation and co-responsibility.”That’s a different rule than the one governing Danish parents who are legal citizens, who are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six. Another rule would instate targeted language tests in the first year of primary school in schools where more than 30% of students come from one of the 25 “ghettos,” in order to ascertain that children are reaching Danish language benchmarks.

Some measures appear explicitly punitive. One targets primary schools with a large proportion of “ghetto children” who miss certain achievement criteria for more than 3 years in a row. Those schools will now incur sanctions, including a possible shutdown or government takeover. Another proposal involves withdrawing social benefits from parents whose children miss more than 15% of the school quarter. Perhaps the most striking is the last measure, which involves a possible four-year prison sentence for immigrant parents who take their children on “extended visits” to their country of origin in a way that the Danish government determines compromises the children’s “schooling, language and well-being.” The measure does not quantify what makes for an extended visit.

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Bloomberg: Richer Poles Are Bad News for Denmark Facing Labor Shortages

Despite a progressive tightening of immigration rules by the center-right government of Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, foreign workers have continued to trickle in and now account for nearly a tenth of the Scandinavian country's labor force, with eastern Europeans making up a sizable chunk of that, according to estimates by Nordea Bank AB, the region's largest lender. [...]

The arrival of about 80,000 foreign workers since 2013 helps explain why Danish inflation remains subdued despite half a decade of negative rates. According to Helge Pedersen, Nordea's chief economist in Denmark, annual wage growth could have been as much as 4.5 percent without them, compared with the actual rates of around 2 percent seen over the past five years. 

Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians or Czechs have been able to look for jobs around the continent since joining the European Union, which guarantees the free  movement of its workers. But years of EU membership – and the subsidies that come with it -- are now bringing the intended rewards to much of eastern Europe. Nordea notes that unemployment in Hungary or the Czech Republic is now at "post-communist lows," while salaries in Poland have doubled since the start of the millennium, says Eurostat, the EU's statistics agency. [...]

In November, the Confederation of Danish Industry said that nearly four out of 10 of its member companies were struggling to find qualified employees. This week, the Confederation of Danish Employers added its voice to calls for the government to attract foreign workers, citing estimates that suggest one in four firms in the construction industry are having to turn down orders because they can’t hire enough people. But the truth is that all kind of workers are needed across many sectors of Danish business.

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Politico: Juncker’s one-president proposal draws few cheers

Given that Juncker’s proposal at a minimum would require the unanimous support of EU leaders, the initial reaction to his call to combine the two top jobs in Brussels suggested it would not fly anytime soon.

Speaking to German public broadcaster ARD after his address, Juncker acknowledged that he was “not expecting to clap their house in excitement” about the proposal. [...]

Tusk, a former Polish prime minister, and his sole predecessor, former Belgian premier Herman Van Rompuy, have fashioned the job into a neutral advocate for national leaders in Brussels, simultaneously a defender of European integration and national sovereignty and sensibilities.

The possibility that the Council would vote to eliminate that role seemed far-fetched, and several EU officials and diplomats suggested Juncker was playing to his audience in the European Parliament, where federalist sentiment is strong. Some said Juncker was savvy enough to realize it was an old and unrealistic idea, and he put it forward primarily to stir debate. [...]

Some European officials said they were more perplexed by Juncker’s decision to push the idea than they were opposed to it. One senior diplomat called it “a deliberate provocation to stir up debate” on an issue that has long been limited to “theoretical discussions.”

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