Have Denmark’s Right-Leaning Social Democrats Finally Learned Their Lesson?
Denmark’s recent elections suggest the Social Democrats’ rightward turn on immigration won’t always win. Voters expect more from the left—even in the age of Trump, Meloni, and Farage.
Progressives, especially in the U.S., are prone to bouts of romanticism about the Nordic countries. But things aren’t quite so rosy in reality—especially for immigrants and minorities. Denmark in particular has taken a hard turn to the right on immigration—so much so that Britain’s increasingly anti-immigration Labour Party, under pressure from Farage’s rising Reform UK, has said it is looking to emulate Denmark’s hardline asylum stance.
Since 2022, Denmark’s Social Democratic prime minister Mette Frederiksen has led an increasingly right-leaning coalition government. Initially head of a minority Social Democratic government, Frederiksen has, to be sure, inherited a slew of immigrant-hostile policies. In 2016, Denmark passed a controversial “jewelry law” legalizing the confiscation of asylum seekers’ personal possessions, including cash and jewelry above a certain value, to offset public spending. While the law has only rarely come into use, raising little revenue over the past decade, its real significance is its messaging effect, signaling Denmark’s shift to a nativist stance. The jewelry law’s racialized underpinnings were disclosed when the country, in 2022, clarified that it aimed to make an exemption for Ukrainian refugees, even as its treatment of Syrian arrivals was hardening—a case of “mismatched treatment” decried by Human Rights Watch, which rightly argued that Denmark should “widen its embrace of Ukrainian refugees to include others as well.”
Meanwhile, in 2018, the government at the time announced a series of policy measures, known as the “ghetto plan,” designed to “combat parallel societies”—a nefarious term increasingly adopted in the Nordic countries’ political lexicon. Amid a moral panic about minorities, Islam, crime rates, and the “sustainability” of the welfare state, the government made a deal with the right-wing nationalist Danish People’s Party to ensure “that residents with a non-Western background will make up a maximum of 30 percent in all residential areas in Denmark by 2030.” Controversially, the government promised to enact “strategic demolitions” in particularly “vulnerable areas” to ram through its program of urban reconfiguration; it also promised to double sentencing levels for certain kinds of crime committed in the areas, violating the principle of equality before the law. “In these areas,” the conservative minister of justice at the time said, “it is clear that the hammer of the law will fall heavier than elsewhere.” One lawyer described the proposal as “un-Danish”; a former immigration minister, Birthe Rønn Hornbech, called it a “crazy proposal.”
Social Democrats Go Nativist
This was the policy climate that Frederiksen inherited when she took office in 2019. But the center-left prime minister has pushed for anti-immigration policies of her own. In 2022, the Danish government declared that it was exploring a UK-style offshoring of asylum seekers to Rwanda—though the plans were quietly shelved the next year. Denmark’s Social Democrats have tightened rules on family reunification, and refugees can have their residency permits revoked and, potentially, be deported if authorities deem conditions in their country of origin sufficiently safe. A wave of such revocations hit Syrian refugees in Denmark in 2022, sparking condemnation from Amnesty International; as one of the refugees’ lawyers said to the New York Times, these actions were taken by the Danish government “in order to send a message to the world that Denmark is the worst place to go as an asylum seeker from Syria.”
It was a familiar tactic. A decade earlier, the country’s Venstre government had run a controversial ad campaign in Lebanese newspapers, aimed at the more than one million Syrian refugees living in Lebanon, that warned that Denmark’s social benefits had been cut and that there “will be a special return centre for rejected asylum seekers to ensure [they]…leave Denmark as quickly as possible.” Would-be migrants were in effect being told that Denmark was closing the door on unwanted migration—what the BBC earlier this year described as Denmark’s “explicit talk about a zero asylum seekers policy.” In January 2021, Mattias Tesfaye, the Social Democratic Minister for Immigration and Integration, said that “the goal is zero asylum seekers.” The day after, Prime Minister Frederiksen emphasized the government couldn’t “make a promise of zero asylum seekers”—even if that was the goal—but it could “set out the vision” that the government wanted “a completely new asylum system.”
Making good on the promise, Frederiksen teamed up with Italy’s right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni earlier this year, explicitly challenging the European Convention on Human Rights and calling, euphemistically, for “the right balance” on immigration. It was a stunning alliance between a Nordic social-democratic leader and the head of what has been described as “Italy’s most right-wing government” since the Second World War.
The Meloni–Frederiksen initiative was said to be in response to immigrants who have “chosen not to integrate, isolating themselves in parallel societies”—again, a loaded right-wing term. “We have to lower the influx of migrants to Europe,” Frederiksen said, speaking in Strasbourg six weeks later. “What has been mainstream among our populations for quite many years,” she said, appearing to celebrate this rightward shift, “is now mainstream for many of us politicians as well, finally.” And as Frederiksen warned later in the fall:
Denmark is the best country in the world. If that is to continue, all parts of immigration policy must be in order. And that is why it must continue to be strict. … So that we can take care of the Danes, our democracy and our lovely country.
Denmark, this “lovely country”—a patriotic phrase resonant with nineteenth-century Romanticism—was increasingly slamming the door shut on refugees. Frederiksen’s rhetoric would not be foreign to Trump. Where Trump was, and is, “America First,” Frederiksen was increasingly “Denmark first”—to the exclusion of growing numbers.
Self-Defeating Ethnonationalism
The conventional view has been that Frederiksen’s rightward shift on immigration has been a case of hard-nosed pragmatism—a center-left leader forced into survival mode in the age of Trump, and a necessary move to stave off the threat of rising right-wing populism. In an interview with the New York Times earlier this year, Frederiksen claimed that her government’s tough-on-immigration stance was the “main reason that her party returned to power and has remained in office even as the left has flailed elsewhere.”
But recent local elections in Denmark have started to cast that idea into doubt. Earlier in November, Frederiksen’s Social Democrats shed more than 150 seats in the country’s municipal and regional councils, with the party’s share of overall votes dropping from 28.4% in the 2021 elections to 23.2% this year—a significant five-point decline. Meanwhile, the Green Left (Socialistisk Folkeparti, or SF) gained 80 councilors and saw overall support rise from 7.6% to 11.1%. The even more left-leaning Red-Green Alliance (Enhedslisten) saw its support held firm at just above 7%, a touch lower than the 2021 result.
The Social Democrats’ losses in the capital, Copenhagen, were especially bracing: the mayoralty fell from the Social Democrats to the Green Left for the first time since the position of lord mayor was established in 1938. “After 122 years of Social Democrat rule in Copenhagen,” Politico recently reported, “the party’s candidate, Pernille Rosenkrantz–Theil, was not even invited to attend negotiations to form the capital’s next government.”
We should be careful not to exaggerate the Social Democrats’ decline. Frederiksen’s government remains in power: municipal elections don’t reshape national leadership. But the idea that the center left must pivot to the right has taken a dent in these recent elections. The notion that the left must “go nativist” to avoid defeat right-wing populism is looking far less secure.
Denmark’s nativism also runs far deeper than Frederiksen’s current coalition government, in power since 2022. As shown above, the country’s hard ethnonationalism of the past decade has, to a remarkable degree, been the product of a cross-party consensus, from the right to the center left, a pan-ideological “common sense”—with the exception of pockets of resistance on the left.
Denmark’s nativism has cut across party divides, an ideology mobilized on behalf of an ethnos, or (allegedly) undivided people. Politicians across the political spectrum have framed these hostile policies as an effort to protect the nation, culture, and welfare state against groups viewed as unintegrated (and resisting integration), destabilizing, and dangerous. This also means that unseating the Social Democrats won’t necessarily improve the lot of foreigners, migrants, or minorities.
Hygge as Selective Marketing
Of course, this is not at all in keeping with the liberal, if not outright libertarian, image that Denmark has projected onto the world stage in recent decades, especially in the realm of culture. Modern Danish culture has long been bold—especially in movies, from its early-twentieth century Golden Age cinema to the avant-garde filmmaking movement Dogme 95. But some are beginning to see through this: As a Guardian contributor put it, “If you think Denmark is all Borgen and social equality, take a look at its awful ‘ghetto’ law.”
To be sure, there have always been deeply problematic sides to this story, like Denmark’s colonial vestiges in Greenland. But the most recent turn to nativism is a marked shift away from a worldview premised on cosmopolitanism, cultural experimentation, and liberal humanism. It’s a worldview that has stood the country in remarkably good stead.
In fact, Denmark’s self-marketing has been remarkably successful: think hygge, the anodyne notion that Danish culture, or even “Scandi” culture as a whole, revolves around a cozy, comforting lifestyle—“taking time away from the daily rush to be together with people you care about,” a kind of pumpkin spice latte for the soul forged into governing cultural ethos. Missing from this cozy vision is the fact that Denmark’s hygge now comes with a side of exclusionary nativism.
To others in the Nordic countries, Denmark has been an important cultural reference point. Now, instead, Denmark functions less like a cultural avant-garde than a nativist vanguard, with the other Nordics emulating Denmark’s hardline politics: from Sweden’s immigration minister’s proposed 50-percent cap on “non-Nordic” residents in “vulnerable areas”—explicitly modeled on Denmark’s policies—to Norway’s right-wing Progress Party advocating “zero net immigration from high-risk countries” and “zero asylum immigration to Norway"—again, borrowing from Denmark’s playbook.
The End of the Road?
The recent election results from Denmark suggest that imitating the right isn’t the guaranteed winning strategy that Frederiksen and the Social Democrats have long thought. Defeating political adversaries by emulating those adversaries might lead to short-term electoral gains—might, mind you—though as Denmark’s recent local elections show, this is far from certain: Danish voters, especially in Copenhagen, are fed up with Frederiksen’s rightward tilt.
Of course, the idea that the left should emulate the right in order to stem its rise and remain in power is self-defeating: What’s the point of staying in power if it means abandoning core values like inclusivity and solidarity? Staving off right-wing populism by adopting right-wing policies will also bring real hardship to those affected by these policies, and so is in itself problematic.
But it’s also poor political craftsmanship. As Grace Blakeley points out, “Over time, left parties that pursue such a strategy erode their own base.” Denmark’s nativist turn, political scientist Cas Mudde writes, will “push away progressive voters, particularly younger ones, who want a party that is socioeconomically and socioculturally leftwing.” Copying the right risks demobilizing core progressive voters, eroding any authentic enthusiasm for the progressive project of building a more humane, inclusive social order. In a world of growing hatreds, this is the vision to which the left must remain true.
Increasingly, it also looks like the only thing that will keep nativists and nationalists from taking power. Only a radically inclusive social vision can spark the kind of enthusiasm needed to mobilize against the populist right’s politics of division and despair.
Thank you. It will be interesting to see how the British Labour Party does in the forthcoming local elections, whether the turn to nativism and evocation of Denmark's anti-immigration policies will have the same electoral effects. Will the apparently popular, more decisive reframing of the Green Party's agenda to embrace social equality and justice, and Polanski's emphasis on a positive reframing of immigration in particular, result in the same electoral shift? Needless to say, as in Denmark, it's one thing to do well in local elections and another matter to shift a national debate over immigration.