X Close

How populism went mainstream in Denmark The immigration debate in this social democracy has pushed politics in an unexpected direction

The cartoon controversy radicalised opinion across Europe. Photo credit should read RIZWAN TABASSUM/AFP via Getty Images

The cartoon controversy radicalised opinion across Europe. Photo credit should read RIZWAN TABASSUM/AFP via Getty Images


May 22, 2020   8 mins

Across Europe, political parties once deemed to be on the far-Right have made huge electoral breakthroughs by moderating their positions and coming in from the cold. They have been able to do this because of the unwillingness of mainstream politicians to address one of the most important issues facing the continent – immigration — coupled with media’s tendency to cast dissenting opinion as extreme.

The story does vary from one country to another, and, just as fringe parties come into the mainstream, so can the mainstream come to the fringe. Few places demonstrate this more clearly than Denmark, where politics in recent years has adapted in a way unlike anywhere else in Europe.

The international press regularly describes the Danish People’s Party as ‘far-Right’. But what precisely does the term mean?

There is no hard and fast definition. That’s part of the problem with the term. But by their fundamental nature, ‘far-Right’ parties do not believe in extending the rule of law to all citizens, and either do not support the democratic process or believe that it should be supplanted.

Other specific platform policies — in particular racism and anti-Semitism — are associated with the extreme Right, but attempts to make legitimate and often common and mainstream opinion into signifiers of extremism have made identifying the phenomenon unnecessarily hard.

The Danish People’s Party was founded in 1995 after a split within the Right-wing Progress Party. In its early years, the party distinguished itself by its criticism of the then existing consensus in Denmark on immigration and multiculturalism, and while not deserving of the ‘far-Right’ label, the DPP might accurately be said to have been (in a non-pejorative sense) a nationalist party.

They argued for immigration restrictions, for the state to put an emphasis on integration of newcomers, and for the primacy of Danish values within the country. As with all such parties, they were easily caricatured by the political centre and their concerns often dismissed. But in Denmark, as in neighbouring Sweden, the events of the first decade of the century caused the political centre to move towards them rather than the other way around.

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?

In the mid 2000s, the state underwent a remarkable stress-test on this question when the mainstream newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a set of cartoons in response to the discovery that no Danish illustrator could be found willing to do the drawings for a children’s book on Islam in a series on the world’s major religions.

The then culture editor of the paper, Flemming Rose, recognised that this comprised a sort of unwritten blasphemy law in the country and commissioned a number of cartoonists to test the taboo. The results, whipped up by a number of Danish imams who sought to portray the cartoons as unimaginably insulting towards the founder of Islam, led to worldwide protests, many deaths, and a number of threats and plots against those deemed responsible for this ‘blasphemy’.

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.

Over the next decade, that was to change dramatically. In 2015 – after the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris — fully two-thirds of the Danish population thought that Jyllands-Posten had been right to publish the cartoons.

The shift was a response not just to the political discussion that raged intensely over the nature of Danish-ness and the centrality of free speech, but also to the global attention, often intensely hostile.

During this period I had one conversation with a number of representatives from the DPP in the Parliament in Copenhagen, and I recall one expressing their belief that the country should not allow in any more migrants of Muslim origin. I questioned whether this wasn’t too stark a conclusion to come to, and the MP in question replied that since opinion polls showed that the vast majority of Danish Muslims did not believe in freedom of the press, why invite more people who also would be opposed almost in their entirety to such a fundamental pillar of democracy?

So while the DPP grew on a platform of immigration restrictions and integration, something interesting began to happen in the international media. As Denmark’s politicians were made to come to terms with one of the sharpest edges of the integration debate, parts of the international press muddied things considerably by presenting almost the whole of mainstream Danish politics as having lurched to the extreme Right.

The New York Times, in particular, got into the habit of portraying Denmark as a country which had somehow turned to the dark side. Even the story of Danish citizens saving the country’s Jews by getting them out of the country to safety in neutral Sweden to avoid the Nazis — almost all of its 5,000 Jews survived — was highlighted in order to be used against modern Denmark. Events that had been the focus of civic pride in the country were turned into a weapon against it; if a country had saved its Jews in the 1940s, so this logic went, then it had no right to turn away any of the world’s citizens in the 2000s and 2010s.

There is an interesting technical explanation for this, something Danish journalists and politicians understand. Countries like Denmark (with a population throughout this period of around 5.5 million people) will rarely be a centre of press attention, so that when they are, there is a tendency for international reporters – especially American ones — to fly in and play “find the Nazi” before flying back out again. Few spend much time focused on the country.

What is more, there is a tendency in the international media (as with the story of the Danish treatment of Jews in the 1940s) to know one or two facts about a country and then use these as the basis of all subsequent analysis. Observers who noted the number of international correspondents who referred to Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia while covering the recent Catalan crises (with which Orwell’s book has no connection) might recognise the trend.

While covering this small, Scandinavian social democracy, reporters from the NYT and elsewhere would call people critical of the government and then use these not-very representative Danes as the “voice of the people”. Inside Denmark, these same critics, often campaigners or activists, would then point to the international furore and say “Look, we are clearly doing something wrong: even the NYT is criticising us”.

And when the international media misreported or misrepresented events, any rebuttal barely got further than Copenhagen, meaning that the allegation stuck and the gap between the reality inside the country and the wider international view grew. As a result, few people have tried to understand what it means for a country the size of Denmark to repeatedly become a focal point for major issues, issues that every European country has also been going through.

So it was that, in the mid-2010s, when the migration wave from north Africa and the Middle East began to disturb politics across Europe, the Danes had already lost much of their previous naivety. The Danish government recognised that the challenge affecting every country was not just a problem of numbers, but of the ability of countries to absorb or integrate people.

During the 2015 crisis, the-then Danish government (most notably the immigration and integration minister Inger Støjberg from the liberal conservative party Venstre) made it clear that they would not go the way of their neighbour Sweden — they would not allow the borders to be open.

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.

This became known as the ‘jewellery law’ in international media, in spite of the fact that the legislation made it clear that wedding rings and other personal items should not be seized. Still the story went around the world claiming that the Danish government was going to seize jewellery and other valuables from desperate people arriving in the country. Again, the 1940s comparisons were made, with supposedly chilling echoes of history’s darkest moments. Four years on, and there is still no record of even one incidence of such confiscation of personal jewellery.

There was, in 2018, a similar row. Thanks to misreporting in the NYT, the story went around the globe that the Danish government was proposing to create different categories of citizen, specifically separating out people in ‘ghettos’. Once again, the corrections to the reports failed to get anything like the international attention of the original allegation; the more prosaic truth is that all citizens in Denmark continue to have equal rights and the country continues to operate an asylum system.

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.

But 2015 was a breakthrough year and Pia Kjærsgaard became the Speaker of the Danish Parliament, reflecting the fact that the DPP’s core preoccupations had proved pertinent. But the other political parties had also realised that they had to catch up if they were to remain politically successful, and rather uniquely in Europe, adapting to the DPP in their platforms.

Such changes are often represented as though they only exist on the political Right, but one of the most interesting aspects of the Danish story is that even a party like the Social Democrats — who have run a minority government since 2019 under the leadership of Mette Frederiksen – now has policies in many ways indistinguishable from the DPP.

And so Denmark’s equivalent of Labour campaigned in 2019 as being tough on immigration, advocating the same policies as the DPP in processing asylum applications outside of Denmark rather than once people had arrived into the country.

They recognised that the country could not absorb large numbers of migrants and that in order for migration to work, the country needed to focus on integrating the people already there. These policies reflected a widely-held belief in Danish politics that the country had inadvertently created ghettoes and failed at the task of integration.

So while the DPP performed remarkably badly at the 2019 election, winning their smallest share of the vote since 1998, and some party members blamed poor leadership, the larger reason would appear to be that the other parties had simply adapted to almost all of the policies distinguishing the DPP from the mainstream.

If one person could be said to demonstrate this shift it would be Mattias Tesfaye. The now 39-year old Social Democrats Immigration and Integration Minister (himself the son of an Ethiopian immigrant to Denmark) has repeatedly said things that are all but indistinguishable from what DPP leader Pia Kjærsgaard used to argue.

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.

For elements within the international press, this is one more proof that Danish society has lurched to the Right. It is more plausible that the political class has simply responded to the concerns of a citizenry historically used to consensus, but which has found itself in recent years having to repeatedly defend and stand up for some of their most fundamental societal values.

As in every other country, actual far-Right parties do hover in the wings. In 2017, Rasmus Paludan formed Stram Krus, or ‘Hard Line’, whose policies might be guessed at by the organisation’s name. Having achieved some notoriety for burning a Quran, Paladan stood for election on a platform advocating d the removal of all Muslims from Denmark. Despite some warnings in the international press that this new ‘far-Right’ party was about to enter the Danish Parliament, Paladan’s party failed to make the threshold for election in 2019.

Both the success of the Social Democrats and the failure of Hard Line can in part be attributed to the DPP, a party that has shown how the label of far-Right is so widely misapplied by a media less interested in informing than in setting the boundaries of opinion.

If the policies of the DPP are far-Right, then all major parties in Denmark would also have to be described as such, from centre-left to centre-right, in a country that scores higher than almost any other on any measure of equality, gender freedom and human rights.


Douglas Murray is an author and journalist.

DouglasKMurray

Join the discussion


Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber


To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.

Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.

Subscribe
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

24 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
David Bell
David Bell
4 years ago

An interesting article but it is a microcosm of a real problem worldwide. The problem is not the public it is a metropolitan left wing media who live in an echo chamber with identical metropolitan left wing politicians and the left wing metropolitan middle class. The key defining features of this echo chamber are:

1. The detest the nation state and anyone who has pride in their nationality
2. The detest the religion they where born into, pronominal Christian.
3. The despise those who don’t hold their views and happily denigrate those people so they don’t have to listen
4. The use of the term “far right” has come to mean anyone who isn’t in the echo chamber

The NYT is an international leader in this echo chamber but The Guardian is a central inhabitant.

Free speech is an anathema to this group. We only have to look at the Bill passing through the Scottish devolved assembly on hate crime to realise just how out of touch things are. Ed Davy chose to observe Ramadan but didn’t even put down a glass for lent. Try having a discussion with Owen Jones on biological sex and see how long it takes him to insult you.

This peace is very interesting but it is also a warning. Anyone who appoints themselves as a “moral arbiter” and demands their views are more equal than everyone else’s needs to be ignored.

davidlcrs
davidlcrs
4 years ago
Reply to  David Bell

If you have not yet seen it I can recommend the film Mr Jones describing his attempt to report the Holodomor while Walter Duranty and the NYT could see nothing.
Also look at the study done by the Danish HMRC looking at the cost of immigration over several generations. The margin for strategic error is small when one only has a small population.

Andrew Best
Andrew Best
4 years ago

Good for them
A government standing up for its people and culture, what a pleasant surprise

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago

The Danes, eventually, woke up to the fact that if they didn’t act quickly there would be no Denmark in the sense of a being western democracy with freedom of speech and association etc. Even so, they are still handing untold levels of welfare etc every year to countless people who will never work and who actively hate everything that Denmark stands for. I know there are plans to inculcate Danish values into the children of immigrants from the age of one, but I can’t see it working. Those children will be inculcated with anti-western values at home and at the weekend etc.

Moreover, within the context of western Europe Denmark is nothing more than a sandcastle holding back the tide of invasion and destruction, which is enthusiastically promoted by almost all politicians, the vast majority of the media and all supra-national organisations etc. Just look at some of the horrifying murders that have take place in Sweden recently. There is simply no mention of them in the fake news mainstream media – you have to get the information from Sanity 4 Sweden and Bretibart etc.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago

A welcome article, as is always the case with Douglas, although anybody who keeps up with events knows all this already. And the problem is that only a handful of people will read this here. It will never be featured in the fake news mainstream media.

The fact is that ‘far right’ now means anybody who believes in western values such as freedom of speech, association and enterprise etc. Meanwhile, left-wing and globalist politicians have deliberately shipped into Europe millions of people who do not adhere to these values. This is because those politicians do not adhere to those values themselves, as we see in the Democrat states in the US with their ongoing lockdowns, and as we would have seen had Labour come to power under Corbyn.

Lee Johnson
Lee Johnson
4 years ago

Restricting immigration is far right ?
Wow. Didn’t know that Aussies and Kiwis are screaming fascists. Shame on them.

opop anax
opop anax
4 years ago

Interesting and insightful as always, thank you, Douglas. If only such an awakening would happen in the UK

Dennis Wheeler
Dennis Wheeler
4 years ago

“far-Right’ parties do not believe in extending the rule of law to all citizens.”

I don’t quite get this statement, very baffling. That line as it stands just doesn’t make legal sense. Of course they believe in “extending the rule of law to all citizens” (no one right or left would disagree with that, though they may disagree about what the law should be). Being a citizen means, by definition, that one is entitled to the fullest civil and constitutional rights within that territory under its law. And all found within a given territory – whether citizens or not – are subject to the rule of law governing that territory. That does not mean non-citizens should have exactly the same rights as citizens do under the law, but all are nonetheless subject to the rule of law.

Are you confusing “citizens” in that line above with mere “residents” (whether legal or illegal)? And by “not extending the rule of law” do you mean to say only that “far-right” parties disagree that all “residents” are necessarily entitled to the same rights as full, legal citizens (opposing leftist movements, for example, in many places to give voting rights to resident aliens, even illegal aliens in some cases)?

Martin Shepherd
Martin Shepherd
4 years ago
Reply to  Dennis Wheeler

I think he’s talking about the discrimination certain citizens have faced at the hand of far-right governments throughout history (Jews, gays etc.) Although the term ‘far-right’ has now been so misused that I don’t find it a helpful or accurate way of describing anything.

David Morley
David Morley
4 years ago
Reply to  Dennis Wheeler

I stumbled over that as well.

I’m assuming that Douglas is suggesting that one of the characteristics of a genuinely far right party is that it does indeed advocate for such a distinction. The classic case, as always, being the Nazis limitation of the rights of Jews.

His point – I think – is that most of the parties currently labelled as far right do not advocate for any such thing.

Bill Gaffney
Bill Gaffney
4 years ago
Reply to  David Morley

The Nazis were fascists…not a nickel’s difference between fascists and communists. Both were and are repressive just as are all Leftist. The statement that “far-right” is not for individual “rights” is BravoSierra! It is the Left/Progressives/Communist(lump in Fascists) who truly despise the individual and believe in Dictatorships/Over-arching Government control. By the way…Islam is not conducive to Westerners nor those who love freedom.

Simon Davies
Simon Davies
4 years ago
Reply to  Dennis Wheeler

To me the rule of law means among other things that everyone is equal before the law, and certain people or groups are not priviledged before it.

Paul Theato
Paul Theato
4 years ago

Freedom of speech and of opinion and the freedom to offend are the keystones of a civilised nation. There should be no debate about that. None (despite what the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims thinks about it). Feel free to spout whatever pious, or other unevidenced rubbish you wish, but raise your hand to strike down or kill someone with an opposing POV or try and introduce legislation to outlaw opinion you disagree with then go and live somewhere else. Go now, and live somewhere else. Off you go.

tiggs95
tiggs95
4 years ago

I think that there is ample evidence in the media of the effects of ” high altitude cerebral edema” caused by prolonged and repeated trips to the moral high ground.

Mark Lambert
Mark Lambert
4 years ago

Going back twenty years, it was obvious to most that the Islamic terrorism was just that, religious terrorism. Some non-Muslims insisted it was all political, eg “foreign policy” and made all sorts of excuses along those lines.

It was perhaps weird that it took cartoons to open quite a few more eyes, that the violence actually *was* religious all along. But the ones defending with “foreign policy” now had to defend on “offence” and start asking questions like, “why would you even want to insult Islam, anyway?” I wondered if even those people realised that the crocodile they were protecting, would eventually eat them, but they had to “protect” because of “ethic minority” and “multiculturalism”.

In Boris Johnson’s article regarding the burka in Denmark, and the plans to ban it, I wholly disagreed with him saying that they should not invoke a ban on the grounds of liberty. Let the Danes do what they want if they want to keep hold of that liberty. Britain has lost that chance, and of course part of that was the full-on 18 month reaction to the other part of Johnson’s article where he gave his less than favourable opinion of the frock. We had our chance to tell the religious lunatics where to go, but we blew it.

matthew hilton
matthew hilton
4 years ago

Good piece. It is always going to be hard maneuvering between the racist primitives and those who want to keep the flag of freedom of speech flying. Thank you for highlighting the journalist part of the issue. if anybody can get the balance right it is likely to be the Scandanavians as they have sophisticated articulations between the tribe and the individual. It is always much easier when the invaders are conquerors – like the Romans and the Normans who got the aspirational classes to speak their lingo and eat their food. It seems that all those years of sixteenth to twentieth century colonialism didn’t create a hybrid culture sufficiently tough and loved to stand out against the rabid god-bothers.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago
Reply to  matthew hilton

‘… if anybody can get the balance right it is likely to be the Scandanavians…’

I suggest you research the recent murder in Sweden for Tommie Lindh, who was killed for trying to prevent the rape of a 14-year old girl. You already know the name of the killer.

Then there’s a Swedish girl called Wilma, who had her head chopped off a few months ago by her boyfriend. I’ll give you a clue – her boyfriend wasn’t born in Sweden.

There was no ‘balance’ here in the sense of the reporting by the fake news mainstream media because they more or less failed to cover it.

matthew hilton
matthew hilton
4 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

the balance I referred to was between the tribe and the individual not the balance of press point of view.

benbow01
benbow01
4 years ago

‘The international press regularly describes the Danish People’s Party as ‘far-Right’. But what precisely does the term mean?

But by their fundamental nature, ‘far-Right’ parties do not believe in extending the rule of law to all citizens, and either do not support the democratic process or believe that it should be supplanted.’

Dear Douglas name here………………………….one political main stream, or other, Party anywhere that that description does not fit. And take a look outside, are we, in our alleged free societies which are not run by ‘Far Right’ Parties, enjoying rule of law, democratic precess and haven’t our inalienable Rights of free speech, freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom to enjoy our property been supplanted?

Tyranny has no political spectrum, so Right, Left is meaningless these days as is ‘extreme’ because extreme has become the normal.

Dr Irene Lancaster
Dr Irene Lancaster
4 years ago

It is impossible to live a Jewish life in contemporary Denmark. Jews have had their religious rights withdrawn, the Danish bible society has censored the word Israel from their recent translation of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, and the reason given for these backward steps is fear of, or resentment of, Islam. New Zealand has gone even further in this antisemitic direction, by the way. So small may be beautiful, but b also stands for bigoted!

john fitzgerald
john fitzgerald
4 years ago

Far right means right, liberal democracy means liberals do whatever they want. England for the English, everyone else should show some compassion and leave.

David Jory
David Jory
4 years ago

How ironic: I made a benign comment and it was deleted.
Now I am unheard on UnHerd.

W. P.
W. P.
4 years ago

It’s a pity that American exceptionalism is represented by its utterly exceptionable press.

airmailpilot
airmailpilot
4 years ago

The New York Times died with Jayson Blair, utterly croaked right there