Pia Kjaersgaard's party has shifted Danish politics firmly to the right and made itself indispensable, writes CLARE MacCARTHYin Copenhagen
HARDLY a day passes in Denmark without some aspect of the “foreigner problem” making front-page news. The pick of yesterday’s crop concerned Tim Kristensen, a teenager born on the island of Fyn of a Danish father and an English mother.
Because his parents (like most other couples in this profoundly secular society) never married, on his 18th birthday Tim received an official letter informing him he was not a Danish citizen.
“The Danish authorities tell us they can do nothing and that I’m a British citizen. But the British authorities say there is no record of me over there,” he said.
If effect, he’s stateless, and with no passport cannot travel abroad on family holidays or student trips.
He’s not the only teenager to get caught in the tangle of Danish red tape. A week earlier, Felicia Kristiansen (no relation) won a two-year battle to live with her father, a Danish GP, and continue her education here. Their struggle was peppered with two-week deadlines to quit the country to live in her mother’s native Mozambique. But locals in the small town of Slagelse kicked up such a media fuss that the authorities eventually caved in and granted special leave to remain. The school kept a diligent student and the town its doctor.
Such bizarre case histories are the legacy of a decade of political upheaval that has seen the meteoric rise to power and influence of the populist and anti-immigrant Danish Peoples Party.
Pia Kjaersgaard, its leader, is a sparsely educated grandmother with a magnetic hold on a large section of the electorate. Her lack of formal education is more than compensated for by an innate and Machiavellian political canniness. The government, since 2001, is a minority coalition comprising two centre-right parties, but it is Ms Kjaersgaard who wields the real power: no major legislation succeeds in parliament without her approval, and each time she extracts her piece of flesh.
Down through the decade her price for passing the annual budget invariably involved another tightening of the screws of Denmark’s strict immigration policy. The laws have been tweaked on average every six months since 2001.
Newspapers often run features showing that even native Danes have trouble passing the language and general knowledge tests required of prospective immigrants from non-EU countries. Many fall foul of wealth barriers, minimum education standards or age restrictions that close the door for spouses under the age of 24.
Hundreds of Danes with a foreign husband or wife have uprooted themselves and gone to live in Sweden, hoping eventually to use EU freedom of movement legislation to return. But many more will not. “Some people are so angry at Denmark that they don’t want to come home,” says Torben Wilken, leader of the Danish-Nordic Resistance Movement, a citizens’ rights organisation.
How all this came to pass in Denmark is a story in itself. Throughout the latter half of the last century, Denmark was widely perceived as a welcoming haven of Nordic tolerance. A prosperous backwater whose fair-minded citizens willingly surrendered some 60 per cent of their wages in taxes in return for an equitable society with free education, health services and safe streets for all.
But even as other countries were beginning to marvel at the Danish miracle and particularly the “flexicurity” labour market model which balanced job security with social security, the model started to unravel. The economy wobbled, unemployment rose, inflation soared and the swathes of guest workers from Turkey and elsewhere were transformed in popular imagination from factory hands to jobless welfare leeches.
The Social Democrats, who had built the welfare state and dominated politics for most of the century, struggled but failed to solve the country’s problems and into this breach stepped a clutch of populist, nationalist and anti-tax protest parties. Most such parties shone briefly before disintegrating, but Ms Kjaersgaard’s DPP has gone from strength to strength with every election.
Founded in 1996, it took 7.4 per cent of the vote in the 1998 election and 12 per cent in 2001, allowing it to enter an informal alliance to propel the new centre-right government into office. Having now backed this administration for a decade, the DPP is angling for cabinet seats should its centre-right allies win the next election.
Though current opinion polls suggest the Social Democrats will return from the political wilderness in the election which will be held within the next six months, the possibility of Pia Kjaersgaard in government unsettles left-wingers.
For the DPP’s influence on the Danish political spectrum has been immense. Ms Kjaersgaard has shifted the centre of gravity to the right and virtually the entire political playing field has shifted with her. The “foreigner problem” has become the incontestable fulcrum and all parliamentary parties (bar one) have hardened their stance.
When Ms Kjaersgaard and the government launched a tough points-based entry system for foreigners earlier this year, instead of condemnation the opposition responded with a points system of its own.
To win votes in this country, you must talk tough about foreigners. This broad shift towards populism also spooked Sweden in the run-up to its general election last September. Traditional parties of the left and the right vowed not to follow Denmark’s example and to keep the DPP’s sister party — the Sweden Democrats — isolated from power.
“They have xenophobic features. For me, it’s a very, very high priority to keep them out,” Anders Borg, Sweden’s centre-right finance minister told The Irish Times.
In the event, the Sweden Democrats won 5.7 per cent of votes to make their parliamentary debut. But though they are still spurned by the other parties, their 20 seats and parliamentary presence has given them a valuable platform for their anti-immigrant rhetoric. Erik Ullenhag, Sweden’s integration minister, frequently cautions against the “Danish setup”. Despite their claims to the middle ground, the Sweden Democrats are fundamentally intolerant and Islamophobic, he says.
When the populist True Finns scored remarkable election gains in Finland last week (from 4.1 per cent to 19.1 per cent), traditional politicians across Scandinavia shuddered. Carl Bildt, Sweden’s centre-right foreign minister called the development “worrying”. Håkan Juholt, leader of the Swedish social democrats, ascribed the outcome to “fears of the future, with people seeking simple answers to complex problems”.
That the far-right should become so entrenched in what are still relatively prosperous countries is another part of the puzzle. The Danish and the Swedish economies have had their problems but Sweden is thriving and is currently the fastest-growing economy in the EU.
The proportion of foreigners in all of these Nordic states is also relatively limited. According to figures released by Eurostat on April 1, just 2.9 per cent of Finnish residents are foreign citizens, rising to 6 per cent in Denmark and 6.3 per cent in Sweden. This compares to Ireland’s 8.6 per cent and a whopping 43 per cent in little Luxembourg. And while anti-immigration voices complain that these headline figures exclude those foreigners and their children who have acquired citizenship, it is worth noting that they do include immigrants from other EU countries. In other words, many of the foreigners in Denmark are from neighbouring Sweden and lots of those in Sweden are Finns.
In Denmark, at least, the explanation boils down to money. With its North Sea oil reserves depleting and its population rapidly ageing, Denmark has problems financing its welfare state. Portraying foreigners as unproductive scroungers is a solution that a lot of Danes seem to understand.
An opinion poll published on Monday showed that 60 per cent of Danes regarded the tone of debate on immigration as either “fair” or “too soft”. For political scientist Klaus Kjøller, this is understandable: the DPP has been around so long and hardened its policies so many times people no longer notice the excesses.