The Danish Exception

While the rest of Western Europe tears itself apart over immigration, Denmark has quietly answered the question—surprisingly, the answer came from the Left.

by Kaiser Bauch

Denmark occupies an unusual geographical position in Europe. Part peninsula, part archipelago, the latter (called Jutland) comprises roughly 70% of Danish territory and connects it with the European continent, as it shares a land border with Germany.

Yet over half of Denmark’s population—which recently reached 6 million for the first time—resides on its islands, and especially on the island of Zealand, where around 40% of Danes live and where the capital, Copenhagen, lies. It is from Zealand that another fixed connection to another country extends: the Øresund bridge and tunnel, one of the great feats of European engineering, an 8-kilometre motorway and railway bridge and a 4-kilometre underwater tunnel linking Copenhagen with the Swedish city of Malmö.

Cross either that bridge or the southern border into Germany, and you enter a different political world. To the south lies a country whose politics have been consumed for a decade by a single issue it cannot resolve. To the north one that was until recently held up as the moral standard-bearer of European liberalism, but is now more frequently discussed in terms of its gang violence and bomb attacks; the slow erosion of the social democratic idyll it once embodied.

Both Sweden and Germany have become embroiled in deepening social and political tensions stemming in large part from mass immigration, most notably from Middle Eastern Muslim countries such as Syria and Afghanistan—in both, the political consequences have been seismic.

German politics is hardly comprehensible without its establishment’s effort to contain the rise of the anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland. Sweden’s Sweden Democrats, another anti-immigration party once seen as fringe by the establishment, now shape government policy. Not so in Denmark. Danish politics is characterised by a development that runs completely against the prevailing trend Western Europe has experienced over the past two decades.

The Predictable Collapse

Throughout the West—whether in Sweden, Germany, or the broader Anglosphere—there has been a sociopolitical development so similar that it has an almost tedious predictability to it. The old centre-left social democratic parties, which were the champions of the working class in postwar democracies, had traditionally paired their welfare economics with relatively strict immigration policies, protecting heavily unionised workers from wage competition—a stance which was at odds with the more laissez-faire outlook of the centre-right.

Over the past few decades, however, these parties have reinvented themselves as the political home of urban white collar professionals, with culturally and socially liberal leanings, as well as an increasingly permissive approach to immigration, driven in part by the ideological convictions of those who came to staff these parties.

The logic seemed sound enough. With the significant deindustrialisation most Western economies had gone through over the past half century and the rise of the service sector, the traditional electorate had simply ceased to be numerous enough to sustain centre-left electoral majorities, so new coalitions had to be forged.

The apparently obvious answer was an alliance between lower-wage workers and college-educated progressive urbanites. But these two groups harbour a number of interests that are difficult to reconcile and which are in some respects flatly contradictory.

And so, in a development that in retrospect seemed almost inevitable, rising immigration alienated precisely those lower- and middle-class voters these parties had historically represented.

The inability—or unwillingness—of their leaderships to adjust course produced a familiar result: the electoral decline of once-dominant centre-left parties, from the SPD in Germany to the Social Democrats in Sweden to the Labour Party in Britain, and the corresponding rise of populist right movements defined above all by their anti-immigration nativism—the AfD, the Sweden Democrats, Reform UK, and, in a different register, Donald Trump in the United States. This is, of course, a rudimentary sketch—one that glosses over many other countries and their unique situations—but the broader arc holds.

The Party That Meant It

In this respect, the leftist Danish Social Democrats stand apart, in that they—and not a rightist party as one would expect—decided to tackle the immigration issue.

The hardening of Danish immigration policy is however not, it should be said, purely a Social Democratic project—it has been a cross-partisan endeavour across governments since the early 2000s, when a centre-right coalition first began tightening the rules.

What the Social Democrats did, upon taking power under Mette Frederiksen in 2019, was to own and accelerate a trajectory already well underway—in doing so, they stripped the populist right, represented in Denmark by the nativist Danish People’s Party, of its most potent issue. This was not accidental. Martin Engell-Rossen, the strategist behind Frederiksen’s rise and her chief of staff from 2019 to 2021, has described how the party made a deliberate choice to sacrifice some of its cosmopolitan urban support in order to win back working-class voters in smaller cities and rural areas who had drifted to the populist right—voters who felt abandoned by a party that had grown too comfortable in the metropolitan professional world it had come to inhabit. It worked spectacularly well.

In 2015, in the immediate wake of the European refugee crisis, the Danish People’s Party scored 21 % of the vote. By 2019 it had fallen to 8.7 %. In 2022, when the Social Democrats won a third consecutive election, increased their vote share to 27.5 %, and formed their second government, the Danish People’s Party received 2.6 %. You want to stop the far right? Get a pen and paper and take notes.

Denmark’s current migration policy rests on several pillars: stringent family reunification rules require both partners to be at least 24 years of age, financially self-sufficient, and able to present a substantial financial guarantee (approximately U.S. $8,900 in cash). For all humanitarian immigrants, including resettled refugees, there is temporary rather than permanent protection status; to gain permanent residency, long and demanding qualifying periods are in place.

In addition, a tactic of deterrence has at times been made explicit: Denmark placed advertisements in Lebanese newspapers warning prospective asylum seekers that conditions in Denmark were unwelcoming, and passed legislation allowing police to confiscate cash and valuables above a modest threshold from arriving refugees upon their entry.

Domestically, the government has pursued so-called “anti-ghetto” policies, which cap the proportion of residents of non-Western background in poor and crime-ridden neighbourhoods, and has empowered local authorities to demolish or sell off social housing in areas exceeding that threshold—an explicit attempt to prevent the emergence of the kind of parallel societies that critics argue have taken hold in parts of Sweden. Predictably, that policy has recently been challenged before the European Court of Justice.

The ideological justification for all of this was articulated with characteristic bluntness by prime minister Frederiksen herself: “Many come here to work and to contribute. But some do not. And around Europe, we see the consequences. Crime. Radicalisation. And terror. We have built some of the best societies ever. But we cannot accept [just] anyone who wants to come here.”

Asylum seekers whose claims have been denied but who cannot be deported are housed in departure centres explicitly designed, in the government’s own framing, to encourage voluntary return. The stated ambition of Danish policy is not the management of asylum flows but their elimination—the official target, stated without embarrassment, is zero asylum applications. In the 2020 Migration Policy Index, Denmark ranked last among 56 countries for immigrants’ access to family reunification, and fourth lowest globally for access to permanent residence, trailing only Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan.