Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen calls an election to take on the hard right again
Photograph: Getty Images
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E UROPE’S CENTRE-LEFT parties have much to thank Donald Trump for. His insults and bullying have made many of them more popular, notably Denmark’s ruling Social Democrats. On February 26th Mette Frederiksen, the prime minister, called a snap election, taking advantage of the bump in support she received after Mr Trump threatened to seize Greenland.
A few months ago Ms Frederiksen looked set for a drubbing. In local elections in November the Social Democrats lost control of Copenhagen, the capital, for the first time in a century. Polls in December put their support at just 17%, down from 28% at the national election in 2022. Since Ms Frederiksen defied Mr Trump over Greenland it has rebounded to 22%, and her net approval has bounced by 21 points.
Denmark’s general election on March 24th, and one in Sweden in September, will be watched closely across Europe, where centrist parties are battling to contain the populist right. The Nordic neighbours have test-driven different strategies for doing so. One is to adopt hard-line policies on immigration and crime in order to steal the populists’ thunder, as Denmark gradually has over the decades; Sweden eventually followed. The other is to give the populists a role in government in the hope that they will become more responsible, as Sweden did after its last election in 2022.
Both strategies entail ethical and electoral risks, but there may be no alternative. Europe’s efforts to isolate populist-right parties, as with France’s “cordon sanitaire” and Germany’s Brandmauer (“firewall”), are failing. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is France’s most popular party. The Alternative for Germany is tied for first nationally with the Christian Democrats, and may end up governing one of Germany’s states after elections this autumn.
For many in Scandinavia, even on the left, the lesson is clear. “Denmark is maybe the only country that has been, in the longer run, successful when it comes to weakening the right-wing populist party,” says Magdalena Andersson, Sweden’s prime minister until 2022 and the leader of its Social Democrats, who are ahead in the polls with about 35%.
In the mid-2010s, a huge influx of migrants and refugees dominated northern Europe’s political agenda. After the populist anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party won 21% of the vote in 2015, a centre-right government introduced some of Europe’s toughest migration laws. These slashed the number of new asylum seekers from a peak of 21,000 in 2015 to around 3,000 two years later. They also undercut support for the populists, whose vote share collapsed. By 2019, when Ms Frederiksen took office, just 21% of Danes listed immigration and asylum among their top three priorities, according to YouGov. Still, her government tightened migration policies even further.
Sweden’s Social Democrats were slow to learn the lesson. After an influx of 156,000 people in 2015, the government cut the number of new arrivals to around 22,000 in each of the following two years. Yet it struggled to shift the perception that it had opened the borders. In a 2018 YouGov poll 76% of Swedes thought their government was handling migration badly, compared with 54% of Danes. In 2022 the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats (SD) came second with 21% of the vote.
The SD had been shunned because of its neo-Nazi roots. But Ulf Kristersson, leader of the centre-right Moderates, struck a confidence-and-supply deal under which the SD backed his government in exchange for policy input, though it did not have ministers. The Moderates say democracy required giving the SD ’s voters a say. “Isolation hasn’t really worked anywhere,” says Alexandra Ivanov Hokmark, chief of staff to Mr Kristersson until 2023 and now at Timbro, a free-market think-tank.
Giving the SD a voice may have helped Mr Kristersson slow its growth; it is steady at around 21%. But legitimising the populists has been costly for two smaller parties in the coalition. They risk falling below the 4% threshold needed to enter parliament. Peter Hultqvist, a Social Democrat who served as defence minister, thinks this was inevitable: if a government includes populist parties, “step by step, it will be eaten up by the right-wing extremists.” The risk will be greater after the next election, since the SD says it will insist on ministerial posts.
The Nordic model raises questions for centrist parties elsewhere. One is whether adopting hardline anti-immigrant policies means abandoning core principles. Ms Andersson argues that stricter migration policies are needed so that governments can integrate those who have arrived, and implement social policies to reduce inequality. Another is whether they marginalise immigrants, making it harder for them to integrate. Then there is the question of whether countries with ageing populations can afford to slam their doors shut.
“We need nurses,” says Sedat Arif, a deputy mayor of Malmo, Sweden’s third-largest city. About a third of its population was born abroad. Immigration “has to be regulated…[but] we also want people to feel part of the society”. It is a balance that voters do not seem ready to embrace. ■
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