Reports in the UK this weekend suggest that the Labour government is set to base a new, stricter approach to immigration on policies set by Denmark’s Social Democrats. Why is the Danish party seen as a model for success?
As far-right parties across Europe have grown in strength and come increasingly close to taking power in recent years, the Social Democrats have appeared to retain a relatively stable position as the dominant force in Danish politics.
With Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen having won two elections, keeping the Social Democrats in power since 2019, Denmark is increasingly being looked to for political inspiration by parties on both the left and right — most recently, Britain’s Labour government.
To understand the success of the Social Democrats, however, it is crucial to look at the similarities between them and the far right.
After Denmark’s far-right Danish People’s Party took over a fifth of the votes in the 2015 parliamentary election — which also saw the Social Democrats removed from power — the latter party, a longstanding leader of the Danish left, significantly changed its immigration platform.
Until this point, the Social Democrats largely espoused conventional centre left viewpoints, for example through a humanitarian approach to asylum and pro-integration stance towards refugees.
Advertisement
This changed drastically under the leadership of Mette Frederiksen from 2015 onwards, culminating in it joining the then-centre right government and Danish People’s Party (DF) in a so-called a “paradigm shift” on immigration in 2019.
This entailed a principal that all refugees must be considered to have temporary status in Denmark and should eventually be returned to their home countries when this was considered safe.
While authorities’ interpretation of what is safe led to controversial rulings to remove refugee status from well-integrated Syrians, for example, it also aligned the Social Democrats with the far right on almost all legislative issues that related to asylum. This undermined the ability of parties like DF to present themselves as being against the establishment.
The rightward turn by the Social Democrats on immigration is arguably also evidenced by the stance of Frederiksen and her party on foreign labour.
Advertisement
In the spring of 2025, Frederiksen said foreign labour in Denmark must be limited due to concerns about societal cohesion. This put her at odds with the two other coalition parties who, like Danish business organisations, say that more skilled labour must be allowed to enter the country to continue growing the economy.
READ ALSO: Why did Danish PM Frederiksen say foreign labour should be limited?
The Social Democrats might say Frederiksen is following traditional core party principles by seeking to protect Danish workers, but her rhetoric sounded distinctly like a national conservative.
“Of course it’s positive that people want to contribute to Denmark, but when it comes to foreign labour, numbers matter, especially those from North Africa and the Middle East,” the prime minister said.
After its bumper result in the 2015 election, DF’s vote share plummeted to 8.7 percent in 2019 and 2.6 percent in 2022.
The once-influential far right party suffered from internal divisions and a splintering on its wing of populist, national conservative politics as rivals Nye Borgerlige and later Denmark Democrats were formed and began competing for its voter base.
It also suffered by supporting a Danish version of Brexit, a position that became untenable even among many of its own voters as Denmark observed Britain’s chaotic exit from the EU from across the North Sea.
Meanwhile, it had little choice but to broadly support government policy on both the response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Far right parties in other countries may have had success through positioning themselves as skeptical of either Covid-19 measures or support for Ukraine, but that was not the case in Denmark where these views remain too marginal.
All of this aside, a key element in the decline of the far right is its loss of ownership over strict immigration policy.
That remains the case today with the Social Democrats retaining their now established anti immigration stance as part of a centrist coalition, and DF grasping at increasingly extreme positions in a bid to regain a foothold.
The extent to which Britain’s Labour Party — or anyone else — can replicate this within their own particular national context and political system is a matter for another debate.