This economic backdrop has had an impact on the refugee debate, even at a time when some Danish companies wish they could find manual workers.5 As far as Petersen sees it, there are two options: Pay refugees a low wage to clean floors and wash windows and risk dragging the general wage level down, or, alternatively, invest in education to bring everyone up to a level where they can qualify for the new economy jobs that are available.
A new low-wage sector of the labour market could put pressure on workers on the lowest rungs. “We can’t compete with China in producing cheap plastic stuff.… You can change the job market to match people’s low skills, or you can change people’s low skills to fit into the job market,” says Petersen, like a true Social Democrat. “I have to choose the second one, because the first one is the way to making our society poor and weaker.” Sweeping the floor for £4 an hour is not a good life, he insists.6
For the DPP, it’s quite simple: letting refugees in and letting them work “will toss out Danish persons who do not have skills from the Danish labour market,” says the MP Kenneth Kristensen Berth. If the hordes descend on Denmark and there is no longer a strict minimum wage, he claims, then employers could pay workers five kroner (fifty pence) per hour. The Liberal Alliance party has supported an entry wage, more out of hostility to the welfare state than out of empathy for refugees. “If nothing is done about the fact that people can just come to Denmark” and receive social benefits, Berth argues that will probably benefit the free-market right in the long term. Why would you be “willing to pay like 50–60 percent of your income in taxes if you are not absolutely convinced that this money goes to well-deserving people?”7 he asks.
This is precisely the sort of outcome most feared by some welfare state scholars in the early 2000s; they worried that perceptions of undeserving welfare beneficiaries would sap support for generous welfare benefits and provide “openings for right-wing populist parties that combine anti-immigrant nativism with attacks on the welfare state.”8 But only half of that equation materialized.
That’s because welfare cuts don’t win elections in countries like Denmark—the staunchly free-market Liberal Alliance won just 7.5 percent of the vote in the 2015 election—and the welfare state is not in danger of disappearing. Indeed, the party that has benefited most from anti-immigration backlash is not trying to dismantle it; it wants to reinforce it. What has changed is that both the nanny state’s boundaries and decisions about who deserves to be included among its members are being more closely monitored.
Berth’s boss, Søren Espersen, is blunt on this point. All that remains of the centre right’s traditional policies “is lower taxation, which nobody listens to anymore,” he scoffs. “They don’t do that in Denmark. It’s a discussion you don’t have.” The idea of a cradle-to-grave welfare state is still holy to most Danes, and American-style welfare cuts simply do not sell.9 But welfare chauvinism does.
That may be part of the reason that the DPP’s target has shifted. Social Democrats were once the biggest losers when it came to competing with the DPP. It is now the mainstream conservatives of the governing centre-right Venstre Party who are at risk of having voters poached either because they are uncomfortable with gutting the welfare state or because they are staunch nationalists. “There’s probably not that many left to gather from the Social Democrats,” says Berth. “On the other hand, I think there’s far more left in a party like Venstre.”10
Espersen acknowledges that the DPP’s support of the Venstre government makes for strange bedfellows. On economic policy, he admits, “we are miles away.” The DPP is not a free-market party, but when it comes to immigration and EU skepticism, “this is what they come for,” he says of the new voters. The DPP is even managing to draw voters from among Venstre’s party officials, Espersen says smugly. He mentions a voter he approached during the last campaign, offering her a party leaflet. The woman declined, telling him she was on the board of the local branch of the Venstre Party. “Then just to be funny, I said, ‘Well, you could vote for us anyway, couldn’t you?’” recalls Espersen. She told him that she did. Later, he asked her what was going on. She explained she had friends in the party and didn’t tell them who she actually voted for. “There were many of those types,” Espersen says, echoing Marine Le Pen’s conviction that there is a large silent vote, fearful of ridicule or retaliation but steadfast in their support for the populist right.
“We don’t want to change our welfare system,” Espersen explains. The DPP wants to protect it for those who are deserving; and for him, that is native Danes and those with valid work permits. When it comes to the entry-level wage for refugees, “we are against that because it presses the wages down and also makes it impossible for Danish people that are citizens to get those lower-paying jobs. We have a minimum wage here of 180 kroner per hour [about £18].” The DPP line is very clear: state revenues should be spent on Danes, not on newcomers.
Espersen finds criticism from Americans particularly galling: “Sometimes when I am blamed by Americans about how horrible and rough we are, I just tell them, ‘How many refugees did you take from Syria? Zero.’ And those ones that come in illegally, they look after themselves. They can wash a car here and there. I don’t think we need any advice, especially from the Americans.” But if there’s a lesson from Washington, he says, it’s the model of low numbers and no safety net for immigrants.
“For me, it has never been about the money,” Espersen says, mentioning plunging revenues from North Sea oil that is straining infrastructure budgets for new train lines and other projects. “We can’t do it anymore. We haven’t got money now to subsidize this.” And then the refugees come and they “are entitled to a house and a flat and everything.”11
A key to selling the DPP’s argument is convincing voters that hardworking Danes are subsidizing the undeserving foreign poor rather than their down-at-heel countrymen who are deserving of solidarity. “If the idea spreads,” says Berth, that taxpayers’ money is going “to people who just don’t want to work themselves or don’t want to do anything for themselves, they just want to have money back, then, of course, people will not be willing to pay such a large amount of money in taxes.”12 What is left unsaid is that the DPP has been instrumental in spreading the impression that immigrants are leeches.
As Mayor Gyldal Petersen put it, the DPP has placed asylum-seekers and everyone else in a catch-22. “Immigrants can’t do right,” he says. “When they’re unemployed, they’re a burden to society. When they’re in a job, they just stole the job from a Dane.”13
In a matter of two decades, the DPP has gone from being ostracized to being normalized. Espersen remembers the early days of the party around 2000, when DPP officials were shouted down; it rarely happens anymore. Once upon a time, he needed protection. Today, says Espersen, “I can walk in peace now in the streets, and people will come over and say hi. There’s never aggravation, not even from those circles that we are supposed to be in opposition to. I mean, the situation is very calm and very good, with the security getting less and less necessary.”
The DPP now has thirty-seven seats out of 179 in parliament; the prime minister’s party has just thirty-four but governs with the support of the DPP and other right-wing parties. “What we have been saying and been warning about has now come true,” Espersen argues, so of course “they will change their ideas about us.”
When I first met Espersen in 2002, he was the spin doctor in chief for the DPP after its first big election victory, when the party gained 12 percent of the vote. Back then, his focus was reducing immigration and getting out of the EU. These days, says Espersen, “these two items are the only things that are being discussed now, the only thing! And we’ve had that right from the beginning. So of course when other parties may start saying the same things, people will often go to the original and not the copy.”
Espersen went into politics “to help save Denmark,” he tells me. “I can see that’s happening now.” He marvels at how far his party
has managed to shift the debate. “The Social Democrats now have moved such a distance that you cannot imagine it. It is absolutely incredible to hear what they are saying now and writing now” compared to ten to fifteen years ago. “That makes me very happy,” says Espersen. 14
In early 2016, the party leader, Mette Frederiksen, went to Stockholm to meet with fellow Scandinavian Social Democratic officials. There she gave a speech that rattled her Swedish and Norwegian colleagues. She declared, “We social democrats must accept that there is a clash.… It is a very strong part of our identity that we help when people need help … but just as strong is our value that we must have a well-functioning welfare state.” Frederiksen then dropped a bomb on the staid gathering of political allies. “My position is that a universally funded Scandinavian welfare state with free and equal access to health-care, education and social subsidies is not compatible with an open immigration policy.” From receiving lower wages to facing competition for housing and schools, “it’s those who were already vulnerable who are being pressured.” And without control over the numbers, the situation would only grow worse, she warned.15
Back in Herlev, Mayor Gyldal Petersen was looking sleep-deprived. The night before we met, there had been a shooting in the council estate where he grew up—an extreme rarity in this small town of twenty-seven thousand. He doesn’t believe that the Social Democrats have lost all appeal. On the contrary, he thinks they can expand their base and win some old voters back, but they have to speak openly; pointing to the shooting that shook his town the night before, he tells me, “You have to say it’s a problem, and I want to do something about it.”16
He is adamant, like the current party leader, Frederiksen, that a genuine commitment to social democratic values means ensuring social progress for everyone. While the left is very worried about mistreatment of asylum-seekers, he fears that they have forgotten working-class Danes, making them low-hanging fruit for the DPP in much the same way that UKIP and Donald Trump lured disgruntled Labour voters and blue-collar Democrats across the aisle. “It is not social progress when people who moved into their flats back in the ’50s, in a good environment, good neighborhood, they had good relations to everybody. Forty years later, in the ’90s, they are now retired, and they live in the same flat; everyone around them are now immigrants speaking languages they don’t understand.”
Not everyone agrees with the direction the Social Democratic party has taken. Yildiz Akdogan, the Social Democratic MP who has tried to encourage young Muslim citizens to identify as Danes, was one of Denmark’s first politicians from a minority background. Despite her trailblazer status, she got little attention from the press when she first started out in politics, and certainly not from the women’s magazines, because, as she puts it, “my story is not that interesting; I haven’t been in a forced marriage, I haven’t worn a head scarf, I haven’t been in a radical group. My story is so normal that it’s not a story.”
She did once get an interview in a major newspaper as a new member of parliament, and it revealed a lot about how Danes view ethnic minorities, no matter how successful they are. Before the Danish political drama Borgen became an international television sensation, there was another popular Danish television show called Krøniken that featured a character who represented the inner-city Copenhagen neighborhood of Nørrebro in parliament. The fictional MP was also a Social Democrat. Akdogan called Ekstra Bladet, the country’s largest tabloid, and told journalists she was the real-life version of the character in the show and happened to be a woman with a Turkish background. The paper seemed interested and arranged an interview.
The journalist’s first question was, “So you are running for election—what does your father say to that?” She was furious. “I wanted to punch him,” she recalls. “What kind of a stupid question is that? Do you ask the same question to my colleagues who are ethnic Danes?” The journalist insisted that her culture must present a challenge for a woman in politics. She told him her father didn’t tell her what she should or shouldn’t do. But it was clear to her that if you don’t live up to the stereotype of being an oppressed Muslim woman in a head scarf with an overbearing father, then the media isn’t interested.17
Akdogan believes the Social Democrats’ biggest mistake was to move from ignoring the DPP to mimicking some of its policies. In the 2001 election, Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen famously referred to the DPP’s members as not being stuerene, a Danish word used to describe dogs who are not house-trained or, literally, clean enough to come into the living room.18 By 2017, they had broken through the front door of the house and moved into all its rooms. The Social Democrats, says Akdogan, ignored the DPP “for a long time, but then when we really took them seriously, we took them too seriously.… We should have also challenged their policies or their ideology, and we haven’t really done that.”19
Aydin Soei, the sociologist who came up with the concept of countercitizenship, is a leading advocate of letting refugees work, which angers many of his friends on the left who believe it will undercut wages for Danes. He is adamant that the state needs to “create another way of getting people into the labour market.” He believes a lower minimum wage is necessary if uneducated people and foreigners who can’t speak Danish well are ever going to find work.
“Denmark is a big welfare state. You get social welfare if you don’t have a job. And a lot of refugees were just parked on social welfare instead of recognizing their education and their skills,” says Soei. Even engineers have been put on welfare, he says, at a time when there is a projected shortage in the field. “If your motivation is to create a liberal society where the individual can create a good life for him or herself, then you would have solved this problem years ago,” he argues. Instead, the state has effectively provided newcomers with an allowance and keys to an flat and ignored them, assuming that its work was done. The problem, says Soei, is that there is no political incentive to integrate asylum-seekers into the job market. “It doesn’t have consequences for the politicians … because they don’t have the right to vote.” Getting onto the first rung of the labour market ladder in Denmark is tough without Danish fluency or local educational credentials. And arguing for a lower entry-level wage for refugees to allow them to work in unskilled jobs, as he has, is politically fraught, because Denmark’s strong unions, not to mention the DPP, are opposed. Soei insists that the unions and the leftist parties are mired in an old way of thinking.20
Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen, the foulmouthed leader of the far-left Red-Green Alliance, doesn’t buy the argument made by Soei. She is in favor of letting refugees work but not if it drags down wages for Danes. “If you go to some kind of company and you work there with a low salary, all your colleagues will say, ‘Well, because of you, my Danish colleague got fired.’” That, she adds, is not good for integration.
Schmidt-Nielsen worries more about how public debate can influence young people who already feel angry and alienated. “Of course we have to talk about the problems. It’s a big mistake not to talk about them, because then we can’t change them.” That said, some things are off limits. As she puts it, “Freedom of speech is not really the same as being a racist motherfucker.” When politicians start competing to “be the biggest tough guy on immigrants,” it can lead in dangerous directions.
Imagine, she says, being “a brown guy. I open the newspapers and all Muslims are terrorists, and I go into a shop, and the shop owner looks at me all the time because he thinks, ‘Well, he’s going to steal.’ I try to get a job, and they say, ‘Oh, your name is Mohamed.’ … If all the time society tells you, ‘Go away, you’re not Danish,’ at some point you say, ‘Well, no, I’m not Danish. Fuck Denmark.’ It’s not an excuse for shooting people, but it’s not difficult to understand.”
She also claims that the right’s rhetoric on traditionally left causes, like women’s rights and gay rights, is purely opportunistic. “They don’t give a fuck about women’s liberation, because they don’t do anything about t
he fact that there’s 17 percent difference between what men and women in Denmark are paid!” she exclaims. And when it comes to gay rights, she points to the DPP’s spokesperson on gay marriage, who responded to new laws by publicly asking, “What’s going to be next, that you can marry your dog?” Unlike Marine Le Pen’s remodeled FN in France, some prominent members of the DPP remain mired in the old right’s religious conservatism.
As much as Schmidt-Nielsen despises the DPP, she concedes that they have positioned themselves smartly on economic policy. “The DPP actually looks like a classic, social democratic party,” she argues, except for the fact that they have supported the centre-right Lars Løkke Rasmussen as the prime minister, despite his calls to cut welfare benefits. She thinks that the DPP’s voters seem to have prioritized issues in a way that leads them to accept concessions on social benefits, because they care more about barring asylum-seekers from the country.21 Like the women and religious Christians who voted for Donald Trump based on his economic platform and pledges on Supreme Court nominations despite his overt misogyny and philandering, some Danish voters on the right seem to care more about keeping refugees out than preserving their welfare benefits.
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