Danish party caught by demographics. Used the immigrants to keep in power. Push the case too far!!
Far right, wrong step
An unaccustomed setback for a populist party
Jun 17th 2010 | copenhagen
PIA KJAERSGAARD, the doyenne of Denmark’s hard right, has not put a foot wrong in the 15 years since she founded the Danish People’s Party. After an inauspicious start as a breakaway from another rightist group, the party has bounded forward, increasing its vote in every general election and, since 2001, enjoying influence over policy by propping up a minority centre-right coalition.
Ms Kjaersgaard’s recipe is simple: she panders to some Danes’ fear of foreigners by demanding a tightening of immigration policy and accommodates their financial anxieties by ensuring generous welfare handouts. Earlier this year Ms Kjaersgaard said that after a decade of supporting Denmark’s liberal-conservative governing alliance she now fancied the real deal—cabinet seats for the DPP after the next election, due to be held no later than November 2011.
But her ambitions appear to have been scuttled by a ham-fisted response to fiscal reform. With a 24 billion kroner ($3.9 billion) austerity package in the air, last month the DPP proposed slashing the period during which the jobless can draw welfare, from four years to two, and insisted on a reduction in child benefit. Both measures seemed aimed at immigrants, who have suffered higher rates of unemployment and have bigger families than ethnic Danes. But the DPP misjudged the demographics. Unskilled poor whites will be the main casualties of benefit cutbacks and immigrant fertility has fallen close to Danish levels.
A further setback came with immigration policy. Egged on by Ms Kjaersgaard, the government has tightened immigration rules every eight months, on average, since 2001. One disincentive involves reducing unemployment benefits to people who have not spent seven out of the previous eight years in Denmark. In 2008 almost 80% of people on this low rate were immigrants. But the residency requirement also turns out, much to the DPP’s embarrassment, to exclude veterans of Denmark’s military actions in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The upshot of all this is a dramatic decline in the polls for both the governing parties and the DPP. On current trends the opposition Social Democrats and their allies are on track for a sweeping victory next year. Ms Kjaersgaard may find her role switched from kingmaker to has-been.
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