Xenophobia as political capital.

Last year, Denmark’s voters decided for a change. They moved decidedly away from the right and center-right bloc of parties to vote for the center-left Social Democrats and the smaller left-wing parties. This move wasn’t altogether unsurprising. The previous government was messy, small, and would be hard to understand for most Anglo-American readers. The party that led the Danish government from 2015 to 2019 was headed by the center-right liberal party known as Venstre (anachronistically, this name translates to “The Left” indicating their positioning in the very different political climate of their soft formation in the 1870s). But Venstre garnered the third most votes in the 2015 election and was smaller than both the Social Democrats as well as the Nationalist Danish People's Party (DF). Since the bloc of right and center-right parties outweighed the strength of the vote leading Social Democrats and their left wing allies, Venstre was tapped to lead a new government over DF. Venstre attempted, at first, to lead a minority government but this only lasted a little over a year before they were forced to add the Conservative and Libertarian parties into the ruling coalition. At the root of this odd formation of governance was the surprise success of the Danish People’s Party.

The Danish People’s Party has operated in the danish parliament since their first electoral wins in 1998 but saw wild success in 2015, jumping from 12% to 21% from the previous election. This placed the eurosceptic, Islamophobic, nationalist party as the second most powerful party in parliament and positioned themselves to be the center of the political world in a right wing coalition. They attempted to negotiate a wide set of demands from Venstre but failed to convince the older party to play along. Instead, they operated as a powerful parliamentary veto, checking government priorities and steering immigration policy towards increased isolationism. Their electoral success was no doubt forwarded by the influx of refugees and migrants from North Africa and the Middle East. A moderate increase in peoples coming from predominantly Islamic countries was the perfect recipe for success for a party which is nominally national-conservative in ideology but in operative reality is primarily an Islamophobic and white nationalist party. Using fears that new arrivals would increase crime, break the welfare state, and lead to cultural decay, DF garnered a fifth of the vote and the commanding presence of parliament even as they refused to take on the role of governance. 

DF’s success was just one example of many in the 2010s of nationalist parties igniting xenophobic fires in order to gain political salience. But DF’s experience is also instructive in the limiting constraints of these types of parties. Their ill-fated attempt to make demands of the 2015 coalitions could have resulted in the party asking to be able to form their own government, but instead they preferred to play the role of bomb thrower. A terrorist in parliament, powerful enough to destroy but too weak to take on leadership and the responsibility that comes with it. This is a trait among far-right parties. More interested in stirring the pot and garnering fear and hate votes than actually governing. Running a government is hard. You are in position to achieve your goals but now have to deal with the real world implications of their implementation. Words said on the campaign trail or in opposition are easier spoken than policy, when in power, is enacted. 

Of course, a failure to lead isn’t the only instructive example set by the Danish People’s Party. They’ve also shown (as have a myriad other nationalist party) that attacking the most politically weak segments of a society can bring electoral success. This isn’t a new lesson. In some ways, politics has always been about the creation of Us and Thems. German political scientist Carl Schmitt coined the approach of politics as the struggle versus the Other. Identity creation is at the heart of politics whether we want it or not. For example, most Americans are ideologically weak, but have strong ideological identities. How can that be? The reality is that while many Americans think of themselves as having strong ideologies that underlie their partisan support, what they actually have is strong identities which they have tied to the belief that they are ideologically strong.

Identity politics has been a buzzword in recent political discourse because some see the rise of BIPOC in political discourse as somehow too tethered to their identities than to beliefs. I think this belief isn’t supported by the data we have about voters. Politics has always been about identity, it just so happens that most of those identities are personal constructs. The concern over ‘Identity politics’ tends to be more about people on which their identity is forced. Identity is constructed by ourselves but it is also a product of identities which are placed on us by our surroundings. People of color may choose to identify as such, or not, but that won’t stop their surrounding society from identifying them as such. Meanwhile, the identity of gun-owner is much less signifyable. While owning a gun is something that many American’s do, only a small percentage identify as gun-owners and they often lack the visual notifiers that could force that identity on them. 

Immigrant as identity is complicated. In the United States, the identity can be a point of pride (particularly if that point is a generation or two removed from that actual immigration). While in many European countries immigration identity is something you may not be able to shake. Much of this comes down to the inclusion of the immigrant identity in with a real ‘American’ identity while it is incompatible to be both an immigrant and ‘Danish’ even if you manage to obtain citizenship. This is part of what makes the anti-immigrant playbook powerful in Europe in particular. The Other is easily established, even when that Other was born and raised in the country they should be considered an Us in. Add in that most European countries do not have birth-right citizenship, and you have an even larger group of Others to marginalize. 

Without citizenship you are not a factor for political parties. They do not pander to your concerns and they do not listen to your plees. As a non-citizen resident your voice is marginalized because you are not offered the same political representation. This gives parties like DF and others the opportunity to cast you in negative terms. Terms which no political party would dare cast their suffraged opponents as (think of the trouble for both Clinton’s deplorables or Romney’s 47%). But immigrants are different, they can’t vote against you, so the only harm your xenophobic rhetoric does you is on citizens who find such rhetoric abhorrent. But even then, these voters are going to vote on their own set of identities and their concern for negative rhetoric may be overcast by the concern about their own identity as a homeowner and the odds of higher property taxes. 

The concern for a time was that the new wave of Nationalist parties was going to usher in the doom of traditional center-left parties. The mid to late 2010’s was particularly unkind to traditional social democratic parties as many of their usual voters were convinced that national problems were on account of all these immigrants. Add in that many Nationalist parties, DF included, cast themselves as being economically moderate or even progressive and you can see why many voters shifted loyalties from traditional labor friendly center-left parties to nationalist ones. 

This brings us back to the 2019 Danish election, which swept out the previous rag-tag center-right government and reinstalled the Social Democrats as the sole government (with some support from the smaller left wing parties). From the outside, this victory seemed like an example of how center-left politics wasn’t dead. The party ran on fixing the decaying pension system, particularly for craftsmen who can’t expect to work as carpenters of brick-layers into their 70s. They also set a focus on regional healthcare and education. But most importantly for their electoral success, they adopted the harsh immigration policy of the previous DF supported government. It is worth noting that DF went from 21% in 2015 to just 8% in 2019. The Nationalist party was thoroughly embarrassed, suffering their largest electoral loss to date, but in a particular sense, they were immensely successful. Without ever entering government they were able to fundamentally shift Danish political culture on their most important policy area: immigration. 

The new government, while not being as punitive towards immigrants and refugees, has refused to reverse many of the harshest laws enacted under the previous government and continues to refuse to support any policies that lighten the extensive difficulties on immigrants in Denmark. Having recognized the political weakness of immigrants and refugees, the Social Democrats took advantage of popular xenophobic sentiments to regain political power. My hope is for a political movement to come along which recognizes this disadvantage in our democratic systems. Immigrants, while guests in a country not their own, should not be so politically powerless that their very identities can be used as political ammunition. My hope is that, as we move further away from the migrations of the mid 2010s, that the political opportunism enacted by both nationalist parties like DF as well as by center-left parties like the Social Democrats will shift towards other priorities. But furthermore we must find ways to allow for some level of political representation for immigrant communities. Whether this is through expanding the vote too all residents in a country or something closer to an elected immigrants representative in parliament is something that I’ll probably expand on in the future.