In an address to her supporters on election night on 24 March, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen acknowledged she’d hoped for a better result. She blamed the Social Democrats’ poor electoral performance on having governed through a pandemic, a war in Europe and a confrontation with Donald Trump over Greenland, concluding that losing four percentage points after almost seven years in office wasn’t so bad. It was the kind of speech a leader gives when the facts require careful framing. Her party had just recorded its worst general election result since 1903. The far-right Danish People’s Party (DPP) had tripled its seat count, despite years of the Social Democrats taking the lead in cracking down on immigration.

At an enormous human cost, the premise that co-opting the far right’s anti-immigration stance would limit its appeal has once again been proven wrong. Since 2001, Denmark’s centre-left has embraced the language of deterring and returning migrants, adopted ever-stricter asylum restrictions and dismantled the rights of migrants and refugees. Civil society and regional and global human rights bodies have criticised them for doing so. Rather than neutralise extremism, the result has been to legitimise it.

A historic defeat

While the Social Democrats came first in the election on 21.9 per cent of the vote, they dropped from 50 to 38 seats. Their coalition partner, the centre-right Venstre (Liberals), had the worst result in its 150-year history. These are the two parties that have led every government since the process of accommodating far-right narratives began. It hasn’t worked out for either.

The Social Democrats lost votes to both right and left: right-leaning voters went for the party that’s championed harsh immigration policies for decades rather than the one that adopted them more recently, while their courting of far-right voters alienated their left-wing base. Vote-switching data from exit polls showed they retained only around two thirds of their 2022 support, with the largest group of defectors, 13 per cent of their previous voters, switching to the Green Left.

With 20 seats, the Green Left is now parliament’s second-largest party. On the right, the DPP has 16 seats, up 11 from 2022. It’s picked up voters from the right-wing Denmark Democrats and the recently dissolved New Right. The far right’s power is only diluted by the fact that it’s split into three groups: the DPP, the Denmark Democrats and the new Citizens’ Party.

Overall, the left-wing bloc now has 84 seats, and the right-wing grouping 77. Both fall short of the 90 needed for a majority, meaning that government formation depends on the centrist Moderates. Since her three-party coalition lost its majority, Frederiksen submitted her resignation as prime minister, but as head of the biggest party was then put in charge of forming a new government. She’d like a coalition of the five left parties supported by the Moderates, but Moderates leader Lars Løkke Rasmussen appears unwilling to be part of a government unless right-wing and left-wing parties are both represented.

Twenty-five years of accommodation

The Social Democrats’ adoption of far-right positions on immigration began in the aftermath of their 2001 election defeat, deepening at each election.

For most of the 1980s and 1990s, mainstream parties resisted anti-migrant policies and sidelined the DPP and its predecessor, the Progress Party. That changed in 2001, when the DPP gained nine seats, enabling Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Venstre to become prime minister of a minority government with its support, bringing it into the political mainstream. His government created a Ministry of Integration and initiated a trend of repeated amendments of the Aliens Act, which was changed 93 times between 2002 and 2016, aimed at making Denmark less appealing to asylum seekers.

When the Social Democrats lost 11 seats in the 2001 election, they concluded they were losing working class voters to the far right over immigration. The party shifted towards adopting anti-immigration policies, framing these as a defence of the welfare state and therefore a reflection of its founding value of solidarity rather than a deviation from it.

Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, the DPP grew steadily, winning 20.6 per cent of votes in 2015 to become the biggest force on the right. Between 2015 and 2018, immigration law was amended over 70 times.

When she became Social Democrat leader in 2015, Frederiksen sought to outbid the DPP, going further than the immigration restrictions advanced by the previous Venstre-led government, including by endorsing a policy of confiscating valuables from asylum seekers on arrival. By the 2019 election, the Social Democrats’ anti-immigration platform closely mirrored that of the DPP. In the short term, this worked for them: they won the election, while the DPP lost almost 12 percentage points. But in losing, the DPP had won, as its previously fringe racist and xenophobic positions on immigration had been brought into the heart of Danish politics. Time and again, European far-right parties are showing they don’t need to win power; they just need other parties to borrow their ideas.

A rights-violating regime

On entering government in 2019, Frederiksen entrenched what the Social Democrats called a ‘paradigm shift’ in Denmark’s approach to migration. This meant shifting from integration to deterrence, detention and return, with the goal of admitting ‘zero asylum seekers’.

Denmark was the first European state to declare parts of Syria safe, enabling it to deport Syrian refugees to an active conflict zone. In 2021, parliament authorised the outsourcing of asylum processing to countries outside Europe. By 2024, Denmark was granting under 900 people asylum a year, the lowest figure in four decades excluding the pandemic years.

The human rights impacts have been extensively documented by civil society and international bodies such as the United Nations Committee Against Torture. Amnesty International has raised concerns about the forced return of asylum seekers to areas of active danger, in violation of the 1951 Refugee Convention’s core principle of non-refoulement, which means people can’t be deported to places where their lives will be at risk.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Denmark’s three-year waiting period for family reunification for refugees with temporary protection status violates the right to family life. Policies targeting areas the government classifies as ‘ghettos’, overwhelmingly low-income neighbourhoods with high concentrations of people from migrant backgrounds, have been challenged at the European Court of Justice on grounds of racial discrimination.

The growing emphasis on temporary protection and return over integration has placed tens of thousands of people in prolonged legal uncertainty, with documented effects on family stability and mental health. These are the intended effects of a framework designed to make Denmark as unwelcoming as possible.

Under Denmark’s presidency of the Council of the European Union, Frederiksen pressed for the adoption of similar policies across Europe and, alongside far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, has lobbied for a revised European Convention on Human Rights to enable easier deportation. Centre-left governments in Sweden and the UK have looked to Denmark as a model.

Normalisation without neutralisation

The political logic applied by the Social Democrats and mainstream parties across Europe is straightforward: if they take ownership of immigration, they’ll reduce its salience as an issue and starve the far right of the fuel it needs to grow.

It hasn’t worked out that way. Rather than satisfying demand for restrictive immigration policies, the move has intensified it, with voters who prioritise the issue pushing for ever more extreme positions. Meanwhile, in Denmark and across Europe, the erosion of boundaries between mainstream and extreme parties has normalised far-right politics instead of marginalising it. In Denmark, the far right’s electoral share has remained broadly stable, with support shifting between far-right parties but showing no sign of declining overall.

Denmark’s experience exposes the fundamental flaw in the strategy that other centre-left parties across Europe are following. Voters who prioritise immigration restrictions will rarely reward mainstream parties for delivering them; they prefer parties that have always believed in them. In Denmark, 25 years of accommodation have produced a society where far-right assumptions about migration, belonging and identity have become normalised, at enormous cost to the people whose rights are being hammered. The Danish model isn’t a template; it’s a warning.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org