In February 2017, Denmark’s Social-Democrat (S) leader Mette Frederiksen and Danish People’s Party (DF) leader Kristian Thulesen Dahl gave a joint interview to the trade union journal Fagbladet 3F. The meeting between the leaders of the Social Democrats and the far-right party was not only of key symbolic importance, but also represented an attempt to cooperate and find points to work on in common.

The prospect of such ties challenge Denmark’s traditional bloc politics of left against right, implying that the far-right DF could seek some limited collaboration with the center-left. The main areas for such a convergence (resisting a rise of the retirement age and social dumping) reflect a welfarist agenda especially aimed at workers, promising to reduce inequality and strengthen social cohesion. Not by chance, this meeting was arranged thanks to the trade union leader Per Christensen, whose initiative responded to his union’s strategy of building a parliamentary majority against the bill to raise the retirement age.

Yet if the two parties have come together on these issues, this also means talking about welfare in a different way. The Social Democrats admit that they have failed workers whose votes have shifted to DF, while the far-right party assumes the contradictions inherent in wanting to represent workers while at the same time supporting the neoliberal policies of the Liberal-Conservative government.