Denmark’s general election in June 2019 was an important victory for the Left. Deploying left-wing rhetoric on economic issues, Mette Frederiksen led her Social Democratic Party back to government in a country renowned for its strong welfare state and almost universally unionized working class. Yet if this success promised an end to the decades-long onslaught of privatization, financialization, and deregulation, it is rather less clear that her government has, indeed, made a left-wing turn.

This is particularly apparent when we look at its adoption of the agenda proposed by the previous liberal-conservative government in 2018, notably a so-called “ghetto plan” that defines certain areas as “ghettos” based on the rates of “non-Western immigrants,” unemployment, and crime. For residents of these areas, the plan spells a regime of arbitrary rules and punishments — a disciplining process that will likely end in eviction and the privatization of their homes.

Fueled by racism and masked as social policy, the ghetto plan’s real aim is the dismantling of Denmark’s long-mighty system of public housing. In the campaign for June’s election, it was widely claimed that Denmark’s Social Democrats had adopted a harsh line on immigration in order to buy themselves political space to move left on economics. Yet looking deeper into the Ghetto Plan, we see that the two are not counterposed — and that the racialized stigmatization of the poor in fact goes hand in hand with the privatization of their homes.