In Denmark, Social Democracy Is Failing
Around Europe, old labor parties have alienated their base by forming grand coalitions with center-right forces. In Denmark, Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats have pursued this same strategy with the same dismal results.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats saw significant losses in the recent Danish elections. (Emil Nicolai Helms / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP / Denmark OUT via Getty Images)
Copenhagen saw a historic shift last Tuesday night, following the elections held in the Danish capital and across Denmark. After more than a century of holding power in Copenhagen, the Social Democrats finally lost the mayoralty.
Sisse Marie Welling, from the left-wing Socialist People’s Party (SF) instead claimed the lord mayor’s post within a broad coalition dominated by left-wingers. While the more moderate socialists in SF claimed the top job, the radical left Red-Green Alliance under leader Line Barfod emerged as the largest party with 22.1 percent of the vote. Together, the two socialist parties, supported by a smaller green party, almost secured an outright majority.
Following the election, these left-wing forces managed to create a coalition that did without virtually every other party in city hall. The Social Democrats were excluded even from a role in negotiations. This also saw the once-dominant party stripped of powerful board posts in important municipally led construction and public transport companies, historically central to the development of the city’s infrastructure.
The defeat came after an extremely negative — by Danish standards — campaign attacking the Red-Greens’ Barfod for her background in communist youth politics and denouncing the alliance’s Marxist foundations as a “corrosive, antidemocratic ideology.” Such accusations were remarkable coming from the Social Democrats, a party historically founded on Marxist principles.
This loss is both a substantial and symbolic shift. Copenhagen has been the center of the Danish labor movement since its rise in the 1870s. While other Scandinavian capitals like Oslo and Stockholm have moved rightward politically, Copenhagen has remained a historic bastion of left-wing politics.
The Social Democratic party has been the central player in this sense, dominating the city’s politics for over a century. This time however, it ended up with a paltry 12.7 percent of the vote, leading its mayoral candidate, Pernille Rosenkrantz-Theil, to resign immediately. This result reflects the party’s strategic shift away from younger urban voters and public sector workers in the big cities and toward older and more rural constituencies, effectively alienating its own traditional base.
In everyday, local political terms, the shift in power may have limited immediate effects. In contrast to Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York, mayor-elect Welling is no insurgent, antiestablishment figure. Rather, her Socialist People’s Party collaborated closely with the Social Democrats on most major policy areas at city hall in recent years. Importantly, it looks like the policy of housing construction remains in place, where the city’s strategy has been to finance public projects like new subway lines by selling public land in undeveloped parts of Copenhagen to private developers. Especially controversial here has been the construction of a new artificial island in Øresund, Lynetteholm, intended to open up new land in an increasingly crowded city, with grassroots movements criticizing the environmental and ecosystem costs.
As such, the Copenhagen elections should be understood more as a defeat of the Social Democrats, than a general turn to the Left. The results are, indeed, primarily an electoral defeat for the national-level government, which spans the political center. Both Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats and its coalition partner, the center-right Venstre, saw significant losses, while the final party in the national-level coalition — the centrist Moderates, headed by former prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen — were virtually obliterated across the country.
The National Picture
The defeat in Copenhagen is part of a general electoral crisis of the governing Social Democrats, where the party has gone from holding power in forty-four of Denmark’s ninety-eight municipalities to a mere twenty-six today. The leftward shift in Copenhagen does not signal a general leftward turn around Denmark. The left-wing parties only managed to take power in five local councils, while Venstre, in national coalition with the Social Democrats, upped their number of mayoralties to forty, despite losing almost as many seats as the Social Democrats, with the Conservative People’s Party claiming another twenty-one.
The nationalist right, previously dominated by the Danish People’s Party, has been fragmented, but it is once again gaining ground with a combination of escalating rhetoric on “remigration” and a sharpened focus on cost-of-living issues.
The rightward turn, however, has been spurred especially by the rise of a new party — the Denmark Democrats — under Inger Støjberg. It has absorbed many of the more moderate parts of the Danish People’s Party and takes a somewhat less extreme anti-immigration line. Støjberg’s party managed to ride a wave of rural disaffection based on anger against economic and political centralization and a growing backlash against Denmark’s ambitious green policy, which led to large-scale construction of solar infrastructure in peripheral areas and regulation of the agricultural sector.
Støjberg is a colorful figure — a former center-right minister who resigned in disgrace and served jail time for violating the constitution in her administration of immigration policies. This has not stopped her from becoming the figurehead of a new rural political formation in the vein of the Dutch Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB).
The Disintegration of the Frederiksen Doctrine
In international coverage, much has been made of the Frederiksen government’s hard-line stance on reducing immigration, which has recently been cited as an inspiration for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in Britain.
The immigration issue has, however, not been central in the local elections and has played little role in the electoral crisis of the Social Democrats.
Focus has been on more economic issues like cost of living, including both housing costs and inflation in food prices, as well as traditional welfare issues like public health and education spending.
But on a broader level, this is a clear defeat for Frederiksen’s strategy and for her centrist grand coalition she has been leading since 2022. Since her rise to the party leadership in 2015, Frederiksen has turned the Danish Social Democrats away from a Third Way social democracy toward a more left-nationalist stance.
Originally, the strategy had two elements. It involved a (moderate) turn to the Left on the economy, and a hard-right turn on cultural issues, especially immigration.
This strategy was aimed at capturing disaffected workers from the traditional working class in peripheral areas, and was largely an electoral success. This secured Frederiksen’s two electoral victories in 2019 and 2022 and meant that the Social Democrats managed to reconquer some of the rural, working-class voters earlier lost to the Danish People’s Party since the 2000s. At the same time, the embrace of hard-line policies of migration disoriented and fragmented the radical right. After 2022, however, this strategy changed rapidly. Even though the parliamentary election returned the left-wing majority that had formed the foundation of the earlier minority government, Frederiksen instead chose a grand coalition with the main center to center-right forces.
The earlier gestures toward economic populism evaporated, and the new government sold itself primarily on technocratic competence and national unity in the face of the perceived security threat from Russia.
This grand coalition thus represented a remarkable break. For the last century, Danish politics, like that of the other Nordic countries, was divided into left- and right-wing blocs, with a dominant party in the center left and center right usually forming the base of various coalition governments. The current government, however, is more like the grand coalition of Christian and Social Democrats in Germany, encompassing the dominant parties of the center right and center left, with opposition of socialist parties on its left and a mix of right-libertarians and nationalist-populists to its right.
The coalition government has been extremely unpopular since its formation in 2022. The first thing it did was to scrap a national public holiday in order to finance further defense spending, leading to mass disaffection, and the government soon lost a third of its standing in the polls.
The unpopularity of the governing coalition has not led to a clear political alternative, but instead to an increasingly fragmented political landscape with various parties rising and falling in support.
As such, the Danish political system is moving closer to that of the Netherlands, where there are no longer traditional, broad mass parties (as in Britain or Germany), or clearly defined left- and right-wing blocs (as per the traditional Nordic tradition), but rather a series of small and midsize parties in various constellations. This fragmentation produces a structurally unstable situation heading into the next general election, which will take place within a year.
Hence, right-wing populism again on the rise in Denmark, after some years of decline. Yet the forces to the left of the Social Democrats are also in a historically strong position. They have consistently polled at 20 percent nationally and may potentially end up with a larger vote share than the Social Democrats for the first time in Danish history. This could result in the formation of a new, closer alliance between left-wingers and the Social Democrats, as has been seen in neighboring Norway or Spain — or else, a further rightward turn and a normalization of the sort of technocratic grand coalition that has dominated German politics in recent decades.
For a time, it had looked like Denmark, along with the rest of Scandinavia, would escape the Pasokification that has so withered center-left parties’ social base. They were meant to be an exception. Yet Denmark, too, now seems to be converging with the broader European pattern.