Unlike most social-democratic parties, Denmark’s has been winning elections since 2019.
That’s because the Nordic country’s centre-left party has stayed true to its working-class roots. Rather than allowing itself to be run by what French economist Thomas Piketty calls “the Brahmin left” — by which he means educated city elites — Denmark’s Social Democrats have been taking blue-collar workers seriously.
The country has had a long tradition of valuing work done by the hands, including with sophisticated trade apprentice programs that ensure wages are often similar to university-trained professionals.
Denmark’s Social Democratic Party Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen also recognizes blue-collar workers have reason to worry about high migration levels. Countries that bring in many workers from offshore tend to experience a reduction in wages, studies show. Pressure also rises on health care, housing costs and schools.
Denmark’s PM, who herself has working-class origins, decided a decade ago that a progressive party has to restrict migration to retain an egalitarian, cohesive welfare state. To that end, Denmark’s left-wing government has been lowering immigration levels and deporting people who enter illegally.
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The New York Times recently ran a sympathetic seven-page feature article about Denmark, asking: “Around the world, progressive parties have come to see tight immigration restrictions as unnecessary, even cruel. What if they’re actually the only way for progressive governance to flourish?”
Given the political culture of North America, once the The Times poses such a question, it becomes OK to discuss it in centre-left circles.
In Canada, people like Simon Fraser University’s Sanjay Jeram, the University of B.C.’s David Green and others have for years called for just such a “healthy debate” of migration policy, but with limited success.
Meanwhile, only a few North American centre-left politicians — like Sen. Bernie Sanders or B.C. Premier David Eby — have gone out on a progressive limb to raise some migration policy downsides.
Not so the PM of Denmark: “There is a price to pay when too many people enter your society,” Frederiksen told The Times. “Those who pay the highest price of this, it’s the working or lower class in the society. It is not — let me be totally direct — it’s not the elite people. It’s not those of us with good salaries, good jobs.”
Tightening borders is just one way Denmark’s centre-left retains the loyalty of the rank-and-file. Others include new legislation to enable blue-collar workers to retire earlier than professionals.
Denmark also stops landlords from raising rents for five years after purchasing residential apartments. And it provides free education through university, including a monthly stipend of about Cdn$1,200.
Such generous benefits, says Frederiksen, can’t be offered if borders are too open — if the population balloons without a sufficient tax and business base.
Despite Denmark’s rigour on migration, it’s worth countering impressions that it isn’t cosmopolitan. Thirteen per cent of residents are foreign-born. In Copenhagen, that rises to 16 per cent. The nation continues to welcome newcomers, including refugees.
While Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has talked about how Canada should have “negative growth” in population, the Liberals’ Mark Carney became PM in April in part because he vowed to fight Trump on tariffs, but also because he pledged to moderately lower migration rates.
In contrast, the social-democratic NDP, under Jagmeet Singh, was more enthusiastic than Trudeau about mass migration. Singh was ready to go further to open borders than Trudeau had been, particularly by advocating bringing in more parents and grandparents.
A rare glimmer in Canada of left-wing concern about migration came this month, when Eby called for a national “serious and adult conversation” on migration levels.
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Eby connected “very high” youth unemployment, chronically low wages and overburdened social services, including food banks, to record numbers of temporary foreign workers.
Denmark’s Social Democratic Party, which has just won elections against the populist right, has brought in policies that have made obtaining citizenship more difficult, including requiring applicants to speak conversational Danish, and has changed asylum rules so a temporary crisis in another country is no longer grounds for a permanent stay in Denmark.
Canadian thinkers like Queen’s University’s Will Kymlika and Keith Banting said more than seven years ago that it’s not possible to have both a welfare society and wide-open borders. They called it the “progressive’s dilemma.”
Princeton economist Angus Deaton, a Nobel laureate, says the trouble with North America’s current centre-left is it’s dominated by academics, urban lawyers and public-sector managers, rather than, as it was decades ago, by labour.
That means the leadership, Deaton says, often doesn’t recognize how high migration policy can exacerbate economic inequality: It has a way of benefiting the affluent, while poor and working-class people, including recent immigrants, bear the burden.
While some accuse Denmark’s Social Democratic Party of getting tough on migration in a cynical effort to draw votes from the right, even the party’s critics acknowledge the shift is authentic.
‘‘For them, it’s not just a strategy,’’ a member of a rival left-wing Danish party told The Times. ‘‘They mean it.’’