(Bloomberg) --
Pia Kjaersgaard, who created Denmark’s most successful populist party ever by targeting immigrants, just lost her job as speaker of parliament.
The move follows June 5 national elections, in which a more left-leaning group defeated the center-right government. The Danish People’s Party, which Kjaersgaard founded in 1995, suffered its biggest election loss ever. On Friday, the 72-year-old will be replaced by Henrik Dam Kristensen, who’s a member of the Social Democratic Party that won the election.
The change of speaker -- Denmark’s highest title after the monarch -- marks something of a milestone in the country’s political history. Denmark was ahead of much of the rest of Europe when it embraced anti-immigration policies at the beginning of the 2000s, led in large part by Kjaersgaard. The question now is whether the near collapse of the Danish People’s Party is a harbinger of what will follow elsewhere.
But the party’s decline may ultimately be a product of its success, as more established parties adopt its policies. Rune Stubager, a professor of political science at the University of Aarhus, says “paradoxically, the party may actually be seeing its influence peak, even though it lost a lot of votes, because its policies have spread.” He says Kjaersgaard has had “a lot of success in changing the discourse in Denmark.”
Kjaersgaard was a regular figure of controversy in the four years she was the speaker of parliament. The first woman to hold the job, she let a parliamentarian who’s a convicted racist hold the floor in order to rail against foreigners, but then chastised a lawmaker who criticized him. Kjaersgaard also threw a female lawmaker out of parliament because she had brought her baby into the chamber, triggering outrage in a country otherwise known for high standards of gender equality.
More recently, Kjaersgaard showed how out of step she was with an electorate increasingly worried about the environment, when she blamed her party’s loss of popularity on what she called “climate loonies.” Kjaersgaard also angered Eurovision Song Contest fans by complaining publicly that the event had become “way too gay.”
While voters now generally accept the tougher stance on immigration that Kjaersgaard championed, they appear to have rejected the tone that she and those around her introduced to Danish politics.
Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister elect, drew voters away from the Danish People’s Party by promising tougher curbs on immigration than the Social Democrats she leads have traditionally found palatable. But she also made clear that she wants to change the tone in Denmark’s immigration debate. “We won’t be celebrating curbs,” she said after the election.
“The most important lesson for Europe from the Danish election is that if the populist parties are to be stopped in their expansion, the Social Democratic parties need to adopt some of their policy on immigration,’’ Stubager said.
Kjaersgaard and her party’s hard line on foreigners also caused problems for Danish companies, which in recent years complained that it was growing increasingly difficult to attract skilled foreign professionals to address labor shortages.
Linda Duncan Wendelboe, a director at the Confederation of Danish Industry, says, “There has sometimes been a tough tone in some parts of the political debate which has mainly focused on the downside of foreigners arriving here.”
“We hope that a new government can help promote a more nuanced view on foreigners – and not least foreign workers - in the political debate,’’ she said.
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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