Polls show centrists stealing far-right thunder in Denmark vote

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Far-right populists were riding high in Denmark in the last election cycle, but as Danes prepare to vote in national polls on Wednesday support for the main anti-immigrant party has plummeted.

Amid mixed results for populist parties across the EU in the late-May European Parliament polls, the electoral collapse of the Danish People's Party (DPP) – an influential force in the Scandinavian country's politics for nearly two decades – stood out.

The DPP topped the polls in the 2014 European Parliament elections with 26.6 percent but dropped to just 10.7 percent in 2019. The party came in second in the 2015 national election with 21.1 percent – the latest Voxmeter poll puts it more than 11 points down on just 9.9 percent.

The emergence of hardline fringe parties has hastened the collapse, but perhaps more impactful has been the adoption of tougher language and policy on immigration by the center-right Liberal Party, the lead party in the current government, and latterly the opposition center-left Social Democrats.

"What we thought was extreme 10 years ago is now a common discourse in Denmark," Kasper Hansen, political science professor at the University of Copenhagen, told AFP.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen and his wife Solrun Lokke Rasmussen at a European Parliament elections party in Copenhagen, May 26, 2019. /VCG Photo

The scale of the DPP's decline in the European Parliament elections was a surprise, but the resolve of incumbent Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen's Liberal Party was also unexpected.

The Liberals have consistently trailed in opinion polls over recent weeks, yet topped the voting in the EU elections, narrowly ahead of Mette Frederiksen's Social Democrats.

Overall center-right parties' share of the vote declined from 55 percent in the 2014 EU polls to 43 percent in 2019 according to the Politiken newspaper, however, with center-left parties' combined support increasing.

Polling for the national election, results of which are decided on a proportional basis, reflects that broader trend. A Voxmeter poll on Monday placed the Social Democrat-led opposition on 59.2 percent, a result which would likely see the 41-year-old Frederiksen installed as the Scandinavian country's youngest prime minister.

Mette Frederiksen of the Danish Social Democrats takes part in an election rally in Morud, Denmark, May 28, 2019. /Reuters Photo

The Social Democrats have proposed a cap on the number of "non-Western" immigrants allowed into the country among other policies essentially maintaining the approach to immigration taken by the Liberals, a departure from the more open stance of the previous leader Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the country's first female prime minister.

"The Social Democrats realized that if they don't want to lose yet another election on the immigration question, they needed to emulate the policies of the Liberals and the Danish People's Party," University of Roskilde political scientist Flemming Juul Christiansen told AFP.

In other areas, such as welfare, Frederiksen has moved to the left with a promise to increase public spending by 0.8 percent per year over five years. She has also campaigned on a pledge to make businesses and the wealthy pay more through higher taxes.

As Danes prepare to vote, embracing the rhetoric of the far-right looks to have been an effective electoral move for the centrist parties.