Danish lessons: What Mette Frederiksen knows

One recent evening in a quiet café near his home in Copenhagen, Kaare Dybvad set out why he believes centre-left parties have no choice but to follow Denmark’s lead and harden their stance on immigration.

A senior Social Democrat who now serves as employment minister, he previously oversaw one of Europe’s strictest asylum regimes, from the left, and was in London two weeks ago for meetings at the Home Office and 10 Downing Street.

The rupture, he said, came in 2015, when the Social Democrat-led “left bloc” lost power as support for the hard-right Danish People’s Party (DPP) surged. After Angela Merkel unilaterally opened Germany’s borders to more than a million refugees from Syria and the wider Middle East, tens of thousands moved north into Denmark and Sweden. “We had people marching on the highways of southern Jutland. It felt like everything was running out of control.” The consequences transformed Scandinavian politics.

Dybvad is a close ally of Mette Frederiksen, the most successful centre-left prime minister in Europe. She became party leader in 2015 and, four years later, Denmark’s youngest prime minister, aged 41. Frederiksen, the daughter of a typesetter, comes from the left of the party but shifted firmly right on cultural and social issues, above all immigration and asylum. At the 2015 election, the DPP won 21 per cent of the vote, against the Social Democrats’ 26 per cent. Frederiksen’s message to working-class voters who had defected to the populists was blunt: “You did not leave us. We left you.”

Her analysis was correct, Dybvad said: “Working class communities always pay the highest price for uncontrolled migration.” Without tight border control and integration, Denmark’s social model, and the solidarity on which it was founded, would not survive.

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While in Denmark, I joined a delegation of Labour MPs for private meetings with senior Social Democrats. Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, is explicitly modelling her immigration reforms on the Danish model and the Labour politicians wanted to find out more about what it meant in practice for a party of the left to get tough on immigration.

Denmark, a country of six million people, combines one of the world’s most generous welfare states with exceptionally high levels of social trust. Its social model rests on contribution and reciprocal obligations not entitlements available to anyone who happens to reside in the country. Mahmood wants Britain to emulate the Danish model by restoring the importance of contribution and making it significantly harder for migrant workers and asylum seekers to secure permanent residence and access to benefits. In her view, those rights must be earned.

Under Frederiksen’s leadership, Denmark has uncompromisingly tightened family reunion rules, made asylum claims far more difficult, it has capped the number of “non-western” migrant workers, and immigrant communities have been relocated from Copenhagen’s Mjolnerparken housing estate and other low-income urban enclaves to more affluent areas. New arrivals are required to learn Danish and complete a five-year integration programme. The state actively intervenes to prevent racial and religious segregation and the formation of “parallel communities” or ghettos. “I wouldn’t advise this particular policy in Britain, though, because it’s difficult to break up the kind of long-established communities you have,” Dybvad said.

Having previously pursued what he calls “the most liberal policy for refugees in the world”, Frederiksen’s Denmark effectively adopted a “zero asylum” target. The result is a 40-year low in asylum applications, severe restrictions on the right to permanent residence, and the expectation that refugees return to their home countries as soon as they are considered safe. Mahmood has taken note.

Alongside its hardline immigration policies, Frederiksen’s government introduced a series of pro-worker reforms: early retirement schemes for non-graduates who began working as teenagers, increased pay for nurses, care workers and prison officers, and significant investment in local health services, housing projects, education and the energy transition. “We got back to essentials,” Dybvard said, “protecting people from the threats of globalisation, both on migration and the labour market.”

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One reason for Frederiksen’s success - after a recent slump, she is once again riding high in the polls and has called a snap general election for 24 March – is her willingness to acknowledge mistakes and her refusal to talk down to voters or preach righteously at them. In her annual New Year address, she apologised for the unpopularity of the three-party “across-the-aisle” coalition she leads with the centre-right Moderates and the Liberal (Venstre) party.

In mid-November, the Social Democrats lost the Copenhagen mayoralty for the first time in a century and suffered sweeping losses across the country in municipal and regional elections. It was a serious shock. Frederiksen cited crime committed by “people coming from outside [the country]” as one important reason for the defeat, a theme she returned to in her New Year address.

“No one can understand why an Iraqi man convicted of brutally assaulting a helpless person with a golf club cannot be expelled,” she said. “Or why a previously convicted man from Kosovo, who was sentenced for having abused his children and spouse for several years, can be allowed to remain here.”

Denmark operates one of the strictest immigration regimes in Europe yet remains an EU member state, but Frederiksen wants to go even further – “to the limit of the international conventions”. Before Christmas, Denmark, together with Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, succeeded in gathering support from 27 countries for a new interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights that, Frederiksen believes, will allow for the swifter deportations of foreign criminals. She wants to protect the victims of crime not the rights of the perpetrators. “Rather than waiting years for this to be reflected in case law, we are taking the lead and will pass legislation before the summer,” she said.

Her government plans to follow Norway and Sweden by banning cousin marriage. For Frederiksen, what matters above all is social cohesion and integration. “Europe needs to have an honest discussion about the limits of tolerance,” says the Social Democrat MP and theologian Ida Auken, author of Dansk (Danish), a book about national identity, culture and belonging.

Auken views the threats confronting Europe as civilizational and has campaigned against the influence of Islamist preachers. “We should be cautious about accepting practices justified on religious grounds that challenge fundamental norms, such as refusing to shake hands with someone of the opposite sex or insisting on strict gender segregation,” she told me. “All forms of religious extremism should be rejected, and social control and violence must never be tolerated. We should also be alert when concepts like ‘diversity’, ‘religious freedom’, ‘personal space’, or ‘shyness’ are used to legitimize norms that belong to a very different historical context. These are not norms Europe should move back towards.”

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Frederiksen has many enemies on the left. To her detractors, her policies were unconscionable, even cruel, such as forcing asylum seekers with assets (in some cases confiscating jewellery and other valuables) to contribute to the cost of being in Denmark. But she knew whose side she was on. Her priorities were shared belonging, common purpose and a renewed bond with working class voters; she was quite prepared to lose support among younger metropolitan progressives if it meant halting the rise of the populist right. And she succeeded: the Danish People’s Party’s vote share fell to just 2.6 per cent at the 2022 general election.

“It’s true we have taken some bold and sometimes tough decisions, but it has been the only logical way if we wanted to protect the welfare society that's been created during the 20th century,” Rasmus Stoklund, the current immigration and integration minister, told me. He now plans to introduce reception centres for refuges outside Denmark and the EU in so-called third countries.

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Migration, as the political scientist Ivan Krastev has written, is “the new revolutionary force of the twenty-first century”. From the start of her premiership, Frederiksen understood the stakes: the migration revolution had provoked a counter-revolution, and no governing party, left or right, could ignore the mass disaffection powering the rise of the new populism.

In the summer of 1999, I attended the ceremony marking the completion of the Orseund Fixed Link, the combined bridge and tunnel spanning the strait between Copenhagen and Malmo in Sweden at the gateway to the Baltic Sea, the first permanent connection between the two countries since the Ice Age. I watched as Princess Victoria of Sweden and Prince Frederik of Denmark, both wearing hard hats, met in the middle of the bridge and kissed as the final girder was fitted into place. When it was officially opened the following year, the bridge was celebrated as a shining symbol of Scandinavian integration and the new borderless Europe.

A quarter of a century later, that optimism feels distant. The era of mass immigration in Europe is ending. Once an outlier among left-wing parties, the Danish Social Democrats are now widely studied and imitated. “If you want open access to a universal welfare system, benefits accessible to everyone, you need to have a closed border,” Stoklund said.

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What, then, are the lessons for Labour? Mahmood advocates for far tighter immigration controls and more restrictive asylum policies in Britain, but she is largely isolated within the party. She is respected for her candour and integrity, and ferocious work ethic, yet her social conservatism is not shared by most Labour MPs. “There’s an office down the corridor [at Reform’s HQ] for Shabana Mahmood,” Nigel Farage joked about her in December, having previously said she was “auditioning” to join Reform. Mahmood told him to “sod off”.

Mahmood was close to Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s former chief of staff, and is revered by the party’s small Blue Labour faction. She and her allies are aware of the incipient rebellion stirring on the Labour benches against her proposals to tighten family union rules and scrap the automatic right to permanent residence after five years. With the soft-left now dominant and Starmer weakened by lost authority and chaotic mismanagement, her opponents may feel emboldened.

Yet the Labour MPs I met in Denmark, representative of all factions, acknowledge that unless the government gets a grip on both legal and illegal migration and their destabilising consequences, it will be crushed at the next general election. Net migration fell to 200,000 last year in Britain (down from 944,000 in 2023, the high point of the so-called Boriswave) and could fall further by the end of this year if Mahmood’s proposals are enacted.

“Acting on immigration is not a tactic or device to win elections in Denmark – they believe it, and therefore it works,” said David Evans, Labour’s general secretary from 2020 to 2024, and a longstanding ally of Starmer, who led the delegation to Denmark.

“As Labour people, we believe in intervening in markets and the same applies to the immigration system when it is felt not to be fair. We are reflecting on what we learned in Denmark, but it would be very dangerous to swallow it whole. It’s clear that the cost of living and the security of national borders are connected. Yet immigration control is an issue we are not yet comfortable with.”

No such doubts trouble Denmark’s Social Democrat leadership. Bolstered by her hard-headed realism and defence of Danish sovereignty in response to Donald Trump’s threats over Greenland, Mette Frederiksen is well-placed to win a third term as prime minister. For her, it is always a matter of country before party.

“It’s not sustainable just to accept mass migration and not consider the cultural clashes that come with it, what kind of costs, both economically and culturally,” Stoklund, the immigration minister, said. “A party can very fast become irrelevant if you aren't able to take decisions that protect the country you are responsible for.”

A final lesson - and warning - for Labour from Denmark, if one were needed.