The Danish election doesn’t prove that the left should embrace anti-immigration policies

Opposition leader Mette Frederiksen of The Danish Social Democrats after the election results at Christiansborg Castle in Copenhagen early June 6, 2019, during the country's parliamentary elections. - The likely future prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, embodies the new Danish Social Democratic model, with a new-found focus on restrictive immigration while championing the welfare state. Frederiksen "has workers' blood in her veins, is a fourth generation Social Democrat... and spent years preparing to take over the leadership (in 2015) of the party she knows so well," daily Politiken wrote just days before Wednesday's general election in which she ultimately emerged victorious. (Photo by Liselotte Sabroe / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP) / Denmark OUT (Photo credit should read LISELOTTE SABROE/AFP/Getty Images)

The results of the Danish election can appear at first sight as a complete vindication of Maurice Glasman’s “Blue Labour” philosophy: the Social Democrats have regained their position as the largest party after adopting the hardline anti-immigration stance of the right-wing People’s Party. (They have called for a cap on non-Western immigrants, for immigrants to be forced to work 37-hours-a-week in exchange for benefits, and for asylum seekers to be deported to North Africa.) But it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Elections fought in small homogenous countries under proportional representation (PR) don’t translate easily into predictions about large countries with first-past-the-post electoral systems and large ethnic minority populations. In so far as there is a clear message over immigration to be drawn from these results, it is that the Danish electorate prefers anti-immigrant policies to be enacted by centrist parties, rather than those more clearly on the fringe.