Following her success in the Danish elections, Mette Frederiksen is set to return the Social Democrats to power. This contrasts starkly with such parties’ fate elsewhere in Europe: the long melancholy roar of an ebb tide. Mette’s explanation for that decline, pitched at working class voters, has been “you didn’t leave us; we left you”. She has won not by ditching core values but by returning to them. To grasp that, we need a larger picture than post-millennium Denmark.
Since 1945, for the first time in global history, some societies have achieved widely-shared material prosperity. Among them, a few have been able to do so while simultaneously enhancing other values intrinsic to being human, and which are better reflected in concepts such as “well-being”. Denmark is at the apex of this miracle: along with Norway, it has a reasonable claim to being the most successful society that has ever existed. It exemplifies the triumph of the political agenda we call social democracy.
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