We have entered a new political order. The right is on the rise, and the left is running for cover. Just look at the G7, which was dominated by the centre left at its summit in Italy last year. When it meets in Alberta, Canada, this June, it will be Donald Trump rather than Joe Biden at the centre of attention. The liberal Justin Trudeau will likely have made way for the right-populist Pierre Poilievre, and the German chancellor Olaf Scholz for the conservative Friedrich Merz. Although Emmanuel Macron will still be there, he is under increasing pressure from Marine Le Pen at home. This is not just an electoral turn or a question of anti-incumbency. Rather, the changes we’re seeing are part of an ideological sea change such as that embodied by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan or Franklin D Roosevelt and John Maynard Keynes before them.
Some Maga Republicans will see Keir Starmer as a centrist dinosaur who entered the scene just before the great extinction. But in a period where the political climate is changing, there are a few liberal and social democratic politicians that have managed to thrive. In Poland, Donald Tusk has successfully pushed back against the populist right by capturing the agenda on immigration and defence. In Kentucky, Democratic governor Andy Beshear has a 65 per cent approval rating in a state where Trump beat Kamala Harris by 30 points. And there is one social democratic party that has managed to win power, keep it and set the political tone for several years and over several elections: Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats in Denmark.
Frederiksen’s approach has been caricatured as simply being horrible to migrants. But there is a much deeper strategy at play here. I recently returned to Copenhagen to explore the secrets of the Danish Social Democrats’ success – and what lessons might apply to Britain.
The man I went to see was Martin Engell-Rossen, the 49-year-old strategist behind Frederiksen’s rise, and her chief of staff from 2019 to 2021. The Danish press has presented him as a Svengali – a left-wing combination of Dominic Cummings and Steve Bannon. Always tieless with sharp suits and open-necked shirts, he is uber-Scandinavian in appearance: relaxed, with a healthy glow and an open face. Now settled in Brussels as chief of staff to the Danish European commissioner, he complained that many social democrat parties “are still lost in the Eighties”. He explained to me that there were four keys to the Social Democrats’ success – and the parallels with the UK are striking.
First, he said, you need a deep understanding of society and a feel for how to build a winning coalition. The Social Democrats lost power in 2015 because they had lost credibility with working-class voters, especially outside cities, who felt abandoned by a party that had introduced austere welfare reforms and failed to address a growing urban-rural divide. Frederiksen deliberately sacrificed some of the cosmopolitan bourgeois voters in the big cities in order to win back working-class support from the populist right-wing Danish People’s Party (DPP), and managed to reduce the far-right’s share of the vote from 21 per cent to 9 per cent. This echoes the Labour Party’s disciplined focus on “hero-voters” – people who voted Conservative in 2019 and often lived in the Red Wall – which allowed it to win two thirds of MPs with little more than a third of the vote last year. The challenge, as Rossen sees it, is to keep the same focus in government that you have in opposition. And just as Frederiksen needed to keep the populist DPP in her sights, so does Starmer need to focus on Reform.
The second strand of Fredriksen’s policy was earning the credibility to be heard on difficult issues such as migration. Her fresh insight was not about getting tough. That was something that her predecessor, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, had already done as prime minister. Frederiksen’s achievement was to find an authentically social democratic approach. She decoupled the debate about migration from arguments about race and culture and linked it to one about the future of the Danish social model and the welfare state. If the struggle was about who could be nastiest to foreigners the far-right populists would always win, but if it was about saving Danish social democracy she would always have an edge.
She accepts Denmark’s moral obligation to vulnerable people fleeing war and persecution. But she argued that the Danish social model – based on contributions from citizens – could not survive mass migration. By acknowledging both “truths”, she found a different voice from the far-right populists and avoided the simplistic narratives of the far right (“close the borders”) and the far left (“welcome everyone”). What was needed was a new asylum system that helped refugees at source (with a “Marshall Plan for Africa”) rather than dealing with them in Denmark. And she championed an integration policy based on rights and obligations and a reassertion of Danish values, including women’s rights and social cohesion. Rossen told me that the shift on migration was by far the most important policy. “Without it,” he said “we wouldn’t have credibility on anything else.”
The Danish debate was easier than the British one in some respects because much of the focus was on refugees rather than economic migrants, but Labour could learn a lot from its authenticity. Starmer’s toughened rhetoric and his focus on “smashing the gangs” allowed Labour to get through an election campaign. But it doesn’t amount to an authentic social-democratic strategy for government. There are many strands that could be brought together, from workplace protections and training to immigration, crime and a labour force strategy for growth and public services. But this still needs to be done.
Rossen’s third piece of advice was to develop policies which show clearly whose side the party is on, coupled with a willingness to make it clear who you are against. This meant developing economic reforms that help working-class people rather than harm them – and making the financial sector pay. Frederiksen’s archetypal policy was a pension reform which linked retirement to the number of years you contribute rather than to your age (thereby allowing non-university graduates to retire three years earlier). The test for all her policies would be whether they helped a brewery worker with bad knees called Arne – the Danish answer to America’s “Joe the plumber”. And the slogan they developed was “It’s Arne’s turn”. Arne subsequently became a minor celebrity and the party recently marked his official retirement with a huge party, where the prime minister and many cabinet ministers showed up for cake and beer and a rowdy celebration. The fact that the policy was not without controversy was seen as a feature rather than a bug. A Danish strategist told me that “in our current political environment, everything is a battle for attention. So unless you have a conflict, nobody notices what you’re doing”.
In the UK, Labour has frequently indicated that it is on the side of the workers, but it has often baulked rather than leaned into controversy. When farmers protested over changes to inheritance tax, the government’s response was apologetic more than anything else. Frederiksen, one imagines, would have relished a fight with the richest farmers, who represent a tiny percentage of the rural public. She might have argued this is how you pay for more rural GPs, health centres and bus routes; this is how you prevent rural flight; this is how you keep the shops open. The same is true for the means-testing of winter fuel payments, which the government introduced half-heartedly and wasn’t ready to defend.
Rossen’s fourth lesson is about governing in a political way. How do ministers stay true to their mission and avoid becoming spokespeople for the civil service? Frederiksen tried to get ministers to look at the world through the eyes of those she was elected to serve rather than the producers of policy.
The key to enforcing discipline on messaging, Rossen told me, is his “70-30 rule”: spend 70 per cent of your time talking about your own priorities and just 30 per cent responding to the news cycle. To enforce this messaging discipline in practice, Rossen installed a white board in his chief of staff office, which hangs on the wall to this day, and was taken over by his successor. On the left-hand side, it maps out the government’s goals, policies, communications techniques and organisation. Red, green and amber magnets keep permanent track of how well the Social Democrats are performing against these goals. They look both at the actions taken (there are action plans for five areas of focus) and ways of tracking perceptions for each of these areas through polling. The board is used to onboard all the MPs, every minister, and every special adviser who joins the government.
The Labour Party has recognised the need for focus by developing five clear “milestones”. And by appointing Morgan McSweeney as his chief of staff, Starmer has belatedly acknowledged that it is a mistake to make a clear distinction between governing and campaigning.
It is clear that Starmer, a human rights lawyer from north London, can’t simply copy the playbook of Fredriksen, a political bruiser who worked her way up through Denmark’s labour movement. But if the Labour Party can decide which parts of British society it stands for, adopt authentic policies that serve its people in areas such as migration and economic policy, be bold enough to pick a few fights and tighten up its messaging, it might manage to survive this new era, and may even provide a model for floundering social democrats across the West.
[See also: The liberal resistance to Trump is already dead]
Listen to the New Statesman podcast
Content from our partners
