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  But they did anticipate a possible alternative model for success; they called it “welfare chauvinism,” a strain of politics that can emerge in societies where contributors to a generous welfare system no longer see themselves as being in the same boat as some of those reaping the benefits of the welfare system. Likening the welfare state to a club, they argued that welfare chauvinism could lead to calls for exclusion or expulsion in order “to preserve national club goods.”15 Certain voters might become hostile to immigrants because they are themselves the existing beneficiaries of a welfare state, and they fear a broader backlash against the welfare system—or its financial collapse—if immigration rates increase. These welfare chauvinist voters are distinct from run-of-the-mill racists who don’t mind welfare cuts and simply hate all foreigners.

  If new right parties pursued this course, they predicted, they would move to the left economically, arguing for protection of the welfare state and increased social benefits—but for natives alone. Their platforms would combine hostility to immigrants, a strong sense of nationalism and patriotism, and the redistributionist politics commonly associated with the left. The authors concluded that welfare chauvinism might work well as a political strategy in poorer societies or places with strong ethnic divisions but was unlikely to succeed in advanced capitalist democracies unless, they conceded, there was a major economic catastrophe.16

  The theory emerged in the heady end-of-history days of the mid-1990s when, apart from a genocidal war in the former Yugoslavia, Europe seemed headed for an era of prosperity and peace. But 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, terrorist attacks on European soil, and the most recent influx of refugees changed the equation, unleashing a fear of Muslim immigrants at a time of economic uncertainty. Although the authors underplayed the relevance of their own theory, it has profound implications for European politics today.

  Gradually, the theoretical fears that worried academics took concrete political form. Rather than combining nativist immigration policy with free-market economic policies, which seemed to be the trend on the European right in the 1970s and 1980s, the new right did something different, dealing an even more devastating blow to the left. The so-called populist right gradually became more socialist than the socialists on economic policy and made a direct appeal to the working class.

  In small wealthy nations like Denmark and Holland, populist parties have succeeded in portraying the welfare state as the exclusive property of native-born citizens, a hard-earned jackpot to be protected from the grasping hands of undeserving new arrivals. In Denmark, the DPP siphons votes away from the left on a platform of reducing immigration and safeguarding Denmark’s welfare benefits for native-born Danes. The same is true in France.

  The theory of welfare chauvinism explains why so many former Social Democrats in Scandinavia and Holland and former Communists in France have gravitated to the populist right. Historically, they have been the beneficiaries of a generous state. Now, feeling abandoned by the left and Labour Parties that ostensibly represent their interests but instead support open immigration policies, they are terrified that their social dividend is threatened by newcomers.

  Kitschelt and McGann’s 1995 book included a small graph, plotting party ideologies along a continuum of socialist and capitalist economic policies on the one hand and authoritarian and libertarian politics on the other and predicted where the political battles in Europe were likely to take place.17 Left empty was the space where socialist economic policy and authoritarian ideology converged. This is precisely the terrain that the new right has now occupied.

  Maureen Eger and Sarah Valdez, two sociologists working in Sweden, have researched the evolution of far-right party platforms between 1970 and 2015; their findings are striking. In the past three decades, the DPP has moved steadily in the direction of welfare chauvinism, combining left-wing economic policy and a strongly authoritarian nationalist message against immigration. Today’s DPP, which is now the second-biggest party in parliament, has come a long way from 1973, when the Danish right was led by Mogens Glistrup, a man who boasted he had paid zero income tax and ran on a strict antitax platform. (He eventually spent a few years in jail for tax evasion.) Since that time, new leaders have made immigration the central issue and moved to the left in their support for a robust welfare state.18

  By treating the new European populists in the same way as the older free-market incarnation of the radical right, many analysts are missing the point. Parties that oppose immigration and defend the welfare state are fundamentally different from those that oppose both.19

  In the 1970s and 1980s, the far right was preoccupied with libertarian economics and American-style conservatism; it was not an electorally successful formula in most countries. Then, in the mid-1990s, Eger and Valdez argue, “the radical right ceased to be economically right-wing.”20

  And that is when it began to win.

  Denmark’s rightward shift on immigration began with a case that concerned the family reunification rights of Tamil refugees who had come to Denmark from Sri Lanka. The conservative government’s attempts to cast doubts on some refugee claims and restrict the entrance of family members ended in scandal, bringing down the government in 1993. In the scandal’s wake, none of the political parties wanted to touch the refugee issue.

  The way that Danes viewed the question of refugees and immigration was also beginning to change. In the 1980s, it was considered a moral question, says Arne Hardis, a journalist at the highbrow conservative weekly paper Weekendavisen, who has been following the immigration debate for thirty years. But in the 1990s, it became a political question. Critics were once asked what was wrong with their conscience; the emergence of real social tensions in the working-class areas in and around Copenhagen forced it onto the political agenda. “It’s totally logical that if there’s a political problem and no political party wants to take it up then a new one is going to arise,” insists Hardis.21 And so the Danish People’s Party was born.22

  The DPP arrived on the scene in 1995 and, with laser-like precision, they homed in on a certain type of voter they believed they could turn. They did not have access to Facebook microtargeting or data mining to determine political persuasions the way that Donald Trump’s campaign did, allowing them to focus on white working-class voters who had traditionally voted for Democrats but seemed ripe for conversion. But the DPP in the mid-1990s did have an immigration policy that held great appeal for Social Democratic voters in areas where “the balance was going the wrong way.”23

  Søren Espersen, the DPP’s deputy leader and the architect of many of its policies, points to the same moment. There was a time, he claims, when the Social Democrats at the local level looked to the DPP as potential allies on city councils. A mayor called him in the late 1990s, pleading for the DPP to run someone. It was the last day to register new candidates. “In those days, we had to persuade people to run,” Espersen recalls wistfully. “Now we can’t control them anymore.”

  He sent canvassers to gather signatures and talked a candidate into running. The last-minute DPP candidate ended up gaining enough votes for four seats, even if the party had only run one person. “It’s ironic,” says Espersen, looking back on the early days. Now, he believes, the DPP has become an open threat to the Social Democrats—and to conservative parties, too—though they have come for different reasons. Old-school conservatives and nationalists come for “God, King, and Country,” he explains. The ex–Social Democrats come for what they believe their own party no longer offers them.24

  The DPP leveraged the immigration issue to siphon away voters from the Social Democrats’ traditional base, positioning itself early on a key issue that has come to define Danish politics. Danes pay high taxes and in return get excellent education and health care for free as well as benefits when sick or out of work. As the number of welfare-dependent immigrants grew, often because the state found it easier to give them social benefits and accommodation than train them for a job, resentment has grown, too. There
is a widespread fear that more people will come to the country and claim social welfare and that the “the bread will be buttered more thinly.”25

  The DPP responded by very effectively combining anti-immigrant rhetoric with a strong pro-welfare message that stresses quality health benefits and good care for the elderly. Espersen doesn’t think the ex–Social Democrats are going back. “When one of those takes the step to vote for us, it is a very, very huge step he is taking,” he says of voters who supported the Social Democrats all their lives. “And why should he go back? I mean to come over this first hurdle of voting for us, then he’s done it.”26

  Hardis gives some Social Democrats credit for foresight. After all, it was mayors from the areas surrounding Copenhagen who were among the first to mention that immigration might have a negative impact and—even worse from a political perspective—threaten the Social Democrats’ dominance of Danish politics and their comfortable hold on the working-class vote. As Hardis puts it, “It was their voters who were starting to live next to these new immigrants. It was their welfare state that was threatened.”27

  One of those places was the small satellite town of Herlev about ten miles west of central Copenhagen. The town’s forty-two-year-old mayor, Thomas Gyldal Petersen, was a child in Herlev in the 1980s when the previous generation of mayors issued their warning, only to be ignored by the party elites. Now they are listening to him. Petersen has lived in Herlev all his life and is adamant that controlling immigration numbers is the only way to reverse the Social Democrats’ political misfortunes and to stop communities like his from turning into ghettos with high unemployment. But many on the left argue that the party has moved too far to the right in order to keep its base on board, adopting some harsh rhetoric about immigration and helping to normalize the DPP’s views.

  The road that led a centre-left party to support legislation like the 2016 jewelry law has been long and tortuous, but the trajectory has been clear. The Social Democrats first began to lose their strongholds around the major cities in the 1990s, with many of their votes going to the DPP. The reason integration efforts have failed, Petersen argues, is because policy could not keep up with the influx. “We put a stronger and stronger effort into the integration work,” he says, “but the challenge just got bigger and bigger.”

  He doesn’t apologize for the tougher laws that outraged so many in Denmark and abroad. And even though he regards himself as a man of the left—he spent several years working as a lobbyist for the metalworkers’ union—he is convinced that advocates of open borders have made matters worse and opened a door for the DPP. “The left wing in Denmark who are advocating for free immigration, they don’t understand that with free immigration we are letting down the people who live here, and mainly the poor, the people without opportunities, we are hurting them.”

  He blames the left for failing to grasp that Denmark and the Social Democrats aren’t in the same position they were in the 1980s. “They believe that we have disappointed, we have abandoned our beautiful history,” he says. “The problem is that what they look at as our beautiful history is actually a very small period in the ’80s.”28

  The biggest shock to the Social Democrats came in 2001; it was the first time that immigration was used as a “wedge” issue to determine an election. As the outgoing Social Democratic prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen told me in 2002, a few months after his defeat, “They took a part of our rhetoric and tried to sell it as a new package to the people, and with some success, one may say.”29 The centre-right coalition came to power but only because of the DPP’s strong showing. Meanwhile, the left’s focus became how to “stop the bleeding,” says Petersen.30

  Since that time, the DPP has dominated on the immigration issue and taken many voters with them. According to Morten Bødskov, a former justice minister and leading Social Democrat, they are caught between an electorate moving right toward the DPP and left-wing supporters who detest the party’s harder line on immigration and flee to the far-left parties.31

  The DPP has won virtually every debate relating to immigration: they succeeded in limiting numbers of immigrants, they have won the debate on Islam, and they were the first to say that freedom of movement within the EU would be a problem—which the 2015 refugee crisis seemed to confirm. Their analysis has in many ways become the default position in Danish politics. Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, a refugee expert at Lund University in Sweden and no fan of the far right, agrees: the DPP’s vision crafted fifteen years ago “has swept the continent. They’ve conquered the mainstream.” A large part of that success, he argues, is because “the far right has an instrument the left doesn’t have: fear.”32

  Mayor Petersen doesn’t buy into the DPP’s rhetoric of stopping all immigration. “We have to take refugees to Denmark in a number that we can help,” he tells me. “Every person that comes to Denmark, alone or with his family, should have the opportunity to make the best of themselves in this welfare society,” he says. There is, however, a risk when the numbers reach a certain level.33

  The key is a demographic balance. As soon as a school or housing project becomes majority immigrant, or for that matter majority unemployed, problems start to arise, he argues. He blames his own party’s leadership in past decades. “Mayors in the ’80s, they were warning, ‘Something is going wrong. You have to change.’” But the party leadership “shut their eyes,” he says. “If the balance tips, the welfare society cannot hold together and cannot be the support for everyone that it should be.”

  Such balance may only help so much. Aydin Soei, a Danish sociologist and the son of immigrants from Iran, believes there is a larger blind spot in the Danish government’s thinking, one that those who have never experienced the state’s famously generous social policies (or its troubled integration programs) from the receiving end fail to see. “Sometimes you forget that it’s not only about how people are spread out; it’s also because you didn’t use people’s resources,” he says.34

  Soei was born to Communist parents in Iran in 1982. He grew up on the working-class fringes of Copenhagen in the 1980s, not far from Mayor Petersen. Only a few years separate the two men. Petersen’s town is a place where Soei spent some time as a teenager. “When I went into the middle of Herlev, that was in ’97/’98, and the DPP was just rising,” recalls Soei. He thought that he would try to make a good impression on old white people. “I had the prejudice that the ones who voted DPP are the elderly, and elderly women,” he explains with a laugh. “So as a kid, I went up to them and I asked them in a really polite manner, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me what time it is?’ even though I knew what time it was,” using the antiquated formal “you” that these days is reserved for the queen. “I thought then they’d be able to see that all young men with immigrant background aren’t criminals—because that was the big debate at that point,” he says.

  But at home, there was a crisis. Soei has seen the disastrous consequences of joblessness up close. “A lot of my parents’ generation ended up just on permanent social welfare. And the ones who had education, it was outdated,” he remembers. “That’s really a big tragedy” that has been passed on to children who have grown up with bitter parents who feel their skills weren’t valued or recognized.

  Soei’s mother had a bachelor’s degree in physics from the Soviet Union. “It would probably have been recognized from day one in the US, but not in Denmark. They wouldn’t even translate her papers,” he recalls angrily. His mother had to start from square one, but she managed. His dad did not.35 Soei’s father went from being a prestigious figure in a political movement in Iran to a nobody in Denmark. He became depressive and violent. Soei’s recent book, Forsoning (Reconciliation), tells the story of his dad’s descent into crime and his eventual expulsion from Denmark after murdering the father of one of Soei’s classmates.36

  Soei doesn’t seek to excuse the crime, but he believes that if both his parents had been able to work, things might have turned out differently. “I don’t buy the arg
ument that you can just take the past, copy it till today one-to-one,” he says. The way Denmark handled refugees and immigrants, especially in the 1980s, was a failure, he insists.

  The reason, says Soei, is that the state treated all these people the same way as the chronically unemployed rather than seeing them as highly motivated job seekers with existing skills. After all, refugees are nothing like the long-term unemployed. They have weaknesses that chronically unemployed natives don’t have (lack of language skills and cultural savoir faire), and they have strengths that many chronically unemployed workers lack (high levels of motivation, grit, and a desperate desire to work, earn, and rebuild). Given these strengths, Soei thinks that the welfare state’s approach has been particularly disastrous: “To have a generation of children who grow up with parents who lack self-respect because of their social position” and then the kids “don’t get the resources and the cultural capital” that comes through working. “It’s the best way of learning the language, getting a network.”37

  For Rabbi Melchior, like Soei, work is a crucial part of the equation if integration is to succeed. Arriving in a new country with no recognition of your qualifications is discouraging for anyone but devastating for some. His own father could work when they fled to Sweden in 1943, because there were so many Danish Jewish refugees in the country; they needed a religious leader. But not everyone was so lucky. If refugees could work, he believes, “it would change everything.” Danes would see “these people are not a danger for you. They’re kind people. They do their job. They work their hours.” Keeping them inactive, especially when they don’t want to be, is a recipe for disaster.38