Immigant Catastrophe Fueling EU Right Wing Resurgence [Picture]

Europe’s Growing Right Resurgence

Neelam Deo
July 11, 2015

Denmark’s Social Democrats, led by incumbent Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, won the largest share of votes (26 percent) and the largest number of seats (47 of 179) in the country’s June 18 parliamentary election. As the popular narrative about these elections notes, Thorning-Schmidt and her party may have won the battle by equaling their best electoral performance in a decade, but they have lost the war.

That is because in this election, the extreme right-wing Danish People’s Party (DPP) secured 21 percent of the votes and 37 seats, to become the second-largest party. It is now a part of the ruling coalition, led by the third-largest party, Venstre, which got 20 percent of the vote and 34 seats.

The right-wing parties are resurgent not only in Denmark, but also Finland and Norway, both of which also have right-wing coalition governments that comprise parties who champion anti-European Union and anti-immigration views on the continent. The same trend is evident beyond Scandinavia, where previously fringe parties have now become more prominent by tapping into those sentiments among sections of the electorate.

The DPP, like the other formerly fringe parties, reflects a conflation of anti- E.U. and anti-immigration sentiment stemming from concerns about the free movement of labor within the European Union, in particular from Eastern to Western Europe.

This is an entrenchment of an existing trend. While Western European countries were apprehensive about immigrants from Southern Europe and North Africa during the Cold War, the disintegration of Yugoslavia between 1990 and 1992 fostered a mood of anti-Slavic unease about the movement of labor from the former Yugoslav republics in Eastern Europe.

Now, this anti-immigration attitude is additionally imbued with Islamophobia. The first Muslim immigrants to arrive in Denmark were Kurds and Pakistanis, invited as “guest workers” in the 1960s. Denmark was, as most of Western Europe, arguably more accommodating of foreign cultures at the time, though the degree and intensity of integration demanded varied across the continent.

In the early 1990s, and around the time of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Muslims accounted for a little over 1 percent of Denmark’s population. In 2015, they make up the second-largest religious community at over 4 percent of the country’s population. This increase in 25 years has fed into the sense of alarm among a section of Danes, which is rooted in cultural differences as well as economic pressures.

A major grievance among the anti-immigration segment of Danish society is the growing allocation for social spending in the national budget. It is fundamentally in this sphere that anti-E.U. and anti-immigration sentiment conflates. Danes, like the citizens of many other European countries where GDP growth has slowed to a crawl, connect the absence of any signs of continuous growth to a perceived influx of “outsiders” who are misusing their welfare system. This has precipitated the right-wing backlash.

In Denmark, although the GDP increased from approximately $138 billion in 1990 to $336 billion in 2013, the rate of growth in 2013 was -0.7 percent. The country has one of the most comprehensive welfare systems and the fourth-highest social spending (from 25 percent of GDP in 1990 to 30 percent in 2014) among OECD countries, after France, Finland and Belgium.  source