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It is no secret that the Danish ‘welfare state’ is not some perfect ‘golden mean’ - that is to say, it is definitely not a miracle cure for the problems of capitalism
Parliamentary elections were held in Denmark on the 1st of November. Danish social democrat prime minister Mette Frederiksen dissolved parliament in early October under pressure from the junior coalition partner, the Social Liberal Party, which threatened to withdraw support for the government after a report critical to the prime minister related to the illegal killing of the Danish mink population. The Danish Social Democratic Party ruled on its own through a minority government, but was supported by a number of smaller centrist, center-left parties in parliament as part of the “red bloc.”
The Danish political system has been the same for almost 100 years. The Social Democrats have always been the biggest party since the 1924 elections, but that doesn’t mean they rule all the time. The Danish parliament is fragmented: there are about five (this is the number of parties in parliament after the 1924 elections) to twelve parties (the number of parties in parliament as a result of the 2022 elections). That is why, for decades, the Danish parties have been allied together in pre-election coalitions. These consist of the “red bloc”, officially center-left, headed by the center-left Social Democratic Party, and the “blue bloc” headed by the conservative-liberal party Venstre (literally translated, it paradoxically means “Left“).
However, this bloc-based system was shaken after the last elections in 2019. The Vestre party lost power (although it won the best result in many years), and the Social Democrats won the elections. However, the outgoing prime minister and leader of the Venstre party Lars Løkke Rasmussen proposed a “broad coalition” (that is, breaking the bloc system so that the Social Democrats would join a coalition with Vestre). His party did not agree to this, and he left it and founded a new party, Moderates, which belongs to neither the blue nor the red bloc. This move took a large part of Vestre’s support (they got 23 per cent in 2019 and only 13 per cent in 2022).
Ultimately, with the arrival of the Moderates party, the results turned out to be quite complicated. This is because the red bloc obtained a total of 90 seats (i.e. the minimum number required for a majority), and the Social Democratic Party was the most successful party in 20, winning 27.6 per cent. As it turns out, forming a government turned out to be more difficult. The Social Liberal Party (which caused the previous government to collapse) has announced that it favors a “broad coalition.” This means that the red bloc does not have the majority. Of course, already before the elections, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen gave signals that she herself was a supporter of such a solution (due to the resistance of left-wing coalition partners to her policy).
On 15 December 2022, a new government was sworn in, consisting of the Social Democratic Party and two right-wing parties: Venstre and Moderates. This move finally broke the division into blocs, and the Social Democrats had already officially moved to the right.
This behavior of the Danish Social Democrats should come as no surprise, however. Frederiksen won power in 2019, receiving a large part of the votes from people who were voters of the far-right Danish People’s Party, whose main postulate was an anti-immigration policy (mainly against immigrants from Muslim countries). It was her government that introduced the “anti-ghetto” law. Denmark’s “anti-ghetto law” aims to reduce the number of people of “non-Western origin” in designated “vulnerable areas” to less than 30 per cent, through evictions, double punishment, over-policing and compulsory daycare. Denmark is in the middle of scandalous negotiations on the possible deportation of illegal immigrants to Rwanda (the UK is in the same talks). When Lars Løkke Rasmussen was prime minister, he carried out massive tax cuts and closed a commission tasked with investigating Denmark’s entry into the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in particular whether the 2003 Iraq war was illegal. When the Social Democrats took power in 2019, they did not reopen this commission.
It is no secret that the Danish ‘welfare state’ is not some perfect ‘golden mean’. That is to say, it is definitely not a miracle cure for the problems of capitalism, while at the same time ‘protecting’ the system against communism. At the end of the day, the Danish social democrats created and maintain this model to suppress revolutionary, anti-capitalist sentiments inside the country. To be sure, such an image of Denmark is at odds with the vision of a social democratic paradise. But in fact, this vision is false from the very beginning.
Above all, Denmark was part of the colonial system. To this day, Greenland is part of Denmark (with autonomous status since 1982). In fact, Greenlanders remain at the lowest level of Danish society, relegated to working migrants below the minimum wage, and racism against them remains a standardised and acceptable trait in Danish culture. They are treated similarly to the Inuit people in Canada, and the Danes also experimented with them and killed their children.
However, Denmark’s integration into the entire criminal colonial system is much deeper than owning a colony on the island of Greenland. Colonialism is primarily a form of developing capitalism, emerging in Western European countries, which engaged in expansion. Between 1536 and 1814, there was a union between Denmark and Norway – the Kingdom of Denmark and Norway. At the end of the 18th century, colonial trade stimulated significant economic growth, especially in Copenhagen (the capital of Denmark).
Denmark-Norway occupied the Caribbean islands St. Thomas and St. John (St. Jan) in 1672 and 1718. While white settlers and indentured servants began to establish a diversified plantation economy, the ‘sugar revolution’ soon came to the Danish Islands. Throughout the eighteenth century, a slave plantation complex developed on the islands, and Denmark-Norway became a slave-trading nation of some significance. It is estimated that 110,000 enslaved people were transported on Danish ships across the Atlantic from the 1660s to 1803, equalling approximately 2 per cent of the entire Atlantic slave trade in this period. Facing continued economic loss in the slave trade, expecting a British ban and influenced by humanitarian ideas, in 1792 Denmark-Norway decided to prohibit the trans-Atlantic slave trade with effect from 1803. Slavery continued until 1848, when a simmering rebellion forced the governor to declare emancipation of the enslaved population.
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