Explaining the Emergence of Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties: The Case of Denmark

Abstract

This article aims to explain the emergence of the Danish People's Party, a radical right-wing populist party, by using a model combining political opportunity structures and the diffusion of new master frames. The article shows that because of dealignment and realignment processes – as well as the politicisation of the immigration issue – niches were created on the electoral arena. The Danish People's Party was able to mine these niches by adopting a master frame combining ethno-pluralist xenophobia and anti-political establishment populism, which had proved itself successful elsewhere in Western Europe (originally in France in the mid-1980s). In this process of adaptation, a far right circle of intellectuals, the Danish Association, played a key role as mediator.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Göran Ahrne, Peter Mair, and the reviewers for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article, and the Department of Sociology at Copenhagen University for all their help during my stay as a visiting scholar the summer of 2003. The study has been financially supported by a grant (2002-3371) from The Swedish Research Council.

Notes

For a more extensive discussion on definition, see Rydgren 2003b.

The metaphor of ‘invasion’ has been frequently used by the Front National (see e.g., Rydgren 2003b), and the obsession with declining birthrates has been a recurrent theme of right-wing extremism since the industrial revolution.

Although the Danish People's Party – contrary to the Front National (see Rydgren 2003c) – does not want to repatriate immigrants that have already obtained Danish citizenship, it proposes a policy that would minimise the arrival of new immigrants. Practically no refugees would be allowed – the party proposes a reintepretation of the Geneva Convention – and, as is stated in the party programme, ‘asylum seekers should not be turned into immigrants'. Refugees would be granted residence permits for only one year at a time, and would be sent home as soon as possible. Like the Front National, the Danish People's Party is against what it sees as a ‘desacrilisation’ of citizenship (see Brubaker 1992) and believes that it should be considered as something extraordinary to obtain Danish citizenship. Before citizenship would be granted a number of conditions should be fulfilled: the applicant should have had a residence permit for at least 10 years; the applicant must be without previous jail convictions jail; the applicant must have contributed to the Danish society in a positive way through his/her work; the applicant must have passed a written and oral test in the Danish language and a written test in general knowledge about Danish culture (including knowledge about Christianity), Danish society and Danish history; and the applicant must make a written vow that he/she will conform to Danish law.

This frame has proven itself highly resonant; which is not surprising given the fact that 31 per cent of voters (in the 1998 election) were left-wing on socio-economic politics and right-wing (i.e., authoritarian) on socio-cultural politics (Green-Pedersen and van Kersbergen 2002: 510).

One thematic strategy that has been widely used by the Front National is to accuse all other parties of discriminating against the ethnic majority (the French) while presenting itself as the only anti-racist or anti-discriminatory party. In this way, frame transformations (Snow et al. 1986) of the concept of racism and/or discrimination are combined with an anti-political establishment strategy. As reported by Bjørklund and Goul Andersen (2002: 113), the Progress Party started to use this thematic strategy in 1985 – that is, shortly after the Front National had shown the new master frame to be successful in 1983–84 – and it is today used by the Danish People's Party as well.

However, as Karpantschof (2002: 55) has argued, ‘it is obvious that the Danish People's Party was well informed about and had in fact invited the activists from the Danish Forum’ in the first place. The Danish People's Party has furthermore been cautious not to make their neo-racist anti-immigration rhetoric appear too extreme. Yet, on some occasions the party has crossed the line. In 1999, for instance, Pia Kjærsgaard suggested that the whole family should be repatriated if a young immigrant committed a serious criminal act. In 2003, Kjærsgaard has had a hard time explaining the party's statement that international conventions should not be seen as an insurmountable obstacle to changing the immigration laws. At the same time, Kjærsgaard lost a case where she had sued a person who accused her of being a racist. According to the Supreme Court, the accusation was not entirely unjustified (Goul Andersen 2004).

More generally, when studying the effect of diffusion processes on the emergence of RRP parties, it is not enough to look at the diffusion of ideas and practices per se (Rydgren forthcoming). Two additional aspects must be taken into account: (1) how adopters manage to modify and adapt diffused items in a way that make them appealing to voters within the specific political culture characterising their political system, and (2) how adopters manage to make diffused items in tune with their internal party or movement history, that is, how they make activists – already identifying with certain aspects of the party or movement – accept the diffused ideas and practices. Hence, it should be emphasised that diffused ideas and practices are always being actively modified or even ‘translated’ – to a greater or lesser extent – by adopters in order to fit the unique political and cultural context in which they themselves are embedded (cf. Czarniawska and Sevón 1996; Snow and Benford 1999). For Scandinavian RRP parties, the Danish People's Party included, this means that they have to play down some of the reactionary authoritarian standpoints concerning, for instance, women's rights within the family and abortion prohibition, that is, on issues where there is a broad popular consensus. This has not been any problem for the Danish People's Party, as it originates from a populist movement, and not a right-wing extremist movement tradition. As a result, there was no need for the party to negotiate with members identifying with old right-wing frames when it was trying to adopt new ones.

In line with this argument, the level of education was a very important factor for explaining the vote of the Danish People's Party in 1998: only two per cent of voters with at least upper secondary school (that is, at least 12 years of education) voted for the party (Borre 1999: 101).

Moreover, data from the 1998 election show that issues such as ‘immigration’ and ‘law and order’ are typical lost issues for the Social Democrats. Considerably fewer than those who actually voted for the party believed that the Social Democratic Party was the best party to handle these issues (Goul Andersen 1999a: 145).

Finally, it should be noted that the 2001 election was held shortly after the 11 September attacks, which presented a further opening for the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the Danish People's Party (see Goul Andersen 2003).

When asked to select from a list the issues that were of greatest importance for their choice of how to vote, as many as 60 per cent marked ‘refugee and immigration policy’ in 1998 – and 68 per cent marked ‘law and order’, another of the Danish People's Party's pet issues (Gaul Andersen 1999: 124).

Although Fogh Rasmussen acknowledged that the Liberal Party and the Danish People's Party disagree on some policy areas (such as the EU and Nato), refugee and immigration policy was not mentioned at all (Fogh Rasmussen 1999: 10–11).