The plan was to win voters from the right and shift the overall centre of gravity, allowing a left-leaning coalition to seize power
SOCIAL DEMOCRATS in much of Europe are living through torrid times. In France and the Netherlands, once-mighty centre-left parties have been reduced to bit players; in Italy and Germany they have been pushed into third place behind populists or Greens. There are many reasons for their decline, but one is the politics of immigration: centre-left parties are seen as too permissive by many of their traditional working-class voters, who have switched to supporting anti-immigrant populist parties.
When the result of the election came in, though, it was inconclusive. As polls predicted, the SD came first. It appears likely to return to government . But its share of the vote was 26%, down a bit from 26.3% in 2015. In contrast, the share of Venstre, Mr Rasmussen’s centre-right liberal party, rose from 19.5% to 23%. If Ms Frederiksen becomes prime minister, she will owe it to the strong performance of other parties on the left, which did not embrace tougher migration policies.
The equivocal results touched off a fierce debate in other countries with struggling centre-left parties, such as the Netherlands, where the Labour party’s share fell from 25% in the 2012 election to just 6% in 2017. Some analysts saw the SD’s win as proof that tough immigration policies work. “If the Dutch social democrats want to win back their original support base, they have to take on immigration,” wrote Kemal Rijken, a left-leaning political scientist, two days after the election.
Some in Denmark, however, said foreign interpreters were drawing the wrong conclusions because they misunderstood the strategy. The SD failed to increase its own vote share because it lost more voters to other leftist parties than it gained from the DPP. The Socialist People’s Party , a green outfit, raised its share from 4.2% to 7%, while the left-liberal Radical Liberals went from 4.6% to 8%.
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