In the left’s simplistic roster of good guys and bad guys, Denmark is very much one of their White Hats.
After all, the left just love Scandinavian countries, which they falsely imagine to be “socialist”. They certainly won’t want to burst their bubble of delusion by finding the answer to the question: which European leader recently spoke of a “vision” of having “zero asylum-seekers” based on worries over “social cohesion”?
Pose that question to your average Guardian reader and they’d almost certainly reflexively spit the name of Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage or Viktor Orbán.
They’d be completely wrong.
No; it was Denmark’s youthful, female Social Democrat Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, whose minority government is supported by other Green-Left parties. Frederiksen has impeccable Leftist credentials. After teenage activism on rain forests, whales and apartheid, she moved, via trade union youth issues and academic work on Africa, to spending the last 20 years as a Social Democrat politician.
Yet, contrary to the rule book, on matters of asylum and immigration, Frederiksen is well to the right of John Howard or Tony Abbott. Hers is the only Western government sending (non-criminal) Syrian refugees home. She also champions sending asylum-seekers in Europe to Australian-style offshore processing centres. Frederiksen’s even more radical when it comes to jettisoning multicultural pieties – she is introducing laws to limit ‘non-Westerners’ to 30 per cent of the population in any given area; she voted for Denmark’s banning of face-coverings, including the burqa and niqab; and she wants Muslim schools closed.
Cue leftist head-spinning.
Denmark’s rightward shift has echoes in neighbouring Sweden, where another minority Social Democrat government, under Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, is having second thoughts about its previous enthusiasm for open borders and multiculturalism. His government in 2015 accepted 160,000 asylum-seekers, proportionately more than any other country in Europe.
And duly reaped such benefits of multiculturalism as soaring rapes and near-daily bombs in Rinkenby, where even police refuse to tread.
Clearly not unrelatedly, the Löfven government has joined the east-central European Visegrad countries in rejecting EU pressure to share around asylum-seekers who reach its shores. But you’ll struggle to find much English-language media reporting on all of this. While the commentariat highlights every outrage to left-metropolitan opinion of Le Pen, Salvini or Orbán, its attitude to Scandinavia’s newly politically incorrect Social Democrats is to ignore them.
Meanwhile, as in much of the West, once-conservative parties are lurching to the left. Angela Merkel has dragged the Christian Democrats to the left of that country’s Greens. Merkel’s determination to reshape the party in her own leftist image was starkly illustrated in 2017 at the funeral of the party’s conservative elder statesman Helmut Kohl. Kohl specified in his will that he wanted Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to speak at his funeral. Merkel summarily overrode his wishes and awarded the podium to herself.
But if Merkel has rudely shoved a former conservative giant into the leftist abyss, she has been outdone, faster, by Boris Johnson.
To meet its 2050 zero carbon commitment, the [Conservative] government is to start pressuring 600,000 households annually to spend an average £18,000 to replace gas heating with heat pumps – which are less effective – plus additional thousands on improving energy efficiency. This will be as the poor benighted Brits contemplate non-electric new vehicles being banned from sale from 2030. The Tories can expect fun trying to sell these policies in the 2024 election, especially among voters in working class bits of northern England who thought in 2019 they were voting for conservatives.
Spectator Australia
The noticeable difference, though, is that Scandinavia’s leftists are moving right and winning elections. Conservatives lurching left are throwing away votes like sailors drunk on Midori.
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