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Could a centrist government change Danish asylum plan?

Acting Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is leading negotiations to form a new Danish government which she wants to encompass the political centre. That could mean working with parties critical of the Social Democratic plan to process asylum seekers in Rwanda.

Could a centrist government change Danish asylum plan?
Danish immigration minister Kaare Dybvad Bek during a visit to Rwanda in September. Photo: Bo Amstrup/Ritzau Scanpix

Frederiksen, now the caretaker PM after her government stepped down on Thursday, is currently leading negotiations to form a new Danish government.

The Social Democratic party leader is in a strong position going into talks after the ‘red bloc’ of left-wing parties won a single-seat majority in Tuesday’s election.

She has confirmed she will seek to form a government across the centre, in line with a pre-election pledge.

“What we will being doing, completely practically, is to invite all parliamentary parties and naturally also the North Atlantic mandates to Marienborg on Friday. The parties will be invited in order according to size,” she told broadcasterTV2.

Senior political editor with TV2 Hans Redder has noted that there are several potential combinations of parties – involving the centrist Moderates (‘M’), the centre-right Liberals (‘V’), the centre-left Social Liberals (‘RV’) and the social democratic Socialist People’s Party (SF) that could give Frederiksen a workable centrist majority.

The Liberals, normally the main opposition party to a red bloc government, are unlikely to govern with Frederiksen, according to an expert.

“There will be negotiations, and the Liberals will come to these negotiations, but they will not last very long,” political scientist Rune Stubager, a professor at Aarhus University, said at a press briefing on Wednesday.

READ ALSO: Five things to know about the Danish election result

This leaves the Moderates, Social Liberals and SF.

Reaching an agreement with one or more of these parties could force the government to reconsider its divisive plan to set up an asylum facility in Rwanda.

Lars Løkke Rasmussen, leader of the Moderates, believes international blowback for a centre in Rwanda would be serious, he said in a TV2 debate prior to the election, while the Social Liberals have said they won’t support a government that moves forward with the project.

“The Social Liberals have said they do not want to support any government continuing the plans to work to send asylum seekers to Rwanda,” Stubager said.

The issue has “been lurking in the discussions” during the election campaign, he said.

The government – now the caretaker government – is “allegedly rather close” to closing a deal with Rwanda for the asylum facility, Stubager said.

“The question is, to what extent [the Rwanda plan] is realistic and whether any refugees will eventually end up in Rwanda, that remains to be seen – there’s a lot of scepticism about that,” he said.

The Social Liberals are “very much opposed to this and they have said that they will not support a government that even continues working with these plans,” he said.

READ ALSO: Leader of Denmark’s Social Liberals resigns after election defeat

“That will be one of the tough issues for the negotiations that will now go on,” he said.

Moving part of Denmark’s refugee system offshore to a non-EU country – confirmed in 2021 as Rwanda – is a long-term objective of Denmark’s Social Democratic government.

The plans entail Denmark sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, where their cases would be processed by Danish authorities, instead of allowing them to live in Denmark.

The government has said the plan will reduce people smuggling to Europe and thereby help to reform what it calls a “broken” European asylum system.

Negotiations between the two countries over the specifics of such an arrangement remain ongoing.

READ ALSO:

On Monday, newspaper Jyllands-Posten reported it had obtained internal government documents that appear to counter politicians’ assessments of Rwanda as a suitable location for an offshore asylum centre.

An initial analysis produced by the Danish government in June 2021 showed grave concerns from agency staffers before the government announced plans for a Danish ‘reception center’ for refugees in Rwanda, according to the report.

“There are reports of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees in the custody of the authorities. There are no reports that the [Rwandan] government has initiated investigations into these matters,” a Ministry of Immigration and Integration document states according to Jyllands-Posten’s report.

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IMMIGRATION

‘Shift to the right’: How European nations are tightening migration policies

The success of far-right parties in elections in key European countries is prompting even centrist and left-wing governments to tighten policies on migration, creating cracks in unity and sparking concern among activists.

'Shift to the right': How European nations are tightening migration policies

With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.

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