“We’re coming for Labour”, Nigel Farage announced the day after the general election.
This week, Starmer met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The visit comes in the backdrop of a surging radical right in both countries. Reform UK have steadily risen in the polls since the election. The most recent poll puts them 1% ahead of the Conservative party.
Things are looking even worse for Scholz’s party. The ruling SDP have consistently been in third place for months, with the far-right AFD and center-right CDU capable of forming a coalition if polling is to be believed.
The leftist BSW, a party which couples the far-left Die Linke’s economic policy with a hardline immigration stance, has taken away traditional leftist voters which returned to the SDP following Die Linke’s collapse.
To put it simply, things are looking bad for the two Social Democratic leaders.
Scholz and Starmer: Two Approaches to Migration
During his trip, Starmer talked to reporters about European progressive parties fighting back against the far-right. Rather than caving in to their demands, Starmer believes “that delivery and honesty is the best way of dealing with the snake oil of populism and nationalism”.
This message was likely aimed at Scholz directly.
In the aftermath of a stabbing by a Syrian asylum seeker, Scholz has used the incident to shift his policy on immigration. The government announced that it would make knife crime a deportable offence for asylum seekers and, maybe more dramatically, reduce migrant benefits to ‘bed, bread and soap’.
It is likely hoped that this will undermine the far-right’s appeal.
Under Keir Starmer’s leadership, the Labour Party tacked significantly rightward on migration compared to Corbyn’s leadership.
As covered previously, Labour have pledged to cut migration through three strategies, improving skills training, co-operation with France and a crack-down on migration gangs. It has stated that it will uphold the current point-based immigration regime.
However, there’s a clear philosophical difference between Labour’s policy and the Conservatives. Labour have frequently condemned policies such as the Rwanda scheme for “scapegoating” migrants and refugees, without actually achieving results.
Labour’s policies to reduce immigration have been directed at actors besides migrants themselves, primarily migrant-smuggling gangs and the skills shortages causing employee demand for foreign labour.
This stands in contrast to Scholz’s new round of policies, which will directly affect asylum seekers and other migrants.
As politico noted, when the Prime Minister was asked in Germany whether he knew any progressive governments which had stemmed the rise of rightist-populism, he could not cite any examples.
He was wrong to do so. There is one clear example, although it may not be a lesson many progressives want to hear.
How Denmark’s Social Democrats Beat the Far Right
Denmark’s far right was a joke. Descended from a party that called anyone committing tax frauds the “freedom fighters of our time”, the Danish People’s party was considered unelectable during its founding in the 1990s.
However, with the European migrant crisis in 2015, that suddenly changed. The DPP finished second, replacing Venstre as the main right opposition party.
In response to this, the now minority SDP-led government established among the most strict migration regimes in Europe.
More controversially, the SDP pursued a radical assimilationist policy towards ethnic minorities. Those designated as being “non-western determination”, a category which includes full Danish citizens if one of their parents comes from a ‘non-western’ country, face restrictions on living in certain areas.
Many criticised this policy as racist.
However, this dramatic shift neutralised the only issue in which the far-right polled better than other parties: immigration. Instead, their policy appeal was limited to their unpopular foreign policy positions and party leader Morten Messerschmidt’s awkward views on Hitler.
The Social Democrats didn’t just shift tack on immigration. The SDP addressed rural poverty deprivation, something that heavily drove discontent among DPP voters.
The result was a wipeout. The party went from 21% of the vote in 2015, to 8.74% in 2019. The DPP would fall once again to 2.63%, the smallest of any party outside of the two Greenlandic separatist parties.
With a number of increasingly shocking controversies, many were surprised that Reform was barely damaged. Although it’s possible that some supported comments made by reform candidates and activists, many likely cared about immigration more than they did these controversies.
The experience of Denmark shows that without this crutch, the frequency of controversies do real damage. The result is the political irrelevance of right wing populism.
However, there are plenty of counter-examples.
Macron has instituted harsher laws on immigration in addition to public displays of religion in an effort generally assumed to be targeted at potential RN voters. This, however, has had limited effect. If anything, it appears to have moved the Overton window in the National Rally’s direction, adding more legitimacy to this former neo-fascist party’s talking points.
Scholz’s approach may go down the route of France, rather than Denmark.
Final Thought
Electorally, so far only one approach by progressive governments has been successful in reducing the rise of the far right.
Of course, this may be morally unpalatable to Labour. Currently Labour opposes policies as scapegoating migrants for political gain.
Not only may it be morally dubious, but as the failure of Conservative immigration policy showed, it may not even be particularly effective.
However, Starmer’s strategy has yet to work anywhere else, and unfortunately is not untested.
Whilst progressive governments like Spain have caused the temporary stagnation of the far-right, none have achieved it as successfully as the approach of Denmark.
Germany and the UK offer a useful natural experiment to see which policy approaches by the moderate left will be the most effective in combatting the far-right.
For more of Chamber UK’s analysis on migration, please click here.
The article was written by Chamber UK’s features writer, Alex Connor.