“For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes,” she wrote in a recent biography.
Denmark’s current right-wing coalition government last year enacted the most anti-immigration legislation in Danish history and, rather than position her party in stark opposition, Frederikson has embraced much of it.
Under her leadership, the SD have called for a cap on “non-western immigrants”, for asylum seekers to be expelled to a reception centre in North Africa, and for all immigrants to be forced to work 37 hours a week in exchange for benefits.
She has reached out to the populist Danish People’s party (DPP), doing a series of joint interviews with its leader, Kristian Thulesen Dahl, and discussing cooperating with them in government.
But it is the government policies her party has supported which have been most alarming for her allies in the left-of-centre red bloc. These include a law allowing jewellery to be stripped from refugees, a burqa and niqab ban, mandatory handshakes irrespective of religious sentiment at citizenship ceremonies, and a plan to house criminal asylum seekers on an island used for researching contagious animal diseases. In February, she backed what the DPP has branded a “paradigm shift” – a push to make repatriation, rather than integration, the goal of asylum policy.
Frederiksen has dealt harshly with any internal dissent. When her party colleague Mette Gjerskov, a former minister, vociferously opposed the burqa ban, her local party backed a rival candidate (whom she fended off) for her seat, and she was then fired as the party’s international development spokesman.
“I was aware that shifting the position in the party would take a lot, but I knew that I had to win that fight,” Frederiksen wrote in her biography. “Normally, I would seek to compromise, but not on immigration policy.”
theguardian.com
