Denmark’s biggest exports include Ozempic, Carlsberg and Lego. But now, European leaders think it has something more valuable to sell: an immigration system tough and effective enough to neuter the hard right and keep mainstream parties in power.
Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, has achieved what many center-left governments of recent years have found impossible: getting reelected. In an age when incumbents keep getting hammered at the ballot box, many in Europe are looking to the asylum policies of Frederiksen’s Social Democrats – which won elections in 2019, 2022, and, polls show, are on course to win again in 2026 – as a model to imitate.
Britain’s Labour government – which has been hounded by the populist Reform UK party over its struggle to control illegal immigration – has been so impressed by the Danish model that it sent officials to find out how the system works.
Announcing a radical overhaul of Britain’s asylum system on Monday, Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, said while Britain had “held rigidly to the old model, other countries have tightened theirs.” She singled out Denmark as a poster child.
The old model referenced by Mahmood is a creature of Europe’s post-war milieu. The United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 applied only to Europe and sought to settle wartime refugees – primarily Jews who survived the Holocaust, ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe and dissidents fleeing Soviet regimes. The treaty was expanded in 1967 to apply universally, in part to atone for colonialism.
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