Socialdemokratisk Folkeparti

Sammanfattning: During the last decades, right-wing populist parties have risen in Western Europe at the expense of the mainstream left. As a way of dealing with this issue, the Danish Social Democrats have taken a stance similar to the right-wing populist party Danish People’s Party in cultural issues such as immigration and integration. At the same time, the Social Democrats have turned more to the left in economic issues. In this essay, I explore the strategy behind this political turn-around, and find that this is a zero-sum game: the Danish Social Democrats have gained voters from Danish People’s Party, but lost about the same share of voters to the other left parties. To examine this, I have made a qualitative text analysis of a political manifesto about immigration presented by the Social Democrats in 2018, and compared it to the immigration policies proposed and driven by the Danish People’s Party. My theoretical framework is obtained from different research about right-wing populism, social democracy and mainstream parties’ reactions to the rise of niche parties. Some prominent social democrats in Sweden propose that the Swedish Social Democrats should follow the example of their Danish counterpart. I try to explain why this stance in immigration issues goes against social democratic ideology, against the slogan “freedom, equality and solidarity for and with everyone”, and not desirable for the Swedish Social Democrats.