Jacob Christensen

The development since the September 2011 election must surely go down in history as one of the strangest periods in Danish politics. It may not be on the same level as the 1973-74II session in the Folketing which followed the 1973 earthquake election and which was one of the most tumultuous times in Danish political history but the miserable start to the three-party government’s life has been extraordinary, especially given that the present government and its supporting party, the Red-Greens, had enjoyed a lead in opinion polls during a long period leading up to the election.

So, how can we explain the malaise? Maybe we need a combination of factors to get to the core of the problem.

The Economy
The 2008 fiscal crisis hit Denmark – and in particular the financial sector – hard even if Denmark continues to enjoy AAA (or comparable) ratings by international agencies. Unemployment may not be on the levels of the early 1990s but there is a real fear among many both in the private and public sectors that they could be hit by unemployment. Similarly, the bursting of the housing bubble has seen a lot of savings vanishing into thin air – not least among those who bought houses or apartments during 2004-2008.

The question is if Danish voters have a real sense of crisis. The latest rounds of wage negotiations suggest that the private sector trade unions fearing a continued haemorrhage of manufacturing jobs but the among voters the expectation could still be that the changing governments ought to do something effective against the continuing low growth following the downturn in 2008-2009.

So maybe first the Liberal-Conservative and now the Social Democratic-Social Liberal-SF governments are hit by the same curse: Lack or crisis-consciousness and short-sightedness among voters.

The Positions
For most of the 1990s and 2000s Danish politics has been described as a battle for the centrist voters, a battle the Social Democrats curiously lost as the became ever more “centrist” and “responsible” in economic policy. Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s big accomplishment was to move the Liberals to the centre (or median voter) on both economic and social (i.e. immigration, law-and-order) issues.

Here, I have heard pollsters argue that voters saw the Liberals as more (though by no means extreme) right-wing in 2011 compared to 2007. This was something which opened the field for the centre-left. The problem was that the Social Democrats continued to be seen as left-wing and thus less attractive to centrist voters – some of which would never vote for the Social Liberals.

Maybe the resolution of the debate surrounding the Early Retirement Benefit helped making some of the Liberals’ perceived move to the right less important and in that way, the Liberals have been able to pull back lost voters – even if we should be aware of the fact that the Liberal strategy during much of the time since the election has been taking a passive stance. In many ways, the Liberals are what different voters imagine them to be – a bit like the Swedish Social Democrats in the period following the 2006 election when the party was without a leader.

So the question is what happens if the Liberals take a more active role and have to decide if they should become more centrist or more liberal/right-wing.

The Issues
The government has become known (especially in Berlingske Tidende) as the government which broke all of its pre-election promises except the one about introducing a congestion charge for Central Copenhagen – and that one has had local Social Democratic politicians in the metropolitan area up in arms. Mobilising voters behind such a policy is not easy but the government is also facing the problem that it was forced to pass and implement the cuts in the early retirement benefit, a move which was deeply unpopular among Social Democratic and SF voters. In many other areas, the government doesn’t really stand out – at least yet.

So the government has been successful in passing the wrong reform while struggling to get its own issues on the political agenda.

The Competences
Much has been said about the leaders of the Social Democrats and SF and some of the criticism points to interesting – and to some degree unexpected – weaknesses.

In my opinion, Helle Thorning-Schmidt is in many ways strategically defensive: She is good at defusing potential conflicts but this may come at the price of weakening the Social Democratic agenda. She did manage to put a working three-party coalition together but at the cost of a clearly communicated profile. (Editor’s note: How does this go together with the perceived left-wing position of the party?)

Similarly, the weakness of the SF leadership is puzzling. Between 2006 and 2010, Villy Søvndal and his entourage could hardly put a foot wrong but the party appears to have been left drifting since the summer of 2011. I find this strange given the process of political and organisational modernisation, Søvndal led. Here, more research is definitively needed.

So: It is Pining for the Fjords?
Four years is a long time in politics – much can happen to the economy (even if the Nyrup Rasmussen government lost the 2001 election despite the economy being in good shape) and we could see a ketchup bottle-effect with the government setting unmistakable prints on the political agenda. Will the Liberals’ laid-back strategy work all the way to 2015 (or 2014. Or whatever)? Will SF buckle under the pressure or will the junior partner in the government be able to reorganise itself? As the experience from Sweden 2006-2010 shows, it is dangerous calling the game to early, but the Danish government is facing problems on different levels.

Today’s Politiken has an article where a number of new MPs complain about the dominant culture in the Danish parliament. Their basic line of argument is that political debate has degenerated into endless repetitions of obvious questions and arguments and that much political behaviour now verges on (if it hasn’t already crossed) the border of victimising.

It is difficult to gauge the argument without extensive studies of parliamentary debates but the observation merits discussion.

First, one of the MPs (Mette Bock) makes the obvious mistake of confusing a parliament with a business. A business corporation has a limited number of goals (produce goods or services, create a profit) while a parliament as a representative organ is one of the major arena for social conflicts. Of course power struggles are part of most, if not all, organisations, but observers of parliamentary business are well-advised to remember that behind most of the work done in any parliament there are more or less manifest conflicts of interests or values.

Second, this means that politicians in general and parliamentarians in particular face two tasks: Solve problems and mobilise voters and social interests. These tasks are not always easy to handle in isolation. Combine them and things get very complicated. We should also note, that if problem-solving gets the upper hand there is a risk that citizens will feel less engagement and perhaps even feel alienated from the policy elite. If mobilisation gets the upper hand, we end in pointless polemics – and voters may end being disgusted by destructive politics.

On the other hand, voters appreciate constructive politics and – as everyone who has checked the Facebook-pages of politicians and political commentators – polemical and condescending attacks on political opponents will invariably draw hordes of cheering supporters. If this sounds confusing, you are on the trail of something important: Voters’ preferences are contradictory.

If you – like me – have read a large number of political debates, you will be depressingly familiar with the polemical style. This is not limited to one particular wing of the political spectrum, but usually the opposition of the day is the most obnoxious part. To me, the problem is that polemics and “gotcha” questions and statements more often than not fail to bring something new to the process. Most Danish politicians are fascinatingly inept at this.

And personally, I tune out when the familiar type of polemics begin.

I was looking for some data about the Danish Social Democrats for an article. Unfortunately, the internet (and in particular the material posted by the Danish Royal Library) can be a frustrating tool but here are some facts which interested me – not least because a comparison with Sweden could be worth an effort:

1. The Danish party has reformed its central organisation during the 00s: The old party board and executive committee were merged into a new board.

2. The statutes have rules for a direct election of the party chairman

3. Membership has continued its downward trend, despite an increase in 2005-06 following the leadership election. In 2003 the party had 54700 members, in 2010 it was down to 46050. The Social Democrats can take some solace in the fact that the party once again is the largest in terms of members after losing the position to the Liberals some time during the 1990s. In 2003 the Liberals had 69800 members, in 2010 they were down to 44400.

4. LO (the Danish TUC) no longer supports the Social Democrats but the party continues to receive some support from individual unions. Still, public subsidies are the largest sources of income by far.

Just in case you didn’t read the comment, here is Nick’s post which focuses on the organisational level.

And what a ride that was: The Swedish Social Democrats – a party which traditionally embodied the image of rational social engineering – spent the better part of 2011 on a veritable political roller-coaster under the luckless Håkan Juholt. Crises and internal conflicts are nothing new to the Nordic Social Democracies but a train-wreck of these dimensions is something unprecedented. One would probably have to look at the German Social Democrats where the position as party chairman turned into a veritable catapult sometime during the 1990s with the rapid succession of chairmen in 2005-2006 at the high (or low) point. Still, Germany with its federal structure is different and the party chairman is not necessarily the party’s candidate for the position as federal chancellor.

But at this point it is fair to ask what went wrong and how big the risks that the Social Democrats will repeat their mistakes. To do so, it will be an idea to look at the challenges, routines and solutions facing or available to the Social Democrats at four different levels and how the party responded and used the available alternatives.

The Social Level
There can be no doubt that the Social Democrats are structurally challenged. The party’s historical base was the numerous smaller and mid-sized communities which again formed the basis of industrial development during the 20th century but the Swedish society has changed as the major cities have become the main economic centres and the population is migrating to the Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö/Lund and Linköping/Norrköping regions. Crucially, the Social Democrats lost the fight against the Conservatives in Stockholm and Skåne in 2006 and again in 2010. Magnus Hagevi discussed this in a recent blog post but I would like to elaborate a bit on his argument by adding the shares of the vote won by the Left Party and the Green Party (I also begin my graph in 1970 rather than 1968)

It is obvious that the Social Democrats are facing a long-term decline in their share of the vote: While the party could operate with a target of 45 percent until the mid-1980s, its target share has been around 40 percent until 2006 and these days 35 percent looks like a more reasonable target. This means I am assuming that the party was performing below its potential in 2010 – and this assumption may not necessarily be correct. But another point is that “the left” is not necessarily weaker because of the Social Democratic crisis – the Left Party and the Green Party could attract voters, even if the Sweden Democrats continue to pull working-class voters to the right; a development Andreas Johansson Heinö has hightlighted (and which has parallels in Denmark)

The Institutional Level
Some years ago, the political scientist Ellen Immergut pointed to an overlooked factor which helped the Social Democrats to maintain their political hegemony from the 1930s until the 1970: The Swedish constitutions. Curiously, the democratisation of the constitution in the form of the abolition of the indirectly elected First Chamber and changes to the electoral system. Immergut’s conclusion is that – depending on your point of view – the Social Democrats punched above their weight until 1970 or that the party would have been stronger on the parliamentary arena, had the two-chamber system been retained.

We should note that the Danish Social Democracy faced similar challenges on the electoral and parliamentary level in the 1970s, so a different institutional development wouldn’t have stopped the Social Democrats from sliding into a crisis but we could have seen a different trajectory.

The Organisational Level
The Swedish Social Democrats have always taken pride in having a strong organisational culture. Outsiders might question the conflict between the image of a grass-roots movement on the one hand and the reality of a top-down controlled machine on the other but the party for a long time succeeded in creating the impression of an organisation without visible conflicts.

The problem is that a strong organisational culture which punish deviating opinions and open conflicts is bound to run into trouble when the environment changes or when conflicts emerge. In reality, there are only two ways to deal with this situation: Either let a dominant leadership decide the course and accept that dissidents are either excluded or leave or find some way of making conflict and conflict-resolution legitimate. The Social Democrats did neither following the Göran Persson’s resignation and this effectively meant that the party was drifting, despite the good intentions of Mona Sahlin. The closed nature of the process behind the selection of first Mona Sahlin and later Håkan Juholt only served to disguise the cracks in the walls of the building.

The Individual Level
At some point during the autumn of 2011 it was obvious that Håkan Juholt wasn’t the man to lead the Social Democrats out of their misery, but what was wrong? As the Swedish magazine Fokus has pointed out, Juholt’s first problem was that he represented the countryside and small towns, rather than the Stockholm centre. He was an outsider – not just because he hadn’t been a minister – and to succeed, he would need to create a stable power base in the party’s central organs. It was not necessarily wrong to pick an outsider, but the Social Democrats managed to pick a leader who looked more like a throwback to the Sweden of the 1970s than somebody who could finally bring the party into the 21st century.

Juholt’s second problem was that he lacked the basic skills needed in a party leader and especially one whose task would be to bring about major political and organisational change. Commentators have noted his carelessness with facts and controversial private life but to me, Juholt is fascinatingly like a Danish party leader who enjoyed great success in his first five years in office despite a certain erratic element. Yes, I am talking about Villy Søvndal – the traditionalist who transformed SF into a lean and mean electoral and parliamentary machine and who between 2005 and 2010 couldn’t make serious mistakes (What has happened from 2010 onward is a different story). Søvndal’s advantage was in seizing the moment when SF was ripe for organisational reform and creating a team (Ole Sohn in the Folketing and Thor Möger Petersen and – until his early death – Jakob Nørhøj in the party organisation) which could support him in a competent way. Juholt essentially was an agitator – and by all accounts a good one – but lacked the strategic and organisational skills. His team turned out to be just as erratic as the chairman, something which put the final nails in the coffin of Juholt’s leadership.

Postscript: For a number of bad reasons it has taken me ages to finish this post. in the meantime, the Social Democrats’ Executive Committee (which is no longer deferentially referred to as “the powerful Executive Committee”) has installed the leader of the Metal Workers’ Union Stefan Löfven as new/interim/whatever party leader. Lövfen is not an MP, something which highlights the party’s problems with attracting talent at the top levels.

This, I am told, is not a parody but the real thing. Why on Earth support for Paavo Lipponen is languishing at below 10 percent in opinion polls beats me.

Well, not really.

Cudos to Ida Auken, MP for SF and Environment Minister in the three-party government, for drawing our attention to the State Council, one part of the Danish government which most people would be absolutely clueless about if you asked them in a vox-pop but still consider an essential part of the very special Danish form of democracy. Needless to say, the Danish People’s Party went ballistic and the Liberals and the Conservatives argued that any discussion of the Danish constitution amounted to sacrilege and an attack on everything the Sacred Danish Culture is built on.

If the three parties had their way, the minister would surely be banished to some remote island, just like others who dared to question the role of the monarch in the Danish political system.

Anyway, and on a serious note, we are dealing with the relationship between what Walter Bagehot called the dignified and the efficient components of the constitution with the State Council being one of the dignified components with no efficient political role: The Danish Monarch, unlike the German president, does not have an effective right or duty to perform a judicial review of new laws. Still, the Council and its duties are described in the Danish constitution and given that changing the constitution is almost impossible, we will all have to live with the illusion that the Monarch and the State Council have a political role. That Danish media do not report about the meetings and that the Monarch have more efficient, if technically informal, ways of being informed about current events in Danish politics is another matter.

These days, Danish political culture is mainly about creating and maintaining the illusion that we live in the 19th century – or rather: An imagined 19th century in which the sovereign powers of the Monarch were never challenged and Denmark never suffered military defeat.

Given the way the legislative machine works, there is very little which can be done to minimize the role of the State Council: Every ministry churns out new laws every month in numbers that are now too big to count which again means that ministers have to be present to do their presentations. Perhaps it would be possible to assign duties on a rotating basis and avoid meetings that are only designed to ramp up the numbers.

As regular readers will know then I’m not a friend of the argument that politics in European countries is about persons: In terms of polls and elections, party leader effects have more often that not proven to be elusive (Latest case in point: Villy Søvndal).

But here is a thought for the week-end: Let us imagine that the challenger to Fredrik Reinfeldt for the office of Prime Minister in Sweden had to be chosen though some kind of primary and we had Håkan Juholt and Jonas Sjöstedt as the contenders

A) Who would win?

and

B) Who would Reinfeldt’s team see as the more dangerous opponent?

The thing is: I can ask the question without being considered completely crazy and the answer – well, maybe the answer is obvious to most readers.

First, I don’t think it is relevant to see Thorning-Schmidt’s New Year’s speech as the last chance for the government. On the other hand, it wasn’t a speech like Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s 2002 or Lars Løkke Rasmussen’s 2011 speech which managed to define a political agenda.

Thorning-Schmidt’s main problem was to strike a balance between creating a traditonal crisis consciousness on the one hand (hardships are brought upon us from the outside) and the rights-and-duties discourse on the other. The “Søren”-story was a traditional appeal to solidarity but there was no comparable case about the rights-and-duties dimension.

Part of Thorning-Schmidt’s problem is that work on tax reform and benefits reform is still in the initial stages which limits her possibilites for being specific about policies. This is something which has also led the government into problems during the past months with accussations against Helle Thorning-Schmidt for lacking a political project.

All in all: A good but not brilliant speech. A 7 on the new Danish scale.

Update: Here is the Wordle

Okay, okay: One last post before 2012 kicks in…

“Carinagate” may have been the political blunder of the year but if we think twice, Özlem Cekic’s badly chosen case actually raises some relevant questions about social policy. Unfortunately, Cekic’s framing meant that her initiative backfired so badly that it now risks completely to turn the political debate in the direction of envy (recipients are either lazy, rich or otherwise undeserving) than in the direction of considering the means and goals in social policy.

So, as a free lunch, here are my thoughts about the mess brought up by Özlem Cekic, Joachim B. Olsen and Ekstra Bladet.

Carina is not poor. Is that a problem?
Carina, the thirtysomething single mother on cash benefit, whom Özlem Cekic used as a case in her campaining for poor families turned out not not to be poor if the official OECD line of poverty was applied. Once we looked at the data, there were two reasons for this: 1. She has a child and 2. She receives a housing allowance due to the high rent of her apartment. Oh, and with one child Carina is hardly a case of a welfare queen.

Personally, I do not think that children should grow up in poverty in a country like Denmark (or any country, but this is another matter), so viewed from the child’s perspective, Carina’s economic and social situation is acceptable. If the child grows up in somewhat ordered circumstances, its chances of finishing school and getting an education is higher and this is good for all parties.

But then the problems begin. Housing policy has been a mess in Denmark for a long time and Carina is in fact among the losers. This is why she receives a housing benefit. One problem is that public housing was financed in an expensive way from the 1960s on while insiders on the housing market perfectly legally were able to rent cheap apartments. Others faced the choice between an expensive new apartment or buying a bigger, cheaper house. A no-brainer. In terms of housing, however, Carina as an outsider is stuck. And this is bad for all parties.

We should also ask why the authorities over a period of 20 years basically parked Carina on long-term benefits and apparently never seriously reviewed her case and offered her help with her condition. It is very difficult for anybody – even experts – to diagnose people from a distance but a number of people – from case-workers up – should ask themselves if the handling of psychiatric and somatic conditions is adequate. If people who would be able to work are left outside the workforce, everybody lose. And this is very bad for all parties.

I haven’t read Lisbeth Zornig Andersen‘s autobiography but it is obvious to me that Carina unlike Lisbeth Zornig never met somebody who had the power and engagement to push open the doors of the educational and social systems. This is bad and we might ask how we engage people in various kinds of social work and how social programmes can be organised to rehabilitate people who fail to get an education or enter the labour market.

One final thought: The level of social benefits always raises the issue of the relationship between benefits and wages. Ideally, we would want people to have a decent level of security while keeping an economic motive to work (there are other motives besides money, btw) and not putting public finances under too much stress. This is not an easy equation to solve. But we should remember that means-tested cash benefits are only available to people who have depleted their means. This means: No home-ownership and no savings. Not an enviable situation. The situation is different for unemployment benefits and similar programmes.

General benefits vs. means-testing
The other issue which has captured the public mind is the existence of a number of social policy programmes that cover the entire population, most notably the general old-age pension and the child allowance. The typical criticism against this type of programmes is that 1. benefits are paid to people who do not need them and consequently that 2. the programmes create a system where everybody pays money to everybody.

We might expect that voters would react by being more positive to programmes directed at people in need but the fact is that means-tested programmes are often viewed less favourably than general programmes and that people receiving means-tested benefits are often viewed with suspicion. Voters do not like paying for people who do not resemble them: The greater the distance between voters and the poor, the harder it is for politicians to mobilise support for social policy programmes. Someone once coined the phrase that “Welfare for the poor is poor welfare”.

This is not entirely correct: A country like Germany has targeted programmes but also quite generous health care and old-age pensions programmes, but it is true that we should not assume that money saved by not paying benefits or providing services to high-income earners can be used to make social policy programmes more effective.

Another issue is that means-testing creates marginal economic effects and while it may seem easy to create some kind of discretionary or rule-based deductions for one programme, things get really complicated when taxes and a number of transfers and services are added to the equation. So, politically, economically and administratively it may be easier and cheaper to make some programmes available to all citizens.

As they say on Facebook: “It’s complicated”. Anyone promising easy solutions is selling snake oil.