Jacob Christensen

In many ways, David Cameron has been an interesting acquaintance as British Prime Minister. I suspect that a lot of observers assumed that he would end the Thatcherite era on the British right and lead the Conservatives to the centre of British politics but instead the coalition with the Liberal Democrats now in almost every respect looks like one of the most right-wing governments the UK has had for ages – something which also raises the question of the strategies and political efficacy of the LibDems. But we will leave that for later.

The relationship between the UK and Europe is an equally intriguing issue. To an outsider, it has long seemed obvious that the Tory right (supported by the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph) would prefer to leave the EU and better yesterday than today. The breakdown of the latest round of negotiations over EMU rescue packages actually makes a British exit from the de facto EU a likely prospect, even if I would expect Britain to formally stay in some kind of zombie-EU.

But the process and the outcome raise a lot of questions which I am not really competent to answer. Still, here goes:

1. How much of the breakdown was due to Cameron (and Downing Street, etc) being an incompetent negotiator? This report from the Economist more than suggest that Cameron s****d up in an epic way in presenting the British position – and if Cameron wasn’t incompetent in a technical sense, he surely miscalculated Britain’s influence completely.

2. While the Tory backbenchers will surely celebrate a breakdown of UK-EU relations in a very loud way, the question is if the UK financial sector (“The City”) will be equally happy over losing influence in the EMU. Will yesterday’s events undermine an alliance which has otherwise been fundamental to the strength of the Conservative Party?

3. The institutional design of the Euro17 or whatever the new arrangement will be named also raises some interesting questions. On the one hand, the Euro17 agreement will strengthen the supranational element in economic and fiscal policy compared with the present arrangements, but on the other hand the institutional setting will – at least de jure – be more intergovernmental than today’s EU, eg. with the European Commission being sidelined. This is very weird, given that Britain has always favoured an intergovernmental EU while France and Germany traditionally have pushed for more supranational government in the EU. But then again: EU politics always had a slightly absurd element to it.

As I say: I have no good answers so far, only questions.

Today’s Berlingske has another of those articles (not published on the web) telling us that “Germans have a natural fear of inflation” due to the hyperinflation of the early 1920s.

This may be but isn’t it strange that the deflationary austerity policies of Heinrich Brüning which were an important element in the developments leading to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and democratic order are completely forgotten in the narrative?

(This isn’t an original thought of mine: Some economist – Krugman? deLong? – posted similar ideas some weeks ago)

This – to put it mildly – was not pretty to watch. Many had suspected that the personal advisor of former Minister of Taxation, Liberal hopeful Troels Lund Poulsen was indeed the man behind the leaking of documents about Social Democratic leader and present Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schmidt and now we pretty much have it in the open.

An inquiry will be chewing through the evidence about the involvement of a number of high-ranking civil servants and politicians during the coming year, and I suspect that one or the other skeleton will be brought to light. This also means that we should be careful in making early judgements.

However, what we do know, is this:

1. The tax case did hurt Helle Thorning Schmidt and the Social Democrats: Support for the party fell noticeably both times the case hit the frontpages. From a purely party political/tactical view, exposing the case was very clever.

2. Peter Arnfeldt, special advisor to Tax Minister Troels Lund Poulsen, was involved in the leaking of the Thorning Schmidt case.

3. Peter Loft, the long-serving permanent secretary in the Ministry of Taxation, took a special interest in the case.

Would we need to know is:

1. How and why did Arnfeldt get access to the Thorning Schmidt case?
2. Did the ministry, in particular permament secretary Peter Loft, try to put pressure on Skat København in the handling of the case?
3. Did Arnfeldt act independently or was Troels Lund Poulsen in any way informed or otherwise involved?
4. …and was the press office of the Liberal Party and the party leader, then-Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen informed or otherwise involved, either by Arnfeldt or Lund Poulsen?
5. When Loft realised that papers regarding the Thorning Schmidt case had been leaked, why didn’t he immediately inform the permanent secretary of the Prime Minister’s Office?

Erling Andersen’s and Peter Loft’s reports to the Minister are published here. They are part of the material behind the Tas Minister’s decision to call for a full inquiry.

The case raises a number of other issues: The relationship between “special advisors” and other staff, the relationship between “special advisors” and other political sources on the one hand and political journalists on the other, limits for journalists’ protection of their sources, the norms guiding the political competition, etc, etc. But each one of these would merit busloads of blog-posts.

Occasionally, things happen that are so weird that you wouldn’t believe them if somebody tried to fictionalise them. Back in the 1990s the UK Prime Minister John Major famously tried to revive his party’s flagging fortunes by declaring that the party should go “back to basics“. No sooner had Major made his big declaration before the Conservatives were flooded with endless sex scandals – one more bizarre than the other – and stories of corruption.

So maybe SF should have been warned: Trying to go back to basics does include some political risks.

The attempt to put poverty on the political agenda should have been an obvious winner – with all the elegance of a herd of bulls in a china shop, Liberal Alliance’s Joachim B. Olsen had attacked earlier demands for Christmas benefits for people receiving social benefits (In Denmark, LA is also known as Team Saxo Bank with a reference to one of the party’s sponsors whose founders a strong adherents of the teachings of Ayn Rand). In political terms, Olsen looked like a sitting duck.

Unfortunately, SF MP Özlem Cekic hadn’t done her homework properly when she produced a single mother on benefits, trying to make a living for 15.000 DKK a month, presenting her as a case of Danish poor and an argument for the need for an official Danish definition of poverty. The thing blew up immediately: Following the OECD’s guidelines, the woman couldn’t be defined as poor and the debate immediately put the relationship between benefits and work income, rather than the conditions of people on the borders of and outside the labour market, at the centre of the agenda. Even worse from the perspective of SF, the latter-day descendants of Jakob Knudsen have won this round of the fight.

In short, Cekic and SF had pwned themselves more effectively than anybody on the right-wing of Danish politics could have hoped for.

I will leave aside the interesting question about poverty and benefits here and just ask: How did SF mess up the story so badly. After all, the party went through an impressive transformation since 2005 which made it much more professional and streamlined in its public relations. We really should have expected a better performance.

One answer could be that Özlem Cekic is a bit of a loose cannon and that the party leadership is struggling to control her. That she is motivated more by instinct than calculation would only make the faux pas more likely. All parties are plagued by rogue politicians but SF’s main problem is that its political profile has faded during the last year and the party can’t really allow itself any major blunders in the public eye.

Keeping control of loose cannons, however, is easier when the parliamentary leadership is working properly and as commentators have pointed out, SF has a bit of a problem here. Party chairman Villy Søvndal is busy establishing himself as foreign minister, the former chairman of the parliamentary group Ole Sohn is rattled both by loss of status in the internal hierarchy and allegations of his past and Thor Möger Petersen lacks a basis in the parliamentary group. Add that the choice of new group chairman after the formation of the government was a surprise and seen as a snub to the party leadership, and we have a very messy situation on our hands.

As a party which is new in government and as a party of the left (as in: to the left of the Social Democrats), SF faces special problems and the process leading up to the formation of the three-party government should give the party leadership ground for concern.

In the meantime, “doing a Cekic” will be the Danish equivalent of “going back to basics”.

Ah, yes: The Conservative Party. Does anybody remember them these days? They used to be a major, if often troubled player in Danish politics and the guarantee for (reasonably) stable centre-right governments. The party under Poul Schlüter even held the position as prime minister between 1982 and 1993.

But these days? Imagine that the Conservative Party actually slipped under the 2% threshold: What would Danish politics be losing?

No?

No-one can come up with any great politicians or any outstanding ideas that the electorate has been waiting for?

Where exactly did it all go wrong? (Yes, that is a lot of question-marks)

Back in first half of the 1980s, there was in fact a lot of talk about the prospect of the Conservatives overtaking the Social Democrats as the largest party – they never quite made it but still won a respectable 42 seats in the 1984 election. The fatigue only really sat in following the 1988 election when the Liberals finally after a decade in the doldrums staged one of the most impressive comebacks in Danish political history, going from 10% of the vote in 1987 to 30% in 2001. The Liberals are still outdone by the Conservatives’ massive rebound from 5% in 1975 to 23% in 1984.

What may be more interesting is the talk about the Conservative Youth Federation which was described as the place for cool kids to be in the 1980s. The thing is that those leading the Conservative Party in the 2000s and 2010s would have been recruited during the 1980s so obviously something went very wrong here.

The conflicts during the 1990s didn’t make things any better – two or three rounds of internal struggle drained the party of a number of potential leaders, leaving it with the tired, those who fit in with the paint on the wall and the self-absorbed. Not exactly a happy constellation.

In policy terms, the Conservatives have spent the 2000s by trying to position themselves as the business-friendly party. Business-friendly as in effectively having only one point on the agenda: Tax-cuts for high-earners. The fate of the Swedish Conservatives in the 2002 election should have served as a warning to the Danish party: Single-mindedly focusing on tax-cuts combined with occasional declarations about what the party don’t like is not enough to guarantee a long-term following.

Now the party faces a double (if not triple) challenge: It will have to come up with a full political agenda which is not exclusively focused on the business community, it will have to reconsider its strategies for recruiting political talent (at a time when the Liberals are appearing as the default party for the general centre-right and Liberal Alliance for the self-absorbed) and it will have to demonstrate its political relevance during a parliamentary term where the party is, effectively, irrelevant.

My old post about Sohn from February is here. I’m not really sure if the new reports about Sohn’s knowledge of and active participation in the transfer of money from the SUCP to DKP really adds anything new to the story but it obviously creates a lot of noise which the Liberals and Conservatives will love to use.

A guide for lazy journalists, provided by Kosmopolito.

Any similarity with real existing journalism is … oh, well…

The news that the party board of the Red-Green Alliance has accepted the party’s agreement with the government over the 2012 budget is hardly surprising but still significant in a Danish context.

The thing is that the parties in the Danish parliament cover the ideological distance from nationalists/populists to (more or less) post-communists. During the last decade budgets were passed following agreements between the Liberal-Conservative government and the Danish People’s Party and this meant that the DF was – in Sartorian terms – a party with coalition potential even if it chose to stay out of government.

With the RGA actively supporting the government we will have the same situation on the left side of the political spectrum – obviously the Red-Greens (just like the DF) will be a long way from joining a Danish government and they will still compete with SF and the Social Democrats for voters – in fact: The competition on the left may be fiercer than on the right – but the party effectively will be judged on its coalition potential.

In terms of integrating different political traditions, the Danish political system has quite a high rate of success.

Last week’s silence was due to a vacation which I spent visiting Berlin. Among the sights was this probably unintentionally but still highly symbolic bear commemorating a meeting of EU Finance Ministers in 2007.

PS: All my public photos from the trip are here. And here is a batch from the last time I visited Berlin – in 2004.

It is perhaps worth remembering that November 11 is the anniversary of the 1918 armistice which ended World War I. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse which I photographed in Bruges this summer were not displayed as a memorial for the War and the dead but as it was Flanders and as those living at the time may very well have feared that some kind of apocalypse had come, they may still serve of a fitting reminder of a truly terrible war.