The Left in Denmark: Electoralism Drags Down Red-Green Alliance

by Brandon Madsen

A Warning from Denmark: Collapse in Red-Green Alliance vote holds lessons for DSA

The elections to Denmark’s Folketing (parliament) on November 1 were unpredictable, nail-bitingly close, and reflected a generalized uncertainty in society about the way forward. The day before the election, 24 percent of those polled still didn’t know who they would vote for. Never in Danish history has there been so much last-minute party switching. Even with 99.8 percent of the votes counted, it was still unclear which way the deciding mandate (seat) would go. When the apportionment of seats was finally announced in the last hours of November 2, the result was a razor-thin victory for sitting Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of the Social Democratic Party, with 90 out of the 179 MPs coming from parties which had given parliamentary support to her previous government.

Despite Frederiksen continuing as Prime Minister, the outcome nonetheless represents a major shake-up of the political landscape. Over 40 percent of the electorate voted for a different party than in 2019, and two new parties entered parliament for the first time. The Folketing is now fractured into twelve different parties, only two of which got more than 10 percent of the vote. At the same time, voter turnout was at a 32-year low (by Danish standards) of 84.1 percent and the number of blank votes increased by more than 19,000. 

Further underscoring the political uncertainty is the fact that it took more than a month to form a new government – the longest delay in Denmark’s modern history. Instead of being supported by the previous so-called “red bloc” of left and center-left parties, Frederiksen has this time opted to sever all ties with the left and form a rare “grand coalition” government – the first of its kind since the 1970s – allying with the two main center-right bourgeois parties: the Liberals (Venstre) and the newly-formed Moderates, a split from the former headed by erstwhile Liberal PM Lars Løkke Rasmussen. Grand coalitions are traditionally formed as an attempt to achieve “stability” in times of crisis, and the bourgeoisie are counting on the new government to implement “labor reforms” to ensure workers are the ones to bear the bulk of the burden. 

The leftmost party in parliament, the Red-Green Alliance (RGA), unfortunately encountered its poorest national election result in more than a decade, despite a heroic campaigning effort by party activists. There is an ongoing debate within the ranks of the party about how and why this happened. While the dominant bloc within the current leadership has been largely complacent about the party’s direction in the aftermath of the defeat, making excuses and pointing to accidental factors – like the electorate’s “strategic voting” to ensure the Alternative (a green split from the Social Liberals) got over the 2 percent threshold – these surface-level explanations do not get us much closer to the real reasons. The polling and election data suggest that the RGA not only lost 12 percent of its 2019 voters to the Alternative but also lost 13 percent to the Socialist People’s Party (SF), 11 percent to the Social Democrats, and 3 percent to the Independent Greens, while another chunk of potential RGA voters simply stayed home or cast a blank ballot. 

Understanding the real dynamics at play behind the electoral beating the RGA has taken is important for the left not only in Denmark but around the world, including in the US, especially as it concerns the future of DSA and its own electoral ambitions. 

The Pressures of Electoral Success

The Red-Green Alliance (in Danish: Enhedslisten, meaning “the Unity List”) was formed in 1989 as an electoral alliance of three different Marxist parties (Left Socialists, Communist Party of Denmark, and Socialist Workers’ Party). It wasn’t until 2011 that the party had its big parliamentary breakthrough, tripling its seat count from 4 to 12, while its dues-paying membership grew more than 50 percent in a single year to over 7,700 (keep in mind that Denmark has less than 6 million inhabitants – a similar proportion in the US would correspond to about 400,000 members). It did this by strongly and publicly protesting against the decisive rightward shift of the Social Democrats under Thorning and the SF under Søvndal, as they laid the ground for collaboration with the bourgeois Social Liberal Party. 

This electoral success was a double-edged sword for the party: with more mandates came increased parliamentarist and bureaucratic pressures. True, its membership has so far continued to grow, reaching more than 9,000 today, and there remains space for genuine debate within party circles. At the same time, however, its day-to-day workings are increasingly becoming the purview of staffers, and many of the active members I’ve spoken to report that the level of rank-and-file activity and engagement is dwindling. 

“As you win more mandates, you get more seats, and each of those seats comes with hired staff. As you become increasingly reliant on that staff, and you see that staff as key to the party’s political success, you get an increasingly narrow focus on parliamentary and electoral victories.”

David Rønne, lead RGA parliamentary candidate in Østerbro

For most of the Red-Green Alliance’s history, it would have been universally acknowledged that the party should control the parliamentary group and not the other way around. But today, most socialist activists would agree that it is closer to the truth to say that the parliamentary group runs the party – or at least that the party is run such that parliamentary concerns (and not movement building) take precedence. As RGA parliamentary candidate and member of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP) David Rønne put it when I spoke with him on election night: “As you win more mandates, you get more seats, and each of those seats comes with hired staff. As you become increasingly reliant on that staff, and you see that staff as key to the party’s political success, you get an increasingly narrow focus on parliamentary and electoral victories.”

It’s important to note that this drift toward bureaucracy and bourgeois parliamentarism cannot be explained by bribery, careerism, or other similarly “direct” forms of corruption. The RGA has taken proactive administrative measures to mitigate careerism that go well beyond most left parties in the world. For example, RGA politicians take only a worker’s wage (an example which more left parties should follow); the party is governed by committee rather than an individual leader; and there are short, strictly enforced term limits (a “rotation” system) imposed by the party both for parliamentary and internal posts. The RGA’s example clearly drives home the fact that the primary pressure toward bureaucracy is a political one, and that administrative precautions alone can never be enough to counter these political pressures. Theoretical clarity, a strong Marxist backbone, and deep roots in working-class movements are required. 

The Cost of Playing Nice

One way that the trend toward parliamentary bureaucratism in the Red-Green Alliance has manifested is that the party has failed to publicly distinguish itself from the strategy of the unabashedly reformist Socialist People’s Party (SF), which for many decades has acted as a pressure group for those who want to pull the Social Democrats to the left. To the average voter this election cycle, the RGA’s approach appeared essentially indistinguishable in this regard – based not only on its messaging during the campaign but also on how its MPs have acted over the three years since the last election. 

Much like the SF, the RGA has in recent years largely kept its opposition to Social Democratic policies behind closed doors, in private negotiations, in exchange for comparatively small concessions on environmental reforms and expanding the welfare state. Not only has the RGA backed bills containing provisions that go against what the party is supposed to stand for, it has not even spoken out to publicly expose these rotten proposals by the Social Democrats and justify voting for them purely as a necessary evil, much less attempted to bring public pressure to bear during such negotiations by calling for mass mobilizations. 

Some of the agreements that RGA has voted for or signed onto (in some cases later backing out due to grassroots pressure) have included a police settlement allowing expanded surveillance, an “education relocation” plan entailing massive cuts to universities, a rubbish settlement that leads toward privatization of the municipal waste sector, a racially discriminatory modification to the already-racist “anti-ghetto law” exempting Ukranians from the restrictions placed on other “non-Western” refugees, an environmental bill emphasizing carbon capture and storage, and a lackluster infrastructure bill that leans too heavily toward building new highways. The party has also softened its policy toward the international organs of capitalist imperialism: the EU and NATO. 

Even on the small-but-positive concessions it has been able to secure from the government as part of these agreements, the RGA has not properly touted these as its own. For the most part, the agreements were taken as a whole and hailed as victories in such a way that made the party appear to be in lockstep with the Social Democratic government. As housing justice activist Jørgen Colding-Jørgensen, one of RGA’s founding members, put it to me during the election campaign: “The party has been campaigning too much on keeping the Social Democrats in power and has not done nearly enough to establish its own independent profile or to help build actual social movements.”

The main reason voters chose RGA in the first place wasn’t because they were looking for a source of “loyal pressure” on the Social Democrats behind the scenes – the SF had already long filled that role. The voters the RGA can draw are those looking for a real, viable left alternative who will not fall into the same old ruts as the other parties, who will base themselves on the masses and build social movements. 

Acting as a principled voice of left protest was key to the RGA’s rise in 2011, but already by 2015 the pressures of bourgeois-parliamentary “respectability” had begun to set in, and this was already hurting its popular support. This fact can be easily lost if one simply looks at the general election results by year – after all, in 2015 the RGA got its best-ever national result of 7.8 percent. At the time, however, this was a disappointing result, representing a loss of nearly half its support relative to 2013, when it was polling at almost 15 percent.

Ali Hansen, a former municipal-level elected RGA representative in Copenhagen, recently wrote in his insightful post-election reflection about why the RGA rose to the number-one party in Copenhagen at the municipal level in 2021 even as its parliamentary support has shrunk: 

The key… must be found in our two different approaches to cooperation with the Social Democrats. In the city hall, we have had a clear strategy of pursuing our own independent policy and not, as SF, following the Social Democrats through thick and thin. […] The voters rewarded us for our clear positions and firmness of principle.

Enhedslisten’s parliamentary group has been more concerned with being a social-democratic companion than leading our own policy. The group’s policy has for many years been bound by “realism” and devoid of any vision.

Following a “bad is better than worse” logic has weakened Enhedslisten’s demands on the government to such an extent that our future dreams have become colorless, our faith in change weak, and our expectations low.

Being a supporting party to a government should not be a matter of identity, but a tactical matter to be measured within the framework of a clearly defined strategic plan. It is only in the context of such a vision that one can understand why a party must be a support party for a government. 

In that regard, it is notable that the Independent Greens, who won no parliamentary mandates and have portrayed themselves as anarchist-inspired revolutionaries, actually got the largest share of the vote in some of the more working-class and immigrant-heavy neighborhoods such as Tingbjerg and Gellerup, as well as the second-largest in Vollsmose. Most of those 30,000 Independent Green voters almost certainly could have been won over to the RGA if it had shown a real fighting policy.

The RGA certainly did not do any favors to its reputation with immigrant voters when the party’s spokesperson for foreign affairs publicly stated that they “could live with” the government’s plan to send asylum seekers to a refugee center in Rwanda for processing. The party soon reversed course and insisted that it could not accept the plan after all. But, as Socialisten.dk correctly argued in their excellent post-election analysis, “the damage was done, and thousands were left with the impression that Enhedslisten’s support was for sale – and that the price was not actually all that high.”

Lessons for DSA 

These developments in Denmark should serve as a cautionary tale for DSA in the US. In New York, where DSA has the most advanced electoral position in the country, there are already troubling signs of electoralist pressures exerting undue influence on the organization. Proposals for a more independent, party-like DSA and for stricter control of elected officials by the organization were defeated, while a resolution forbidding DSA working groups from publicly criticizing DSA electeds without prior top-down approval was passed.

The most recent trends in Denmark’s RGA clearly show the dangers of continuing in this electoralist direction – even, ironically, from the narrow viewpoint of building electoral support. Let’s heed the warnings and lessons from our Danish comrades, before it’s too late.