Where is Europe in the Danish election campaign?

When he called the elections that will take place next Thursday, Danish Prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen promised that they would be about economic responsibility and durable growth. According to recent polls, Danish voters believe the opposition, consisting of Social Democrats and the Socialist Left, are more capable of delivering these things than the current government.

This election is about the three E’s: economy, economy, economy. Yet despite the backdrop of European economic crisis, the debate has been quite insular. No Danish politician has addressed the question of how Denmark’s economic choices relate to or can address Europe’s larger problems, despite the fact that European partners make up more than two-thirds of Danish trade, and that up to 70 percent of Danish law-making springs from the European well. The EU might not be on the agenda, but the Danish elections are a telling reflection of Europe’s ills, and an illustration of why there is a dearth of national answers to the current crisis.

No ‘Plan B politicians’ on stage, and the EU missing from the script. Europe is in crisis, with Greece still teetering on the brink of default, Portugal offering junk bonds and Germany unwilling to dig deeper into its pockets. It is hard to see where future growth will come from. The decision-making process in Brussels seems to move in slow-motion, with gestures unable to deliver even short-term satisfaction to markets and voters. Europe’s woes are easy to detect. The solutions to them are harder to spot.

It is easy, therefore, to be sceptical of Plan A: Europe as it is run now. There is, for example, a whole media industry – with cheerleaders in the FT – that seems to have put its money on the break-up of the euro. There are also plenty of Plan A politicians that just lament the current state of affairs, or run national campaigns based on easy anti-Europe solutions. That was the case with the True Finns in Finland, who are now leading the Finnish demand for collateral assurance in respect of Greek debts. Perhaps reasonable enough, but hardly a longer-term answer to the genuine conundrum of redistribution between North and South. The Danish government’s decision to re-introduce border controls just before the election campaign (a compromise to get the far right Danish People’s Party into a larger deal on the economy) was similarly an example of the sort of short-sighted action by member states that is chipping unnecessarily away at the cornerstones of European integration. 

For the current election campaign, Danish politicians have chosen the ostrich strategy: they are simply ignoring the European question. Europe is too complicated and they, like their colleagues in other EU countries, simply haven’t resolved the bigger question of why and how European nations can benefit from working together in the years ahead. Right now, Denmark isn’t fostering politicians like Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, the former Foreign Minister and recipient of the prestigious Schumann prize who was constantly ready to embed Europe into national decision-making. Yet Europe is in dire need of a Plan B and a political vision. And such a Plan B must grow out of national politics in member states, in order to convince voters locally and muster civil society.

The democratic problem with austerity. The current Danish government has introduced austerity measures, including reduced benefits and a hike in the retirement age. It is not likely to be rewarded for this on election day. This echoes the dilemma that politicians across Europe are facing as they balance the economic need for austerity with voter satisfaction. As Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the Eurogroup and Prime Minister of Luxembourg, remarked a while ago: “We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” The Danish polls add to the picture of voter disenchantment with governments across Europe as a result of recession and austerity politics. Since the crisis began, no government in Europe has been re-elected on a package of reducing the benefits paid to large groups of the population. This shows the democratic limits of Chancellor Merkel’s hopes of curing Europe with purely budget-cutting measures. Governments might enact such measures, but there are not going to be re-elected if they do. This should prompt politicians to re-think longer-term visions for Europe’s growth, and its position in the world. 

Europe in the national political discourse. There is another reason why Europe doesn’t loom large for Danish politicians. In election campaigns, politicians promise things. Europe is hard to make promises about. It is a place where political deals based on compromise between 27 states and the European Parliament are the norm. And Danish politicians and the Danish state are, of course, only small players on the European stage. Nobody wants to run for national government on a vision of impotence, and that idea that decisions are made elsewhere. Still, the simple truth is that more than half the legislation that a Danish parliamentarian deals with stems from Europe. If voters in a country of six million want to constructively influence a European community of 500 million, then the EU must form part of the national electoral conversation.

In recent national elections within European states, the EU has been either a focus of negativity or, at best, ignored – as in Denmark. Yet the next Danish government is going to steer Europe during the upcoming Danish presidency from New Year, and will therefore have to explain to its own people how important and decisive Europe is to Denmark’s future.

Europe needs re-inventing in order to keep alive the EU project and everything that goes with it: the world’s largest internal market, borderless travel and study, a common currency and peaceful vision for the world. Yet we are still waiting for the Plan B politicians to appear on the horizon. If they don’t, civil society and voters ought to demand this reinvention, instead of being fobbed off with short-term national solutions. If our senior politicians can’t produce a Plan B, perhaps the grass roots and Europe’s flourishing civil society movements can.  

This piece was first published by E!Sharp