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Why should foreign residents vote in Denmark’s local elections?

If you find Denmark's multiple political parties and consensus system a bit opaque, fear not. The upcoming municipal and regional elections are about things you have opinions on — from healthcare and schools to noise complaints and alleviating traffic. And crucially, many foreign residents are eligible to vote.

Published: 11 November 2021 18:58 CET
Updated: 16 November 2021 09:31 CET
Local election placards on display in Helsingør. Foreign residents in Denmark have the chance to vote on issues that matter to them on November 16th
Local election placards on display in Helsingør. Foreign residents in Denmark have the chance to vote on issues that matter to them on November 16th Photo: Keld Navntoft/Ritzau Scanpix

Local elections are just around the corner on November 16th. According to Denmark’s interior ministry, 1 in 11 eligible voters in Denmark’s municipal and regional elections are foreign citizens.

Foreign citizens living in Denmark suffer from chronically low voter turnout in the local elections—only 32.1 percent of eligible foreign residents cast their ballots in the 2017 election, an analysis by the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Political Science revealed. And while the cryptically-named Danish political parties can be baffling to newcomers, experts say you don’t really need to understand national level politics to be involved in local elections.

“Most local politics are about very local issues,” Jakob Nielsen, editor-in-chief of Danish political news outlet Altinget, told The Local at an election briefing.

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On Tuesday’s ballot are candidates for municipal and regional councils. Your municipality handles local administration of welfare and social needs—encompassing social services, primary schooling and childcare, infrastructure, transportation, and the somewhat euphemistic “integration” of refugees and immigrants.

The job description for the regions is similar—healthcare, welfare, and social development. They administrate public hospitals and the GP system, orchestrate regional mass transit, and manage initiatives to create economic growth. While there are 98 municipalities, there are only five regions.

Immigration, refugees and foreign workers

While immigration has been a front-and-centre issue in the past several Danish election cycles, “this is probably one of the elections with the least focus on foreigners, immigrants, and people not originally from Denmark,” said Professor Ulrik Kjær of the University of Southern Denmark’s of Political Science department.

A tacit agreement to leave the debate on immigration issues until after the November vote means it hasn’t been discussed publicly in the context of the local elections, Kjær explained. 

Quality of life questions 

Perhaps the most practical reasons for foreign citizens to vote in local elections are the quality of life questions unique to that area. Should Vejle invest in a tunnel under the city centre to ease the traffic gridlock? Should Copenhagen make it harder for bars and restaurants to serve alcohol to ostensibly loud patrons after midnight? 

“Most local politics are about very local issues,” Nielsen said. “Vote as you would in any election for those you trust to do the most for the schools or the elderly, or to steer the local economy in a responsible way.” 

How to learn what the candidates stand for 

Danish broadcasting agency DR offers a helpful “candidate quiz” (in Danish) for each of Denmark’s 98 municipalities — just answer around 30 questions about changes you’d like to see in your area and the quiz will show you the candidates that are most aligned with your opinions. 

Altinget offers a similar quiz for each municipality and a separate version for the regional candidates and issues.  

All of these quizzes are unfortunately only available in Danish, so keep Google Translate or your favourite Dane handy. 

The environment 

While schools, elderly care and other social services regularly top the list of issues voters prioritise, “this local election might be the breakthrough of the environmental question on the political agenda,” Kjær said. 

“They might discuss [environmental policy] in Glasgow, they might discuss it in the national parliament, but they definitely discuss it” — and make meaningful decisions — “in each of the 98 municipal councils,” he added. 

Member comments

  1. Thank you for the article. I think people with foreign background have a hard time to connect to local politics, because first of all, everything is in Danish, and there are many issues a foreigner will not necessarily understand, I know many who have no clue in what condition the elderly care or school system is because they didn’t grow up in Denmark and could never relate, that is why those political candidate tests are useless and misleading. Second of all, most Danish politicians never approach people of foreign backgrounds and never communicate to them their goals, thus the strong disconnection we have today. I can completely understand that people don’t vote, it is no good to vote for just a candidate that you get from the candidate test, but rather vote for those who you feel considers your wishes. I have been involved in political activism in Denmark and for the 10 years of residence, I only witnessed one small local election debate that was in English and where residents of foreign background could get their moment of questions and answers. If we are not invited to participate by politicians and political parties, then why bother… I would encourage people to vote blank instead, if they feel it is important to vote but they don’t know for whom.

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POLITICS

EXPLAINED: How AI deep fakes are bringing new tensions to Danish politics

Denmark's culture minister said on Monday he hoped to use copyright law to bring an end to the controversial new trend of using deep fake videos in politics. Here's the background.

Published: 13 May 2024 15:13 CEST
EXPLAINED: How AI deep fakes are bringing new tensions to Danish politics

Jakob Engel-Schmidt, who represents the Moderate Party, warned that the technique, used in recent videos by the far-right Danish People’s Party and libertarian Liberal Alliance were the “top level of  a slippery slope that could end up undermining our trust in one another and making every political message, newspaper article and artistic publication a potential battleground for whether it is true or false”. 

Which parties have used deepfake video in campaigning? 

The Danish People’s Party at the end of last month issued an AI-generated deepfake video showing a spoof speech in which Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen appeared to announce that Ascension Day, Easter and Christmas would no longer be public holidays, and that they would all be replaced by the Muslim festival of Eid as the country’s only holiday. 

This was a satirical reference to the government’s unpopular decision to abolish Store bededag, or “Great Prayer Day” as a public holiday. 

The video was clearly labelled as AI-generated, and ends with the Danish People’s Party’s leader, Morten Messeschmidt, awakening from a nightmare. 

The Liberal Alliance also released a video for Great Prayer Day, in which it used AI to turn Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (S), Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen (V) and Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen (M) into eccentric-looking characters similar to those in the film’s of the US director Wes Anderson.

What kind of a stir have the videos caused in Denmark? 

Denmark’s Minister for Digitization, Marie Bjerre, who represents the centre-right Liberal Party, was sharply critical of the Danish People’s Party’s move. 

“I think it is way over the line for the Danish People’s Party to make a deepfake of a political opponent. I don’t think it’s proper either, and they shouldn’t do it,” she said. “It is also a problem for our democracy and society. Because with deepfakes, you can create material that looks extremely credible, which means that you can really spread misinformation. That is why it is also very serious that the Danish People’s Party is using deepfake for this kind of thing.” 

She said that such videos should only be allowed if the organisation making or distributing them have received consent from the person depicted. 

“If you want to make deepfakes of people, you must ask for permission. That will be the proper way to do it,” she said. 

Messerschmidt defended the video as light-hearted satire that at the same time educated Danish people about the new technology. 

“What we can do is show Danes how to use the new technologies and how to use them in a good way, like here in an entertaining and satirical way,” he said. 

Although Engel-Schmidt said he was concerned about the use of deepfake videos in politics, he acknowledged that the light-hearted videos released by the two parties were in themselves unlikely to deceive anyone.  

How does Engel-Schmidt hope to regulate such deepfake videos? 

He said he aimed to see whether copyright law could be used to regulate such videos.

Presumably this would mean seeing whether, under law, people have a right to the use of the own image, personality or voice, and can therefore forbid them from being used without permission. 

What do the experts say? 

Christiane Vejlø, one of Denmark’s leading experts on the relationship between people and technology, welcomed the government’s moves towards regulating deepfake videos, pointing to the impact they were already having on politics in other countries such as India and the US.

“There is no doubt that we will have to deal with this phenomenon. It has an impact on something that is most important to us in a democracy – namely trust and faith in other people,” she told Denmark’s public broadcaster DR.

In the current Indian election campaign, she said that deepfakes of popular Bollywood actors had been used to criticise the current government and encourage voters to vote for the opposition.

“In India and the USA we see politicians saying things they could never think of saying. We are getting an erosion of the truth,” she said. 

She said that even if the videos were clearly labelled as AI-generated, it did not necessarily make them unproblematic. 

“Even if you can see that it is a deepfake, it can still influence voters to think that there is something wrong with them [the politician] or that they look stupid,” she said. “We have a situation where another person is used as a digital hand puppet.” 

 
 

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