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Could a centrist government change Danish asylum plan?

Acting Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is leading negotiations to form a new Danish government which she wants to encompass the political centre. That could mean working with parties critical of the Social Democratic plan to process asylum seekers in Rwanda.

Published: 3 November 2022 16:52 CET
Could a centrist government change Danish asylum plan?
Danish immigration minister Kaare Dybvad Bek during a visit to Rwanda in September. Photo: Bo Amstrup/Ritzau Scanpix

Frederiksen, now the caretaker PM after her government stepped down on Thursday, is currently leading negotiations to form a new Danish government.

The Social Democratic party leader is in a strong position going into talks after the ‘red bloc’ of left-wing parties won a single-seat majority in Tuesday’s election.

She has confirmed she will seek to form a government across the centre, in line with a pre-election pledge.

“What we will being doing, completely practically, is to invite all parliamentary parties and naturally also the North Atlantic mandates to Marienborg on Friday. The parties will be invited in order according to size,” she told broadcasterTV2.

Senior political editor with TV2 Hans Redder has noted that there are several potential combinations of parties – involving the centrist Moderates (‘M’), the centre-right Liberals (‘V’), the centre-left Social Liberals (‘RV’) and the social democratic Socialist People’s Party (SF) that could give Frederiksen a workable centrist majority.

The Liberals, normally the main opposition party to a red bloc government, are unlikely to govern with Frederiksen, according to an expert.

“There will be negotiations, and the Liberals will come to these negotiations, but they will not last very long,” political scientist Rune Stubager, a professor at Aarhus University, said at a press briefing on Wednesday.

READ ALSO: Five things to know about the Danish election result

This leaves the Moderates, Social Liberals and SF.

Reaching an agreement with one or more of these parties could force the government to reconsider its divisive plan to set up an asylum facility in Rwanda.

Lars Løkke Rasmussen, leader of the Moderates, believes international blowback for a centre in Rwanda would be serious, he said in a TV2 debate prior to the election, while the Social Liberals have said they won’t support a government that moves forward with the project.

“The Social Liberals have said they do not want to support any government continuing the plans to work to send asylum seekers to Rwanda,” Stubager said.

The issue has “been lurking in the discussions” during the election campaign, he said.

The government – now the caretaker government – is “allegedly rather close” to closing a deal with Rwanda for the asylum facility, Stubager said.

“The question is, to what extent [the Rwanda plan] is realistic and whether any refugees will eventually end up in Rwanda, that remains to be seen – there’s a lot of scepticism about that,” he said.

The Social Liberals are “very much opposed to this and they have said that they will not support a government that even continues working with these plans,” he said.

READ ALSO: Leader of Denmark’s Social Liberals resigns after election defeat

“That will be one of the tough issues for the negotiations that will now go on,” he said.

Moving part of Denmark’s refugee system offshore to a non-EU country – confirmed in 2021 as Rwanda – is a long-term objective of Denmark’s Social Democratic government.

The plans entail Denmark sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, where their cases would be processed by Danish authorities, instead of allowing them to live in Denmark.

The government has said the plan will reduce people smuggling to Europe and thereby help to reform what it calls a “broken” European asylum system.

Negotiations between the two countries over the specifics of such an arrangement remain ongoing.

READ ALSO:

On Monday, newspaper Jyllands-Posten reported it had obtained internal government documents that appear to counter politicians’ assessments of Rwanda as a suitable location for an offshore asylum centre.

An initial analysis produced by the Danish government in June 2021 showed grave concerns from agency staffers before the government announced plans for a Danish ‘reception center’ for refugees in Rwanda, according to the report.

“There are reports of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees in the custody of the authorities. There are no reports that the [Rwandan] government has initiated investigations into these matters,” a Ministry of Immigration and Integration document states according to Jyllands-Posten’s report.

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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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