The Conservative citizenship spokesperson, Brigitte Klintskov Jerkel, said that the party would not vote for a bill approving over 2,000 citizenship cases, claiming many of the people whose cases are voted on are “serial criminals”, the Ritzau newswire reported from the parliament.

The move by the centre-right party could have the consequence of pushing them outside an agreement it made with several other parties, including the governing Social Democrats, when the most recent citizenship law was passed with the help of the Conservatives in 2021.

Minister for Immigration and Integration Kaare Dybvad Bek has stated that the Conservatives would no longer be a part of that agreement if they failed to vote for the naturalisation bill.

“If you want to throw us out of the agreement group because we insist criminal foreigners shouldn’t have citizenship, I think that says more about you than us,” Jerkel is reported to have said ahead of voting on the bill.

Automatic deletions in the criminal register make it difficult to ensure people who have committed crimes are not approved for citizenship, she argued.

Unlike many other countries where citizenship applications are processed and improved entirely by the civil service, Danish citizenship can only be granted to foreign nationals via legal naturalisation meaning all applications must be approved by a parliamentary majority.

Accepted applications – those which are deemed to meet the stringent set of criteria for Danish naturalisation – are normally processed in parliament twice yearly. Essentially, politicians vote to approve the acceptance of the applications after they have been assessed.

Criteria for citizenship include strict rules relating to criminal records.

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The decision by the Conservatives not to vote for the current naturalisation bill does not affect persons whose applications are included in the current bill because it was still approved by a majority of parties.

This can be seen on the parliament’s website, which shows the previous reading dates of the bill as well as its final vote and adoption on Tuesday.

However, the centre-right party’s decision means it joins two other parties who do not vote to approve the citizenship bills. The far-right Danish People’s Party has consistently voted against approving new citizenships since 2017 while another national conservative party, the Denmark Democrats, votes neither for nor against – as the Conservatives did on Tuesday.

Prior to 2017, the citizenship bills were routinely approved by a unanimous parliament.

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In April 2021, the then-single party Social Democratic government linked up with the conservative Liberal (Venstre) and Liberal Alliance parties along the Conservatives on a tighter new agreement around citizenship rights.

It is this agreement that the Conservatives are now leaving by voting against naturalistion bills, Jerkel confirmed she had been informed by Bek.