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Is the Danish People’s Party chaos a sign of far-right party’s impending collapse?

The far-right Danish People’s Party is in crisis after five of its parliamentarians quit the party in two days and its former leader failed to rule out also quitting in protest at the new leader, Morten Messerschmidt.

Published: 22 February 2022 16:42 CET
Danish People's Party leader Morten Messerschmidt
Danish People's Party leader Morten Messerschmidt speaks to press on February 22nd 2022. The far right party is in crisis after several MPs quit in protest at Messerschmidt's leadership. Photo: Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix

A senior figure in the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti, DF) suggested the party could face collapse as five members of parliament left the anti-immigration party in two days.

The party was set to hold crisis talks on Tuesday after four of its members of parliament walked out on the party on Monday in protest at new leader Morten Messerschmidt, who was elected last month.

The four MPs, Liselott Blixt, Bent Bøgsted, Karina Adsbøl and Lise Bech all had spokesperson positions representing DF in parliament.

They said the reason for their departure was that they no longer have confidence in Messerschmidt as leader.

A fifth member, business spokesperson Hans Kristian Skibby, said on Tuesday morning he would also be leaving the party.

“My decision is necessary solely because it has become more and more challenging to work for DF at Christiansborg [parliament, ed.] in recent years, where internal failures, gossip, undermining work by others and most recently a significantly worsened leadership style make it impossible for me to continue in the party,” Skibby said in a comment to newspaper Berlingske.

In a Facebook post, Adsbøl wrote that “no one can force me to support a leader who is about to go to the city court accused of document falsification and fraud”, in reference to Messerschmidt’s pending retrial in a high-profile EU fraud case.

Earlier on Tuesday, the former deputy leader of the party Søren Espersen lashed out at the defectors and speculated that their exits could herald the end of DF as a political party.

Asked whether the party could collapse, Espersen told broadcaster DR’s Radioavisen programme “it could be that’s where we end up”.

“I’m shocked over what’s happened and I’m furious at the four of them,” he said in comments prior to Skibby’s exit.

“This is pure desertion and treachery which they are committing to our very large majority of delegates,” he said in reference to the majority support for Messerschmidt at last month’s party congress, where the new leader was elected by members.

Messerschmidt himself commented briefly on the situation on Monday evening.

“I have not heard from them all week before this so it naturally surprises me a little,” he said.

“I was elected at the congress to set a new course for the Danish People’s Party. If you have something against me as a person, that’s a challenge. That’s how it is at Christiansborg,” he said.

“But I’d have probably expected them to be loyal to the decision the party members have taken,” he said.

News got worse for the DF leader on Tuesday as his erstwhile leadership rival Martin Henriksen, who also quit the party earlier this month, applied to the interior ministry for approval of a new party name, newspaper Ekstra Bladet reported. That is a sign that Henriksen, an anti-Islam hardliner, could be set to start a rival party to DF.

Messerschmidt’s predecessor as leader, Kristian Thulesen Dahl, on Tuesday failed to guarantee that he himself would not follow his erstwhile colleagues out of the door, but said his “ambition” and “aim” was to continue in DF.

“My ambition is to stay in the Danish People’s Party, and I hope the best for the party,” Dahl said to news wire Ritzau.

Comments by the now ex-members have also linked Pia Kjærsgaard, the party’s leader from 1995 to 2012 and co-founder along with Dahl, to the “poor working environment” within the party that had contributed to the walkouts this week. Kjærsgaard is a vocal supporter of Messerschmidt.

Kjærsgaard, a former speaker of parliament, has lost her position as a deputy speaker as a result of the accusations made by the party leavers against her, Ritzau reported. The development weakens DF’s overall influence in parliament.

“That’s the way it goes. Pure technicality. I’m sure I, and the party, will get over it. There are more important things for DF right now,” Kjærsgaard told Ekstra Bladet.

DF flopped badly in local elections in November 2021, losing over half of its vote share from 2017 going from 8.75 percent to 4.08 percent. That represented the party’s third consecutive election failure after poor performances in the 2019 general election and EU elections.

The high water mark for the party was at the 2015 general election, when it took 21.1 percent of the vote and became the second largest party in parliament with 37 MPs. This week’s defections leave it with 11 lawmakers remaining.

READ ALSO: Far-right Danish People’s Party chooses new leader

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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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