Danish People's Party - The Popularity of DPP

The Popularity of DPP

Since its founding, the party gained electoral support in the first three elections. While opposition to mass immigration and Islamification is central to the aims of the party, other issues are thought to have added to the popularity of the party:

• Ideological Novelty: The DPP combines support of the welfare state, and particularly benefits for pensioners, with strongly conservative policies on immigration and law and order. As such it is distinctive from the mainstream parties and offers policies which appeal across the traditional right-left dividing line. Polls have shown that a great deal of the party's voters are former Social Democrats, concerned with the decline of the welfare state. An analysis by the trade union SiD after the 2001 election stated that among unskilled workers aged under 40, 30% voted for DPP and only 25% for the Social Democrats.
• Decreased importance of "economic cleavage": Several authors believe that the political "cleavages" of European societies have changed over recent decades. (Hout et al. 1996, 55–56). Contemporary Western European democracies are characterized by two major cleavage dimensions: the economic cleavage dimension, which pits workers against the capital, and which concerns the degree of state involvement in the economy, and the socio-cultural cleavage dimension, which is about issues such as immigration, law and order, abortion, and so on. (Rydgren ) Rydgren believes that DF has become increasingly popular as the economic cleavage's importance has dropped, alienating many working class voters from their traditional parties such as the Social Democrats.
• Euroscepticism: In Denmark, only two parties have been against all new EU treaties throughout their existence. Those parties are DPP and the left-wing Enhedslisten. Whereas most politicians favour a more dominant EU, public opinion is broadly skeptical and in favour of the nation state keeping its powers. Referendums brought the rejection of the Maastricht treaty and the Euro. The DPP has managed to harness this scepticism more effectively than the left-wingers.
• Outspokenness (populism): Some analysts believe that Pia Kjærsgaard, a former home care assistant for elders, appeals well to the 'common man' because she is different from the traditional political class of economists and academics. In combination with her critical stance towards non-Western immigration and Islam, this has given her strong support among workers and lower middle class voters. Danish political commentators generally acknowledge that Pia Kjærsgaard and her party maintain clear and direct stances on the most central political issues of the party, and have been able to set the agenda more than the size of the party would make one expect.

An interesting feature, compared to other Danish parties, is that the Danish People's Party is usually underrepresented by about 1-1.5 % in opinion polls. Election researchers have suggested that the party's voters may be less interested in politics, and therefore declining to talk to pollsters, or that voters are reluctant to reveal non-politically-correct opinions to pollsters.