The decline of the Danish Peoples' Party

During several years the Danish Peoples' Party (DPP) has been on the rise in Danish politics. At the last elections for government that party actually came out as the third largest party in the country, and therefore it gained considerable influence. Since the election, the DPP has been directly supporting the present government securing it its parliamentary majority, although it is not actually a part of government itself.

And although the name sounds as if it was a decent and main stream party, it is actually a hard core right wing and to a great extent racist party. Several of its leading members have been sentenced for violating the law against racial discrimination, which also includes religious discrimination. The party has been very clever in playing the strings of fear in the population, pitching Muslims as being the enemy of civil society at large. Building on a note of stereo typifying and generalizing, the party has managed to whip up frenzy against Muslims and Islam, a tendency which has been on the rise in several European countries for more than a decade, to a great extent orchestrated by the DPP.

Muslims and non-Muslims have fought side by side in a year-long fight against this unlucky tide, and recently it has started bearing tangible fruit. And at the same time the DPP has had considerable internal problems, in total bringing the so far successful party to a decline.

The downfall started during the summer of 2006, when a newspaper started calling the local chairmen of that party, feigning to be a neo-nazi and asking to become a member of the party. Out of 11 local chairmen called, only one directly refused to enrol a neo-nazi into the party. When the story broke out, all the local chairmen in question were immediately kicked out, and thus the party attempted to indicate that it totally distances itself from racial extremism. Obviously it is a hard blow to a political party sacking ten local chairmen in a public scandal.

During the autumn a number of further circumstances helped in bringing the party to its knees. Initially a number of its remaining local chairmen started raising questions about the leadership of the party, and immediately the leadership took action and sacked another 11 local chairmen. As a reaction to this even more local chairmen by themselves left the party, some of them openly calling the party deeply racist.

At the beginning of October, the party had its anniversary, at which occasion not less than 66 people, myself being one of them, signed on a joint petition to file 11 charges against leading members of the party, including its chairperson, Pia Kjaersgaard, and it is strongly expected that if not all, then at least some of the charges will result in actual court cases and eventually sentences.

Only about a week later, it was revealed that a young left-wing activist had infiltrated the youth wing of the DPP and spent 18 month under cover in order to reveal the racist undercurrent in the party. During a national rally in the youth wing, he filmed a situation, where the youngsters competed in drawing mocking pictures of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and the video recordings of this event was displayed on the internet and described in a Danish newspaper, only in order to reveal the shocking tendencies in this party, receiving public funding. Thus the intention of bringing the drawings to the attention of the public was not to further defile the name of the Prophet, rather it was to blow the whistle on the racist tendency within that party.

It is obvious to any political observer in Denmark that the interest of the DPP was to shift the focus, so their internal problems would be forgotten, hoping that the incident could stir up a major crisis, as we saw it in February this year with the drawings done by a Danish newspaper. If such a crisis had actually come to be, the DPP would have used the opportunity to "prove" that Muslims are a grave threat to the "free world". Thanks God it did not happen, even though the party did its best, even bringing another defiling picture, once the crisis was building up. This time not by the youth wing but by the actual political party itself.

So all in all they did their best to bring Denmark into the eye of the storm for yet another scandal with the Muslim world at the other side of the table.

No major crisis happened, no scary scenes to show in the news, and the whole event backfired dramatically at the DPP. Suddenly the party stood out more or less as enemies of the nation, having pushed Denmark to the brink of another international crisis, which by the endless grace of Allah did not happen. The debate in Denmark was hard and square on, and I myself had the good opportunity to participate in it at many levels from newspapers over radio to TV. All in all it became increasingly more evident that the DPP had committed a major blunder, and that has had its price.

According to polls conducted during the past few days the DPP would lose up to 6 mandates in parliament, and could be isolated and left without any influence on real-life politics. The tide has turned, and we are most likely watching the DPP dropping from being a major influence in Danish politics to becoming an isolated minority of more or less racist populists.

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