Denmark’s Prime Minister Echoes Trump’s Anti-Migration Rhetoric—Is She the New Face of European Conservatism?

Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is turning heads across Europe — and not for the reasons you’d expect from a center-left leader. In a bold move that’s raising eyebrows both inside and outside the EU, she’s echoed the kind of rhetoric more commonly associated with Donald Trump and US Vice President JD Vance, calling mass migration a “threat to daily life.”

“I consider this mass migration into Europe as a threat to the daily life in Europe,” Frederiksen said, striking a chord with what Vance recently stated at the Munich Security Conference. “No matter if you look at statistics on crimes or if you look at problems on the labor market, insecurity in local communities, it is the most vulnerable who experience the consequences.”

Her stance sounds eerily familiar — almost word-for-word in line with what Trump and Vance have pushed in the US: that migrants are taking jobs and fuelling crime. But this isn’t coming from a right-wing firebrand — it’s the leader of a wealthy Scandinavian welfare state and one of the few remaining socialist heads of government in the EU, reported the Express.

Vance, speaking in February, went even further by telling EU leaders that immigration posed a bigger danger than Russia. “No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants,” he said, pointing to Brexit and other anti-migration political movements sweeping Europe.

Denmark’s government, under Frederiksen’s leadership, has been rolling out some of the continent’s strictest immigration policies. Branded as a “zero asylum” approach, her measures include seizing migrants’ valuables to pay for accommodation, fast-tracking deportations of settled Syrians, and launching negative ad campaigns in migrant-source countries to put people off coming in the first place.

One of the most headline-grabbing policies is the so-called “No Ghetto” law, which aims to limit the number of foreign-born residents in certain Danish neighborhoods. And since a 2021 law allowing refugees to be relocated to processing centers in non-EU countries, asylum approvals in Denmark have plunged — with only 864 approved in 2024 so far.

Despite the tough line, Frederiksen’s Social Democrats actually soared in the 2022 Danish General Election, securing their best result in two decades with 28% of the vote. It seems her hardline stance hasn’t hurt her popularity at home — but it’s certainly rattling political allies abroad.