For more than two decades, the Danish People’s Party ran on an unapologetically anti-immigration, populist platform, pushing Danish politics to the right by rejecting multiculturalism and opposing the transfer of sovereignty to Brussels.
Today, the DPP faces its own challenge from the right.
Nye Borgerlige, or “The New Right,” led by 41-year-old Pernille Vermund, pursues a libertarian economic agenda and wants even stricter controls on migrants in a country that already has some of the most stringent immigration laws in Western Europe.
Vermund, a trained architect, has called for a ban on headscarves in schools and public institutions. Her party wants asylum to be given only to refugees coming directly from the U.N. refugee agency’s resettlement scheme and those with “a job in hand,” and supports limiting Danish citizenship to people who “contribute positively” to society.
“Those who don’t have the ability to provide for themselves, we have to ask them to find another place to stay,” Vermund said.