Elham Asaad Buaras
Denmark’s far-right, populist The New Right Party is being dissolved. Announcing the dissolution on January 10, party founder Pernille Vermund said, “If we are to rebuild centre-right Denmark, we need to gather all the good forces — but in slightly fewer centre-right parties.”
Vermund pursued a libertarian economic agenda and stood for strict controls on migrants in Denmark, which already has some of the most stringent immigration laws in Western Europe.
Her party also demanded Denmark’s withdrawal from the EU, or “Dexit.”
Vermund, a trained architect, had previously called for a ban on headscarves in schools and public institutions. In the 2022 parliamentary elections, The New Right got 3.7 per cent of the vote and nabbed six seats.
But within a week of the election, Mette Thiesen left the group, followed by two other MPs, while another MP got cancer, leaving the party with two sitting parliamentarians.
“I didn’t see that coming!” Morten Messerschmidt, chair of Denmark’s more established right-wing Danish People’s Party, said after the announcement.
The New Right has been a fierce competitor to the Danish People’s Party, and it has “previously given us grey hairs,” Messerschmidt admitted. “But it also means that the Danish People’s Party will have an even more important role in Danish politics.”
New Right has only two members in the Danish parliament: Vermund herself and MP Kim Edberg. The party gained six MPs in the election in November last year, but a real meltdown shortly after the election resulted in the parliamentary group being reduced to three, which might have played a role in the decision to disband the party.
“When we founded the New Right Party eight years ago, there were four centre-right parties. Today there are seven,” Vermund wrote, adding that with two active seats, her group risks not only breaking itself up but also being the one to block a centre-right majority and thus a centre-right prime minister. It is not clear whether Vermund will now join another party.
