With less than a week to go before 4m Danish voters go to the polls to vote for a new government, immigration policy has emerged as the dominant theme in an uncharacteristically bitter election campaign.
Opinion polls ahead of Tuesday's vote are forecasting that Pia Kjaersgaard's Danish People's party, a hardline anti-immigration party, may double its support to around 13 per cent. That would make the People's party the country's third largest political group, after the Social Democrats of Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, prime minister, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen's centre right Liberal party.
Despite the fact that Denmark has a robust economy and a relatively low non-native population, a recent Gallup opinion poll said that 55 per cent of Danish voters are convinced that the most urgent problem their country faces is immigration.
The focus on the issue comes despite the strength of the economy. Denmark's gross domestic product expanded by an unexpectedly robust 1.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2001. Unemployment, at 5 per cent, is the lowest in 25 years, and some sectors, notably healthcare, are suffering from serious labour shortages.
With 7.4 per cent of the resident population comprising foreign citizens, naturalised immigrants and their descendents, Denmark has a lower per capita immigrant population than neighbouring countries such as Germany and Sweden. Both countries also have more asylum applications than Denmark. But neither has witnessed anything like the antipathy towards immigrants that has emerged in Denmark.
Tensions over immigration have increased since the September 11 attacks in the US. Mogens Camre, a European parliament member of the Peoples' party, recently stated that "all Western countries have been infiltrated by Muslims, some of whom are polite to us while waiting until there's enough of them to get rid of us".
Although extremely vitriolic outbursts such as this are largely confined to politicians on the far right, there is growing unease that a broad anti-immigration sentiment has spread to the two mainstream political parties.
Birthe Ronn Hornbech, justice and aliens spokeswoman for the Mr Fogh Rasmussen's Liberal party, which is expected to form the next government, said last week that Danes' statutory right to bring a foreign spouse into the country should be abolished.
She argued that the current law, which allows foreign born naturalised citizens to marry overseas nationals, should be replaced by a system in which civil servants would pass judgment on a case-by-case basis.
While she said the changes would apply to all Danish citizens and not just naturalised foreigners, Mrs Ronn Hornbech referred in particular to Turks, Pakistanis and Somalis as groups that continued to arrange foreign marriages into the second and third generation.
Americans marrying Danes would still receive residence permits, she said: "They (Americans) do not bring in new family members for three generations, they don't move their homeland to Denmark."
Mr Fogh Rasmussen himself later moved to distance himself from his colleague's remarks.
The Social Democrats have also been stressing the need to control immigration, without offering specific policy ideas. Karen Jespersen, the interior minister, has warned that current immigration levels will lead to an unacceptably high second generation immigrant population in the future.
Mimi Jakobsen, leader of the small Centre Democratic party, has accused the Liberals of espousing views similar to those of the Austrian People's party of Jorg Haider, while accusing the Social Democrats' Karen Jespersen of beliefs that were indistinguishable from those of Mrs Ronn Hornbech.
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