Summer news roundup: Mermaid cage fight

The New York Times reports that the estate of Edvard Eriksen, the sculptor who created the famous Little Mermaid that sits on her haunches in Langelinie Harbor – one of Copenhagen's biggest tourist draws – is suing the village of Asaa in northern Jutland for displaying another version of the Hans Christian Andersen figure. The heirs of the original sculptor not only demand compensation but insist that the “copy” be destroyed.

The original scuplture was a gift to the city of Copenhagen in 1913 from Carlsberg Brewery founder Carl Jacobsen. The sculptors' heirs have often sued artists over rights to the mermaid image, with some success, and the copyright expires in 2029. The Asaa Mermaid sculptor, Palle Mørk, denied deliberate appropriation. His mermaid is made of granite, whereas the Copenhagen version is made of bronze, and is chubbier. "I didn't think we destroyed art works in Denmark," said Mørk. "That's something the Taliban do." 

New Right chair promoting public-sector layoffs. Photo: Søren Bidstrup.

So sue me too!
Now Mermaid No. 3 is stealing attention. The libertarian Nye Borgerlige (New Right) party launched its biggest policy campaign, featuring cuts in taxes and social services (DK). It succeeded in positioning itself as not only the most anti-tax and most anti-immigration party but also the one with the hottest party leader, Pernille Vermund, shown above. She's "ready with a drastic plan," says the ad, "Will make big changes to Denmark." The main beneficiary of the campaign may be the Danish People’s Party, which had been losing voters to the New Right but now stands to reclaim some who didn't realize how much the party wants to reduce social welfare.

Combatting EU bureaucracy

The Danish People’s Party can use a boost because Morten Messerschmidt, its vice chair and “crown prince,” has been given a conditional six-month prison sentence for swindling EU funds (DK). The money had been intended for a conference in Skagen, Denmark, in 2015 on European issues involving MELD, an international (Euroskeptical) conservative confederation, but the conference apparently consisted only of the party’s usual summer meetings. The charges also included falsifying EU documents. Messerschmidt is known as a sharp debater, but his party colleagues' testimony at the extraordinary trial gave no support for his position. He will appeal the sentence.

Nursing a grudge

The government pronounced sentence on the two-month nurses’ strike (DK). With no progress in negotiations, it intervened and ordered the nurses back to work, causing some to doubt the continuing efficacy of the "Danish model" of labor relations. The hospitals were accumulating about two years of backlogs in elective surgery, and the nurses had exhausted their strike funds. The union never gained much public support for an additional wage increase. Perhaps they thought they would be rewarded for their heroic efforts during the pandemic, but people apparently had their enough of their own pandemic problems to worry about.

What’s in a name: Parsing racial slurs in Denmark

Last week I wrote about the relative paucity of controversy about social justice and political correctness in Denmark. But there are often minor incidents that indicate the status of the culture wars in the country. Most often they concern race and immigration A couple of recent incidents involved a fairly new political party, the Nye Borgerlige (The New Right), which was founded in 2015. 

On December 17, Denmarks Radio, the state television network, broadcast a short documentary about the party’s campaign to gain a foothold in Parliament in the June 2019 election (Vermund and the battle for the right wing (DK)). It focused almost exclusively on Pernille Vermund, the party’s co-founder. Vermund is a former member of the Conservative Party who sought to create a niche that combined aspects of the xenophobic but welfare-state-friendly Danish People’s Party and the economically libertarian Liberal Alliance Party. The party’s platform had three key conditions for supporting the current center-right government: a moratorium on accepting refugees, the deportation of foreigners convicted of crimes, and a requirement that foreigners support themselves. Its main stated objective was to preserve Danish culture and values.

Competing for anti-immigration voters
It appeared from polls that the party was taking voters from Denmark’s People’s Party. But during the campaign, a newer, more virulent anti-immigrant party obtained enough signatures to get on the election ballot. This was Stram Kurs (Hard Line), led by Rasmus Paludan, who advocated deporting all Muslims and whose public appearances drew counterdemonstrations from Antifa that turned violent. The New Right thus now had a rival faction to the right that was also drawing voters from Denmark’s People’s Party. Paludan was considered a crude interloper, while Vermund was a presentable sophisticate from the wealthy northern suburbs. In the election, the New Right received 2.5 percent of the votes and gained the minimum number of parliamentary seats, and the Hard Line fell just short of the 2.0 percent threshold. Overall, the left-wing parties won a secure 91-75 majority, with the Danish People’s Party suffering the greatest losses.

Wedding-day jitters
Six months later, the documentary included a kind of open-mic moment that had nothing to do with the campaign. The governing administration had announced the election in May, one week before Vermund’s planned wedding (she married entrepreneur, investor and author Lars Tvede). On the morning of the wedding, Vermund was hanging campaign posters on lampposts with her staff. It was warm, and she was wearing shorts. She wasn’t being interviewed, and they weren’t discussing the election. The camera watched them from across the road. When a limousine passed, Vermund remarked that it was a perker, a derogatory term for people of Middle Eastern or Arabic background with a connotation similar to the notorious American N-word but not quite as charged. She immediately covered her mouth with her hand, and someone standing by her quickly added “En udlænding” (a foreigner), a more politically palatable description. (Only “more” PC because the people in question may well have been Danish citizens whose parents or grandparents were immigrants.)

This little remark prompted accusations of racism and calls for Vermund to apologize by representatives of other parties. In an interview with the tabloid BT (DK), Vermund refused to apologize. She maintained that she was informal and outspoken, that this had been a private situation with familiars, that the word referred to a particular subculture, that it shouldn’t be considered offensive if it is not used maliciously, and that she wouldn’t use it in Parliament. Vermund, who happens to be an attractive blonde in her early forties, has at times behaved impulsively, once saying that she found women attractive and French-kissing a (male) comedian on a talk show. She said that it’s good to provoke the liberal intellectual elite (DK) who think they are more open-minded than others.

Forgiving jihadism?
The word perker is indeed considered by most to be a vulgarity in any context, certainly any involving a politician. It suggests condescension at best and possibly an instinctive aversion to ethnic minorities or a lack of compassion. It tarnished the veneer of slick confidence of Vermund and her neoliberal supporters and lessened their distance from Paludan’s motley Hard Line. One might ask why the camera was turned on at that moment when nothing significant was happening and whether Vermund and her staff knew it was on, although that doesn’t change the fact that the word slipped out and was captured.

This slip-up aired just a week after another incident involving the New Right that reached its conclusion. MP Mette Thiesen was convicted of libeling a fitness instructor (DK), Mahmoud Loubani, by calling him a “terrorist sympathizer” in a Facebook post. The background is a little murky. Earlier Thiesen had written a post about a threat made against her. Loubani, who had appeared on a television program, wrote a comment on it wondering whether Thiesen had made up the threat herself, with laughing emojis. Thiesen read through Loubani’s posts and found that he had once written “Allah yerhamo” (May God forgive you) apparently about Omar El-Hussein, the young radicalized Muslim who murdered two people in 2015, a film director outside a panel discussion with a cartoonist and a volunteer security guard at a synagogue. 

Thiesen maintained that she had deliberately refrained from calling Loubani a “terrorism sympathizer,” but the judge found that her epithet must ordinarily be understood to mean that Loubani endorsed the terrorist action. She had to pay a small amount to Loubani for damages and legal fees (under $5,000 in total), but she was acquitted of criminal charges because Loubani had not filed them within six months of the incident.

Small parties come and go
Is the lesson here that the New Right’s leaders need better PR discipline? Neither incident is more unusual than behavior that emerges periodically from the Danish People’s Party, and they apparently have little consequence. Telltale indiscretions followed by obligatory indignation and then exculpatory rationalizations – fairly tame business as usual that can’t compare to saying that Mexicans are rapists and Congresspersons are treasonous human scum.

It’s not clear yet whether there is indeed a place for nationalist libertarians on the crowded political landscape. Recent attempts by the right-wing coalition to blend these elements did not succeed, and the New Right is now polling below the parliamentary threshold. It is not sitting idle in its legislative seats, however. Most recently it initiated a farfetched campaign (DK) against the new center-left administration’s removal of restrictions on social benefits for immigrant families. It proposed holding a referendum on the issue and got support only from the Denmark’s People’s Party.