Mette Frederiksen, the prime minister of Denmark, had returned from Ukraine hours earlier and was munching on a baby carrot when I walked into her office on a recent Wednesday afternoon. {snip}

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In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has changed laws and marginalized critics to help him remain in office. In Austria, Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and elsewhere, the far right has grown. In Germany’s election on Sunday, the governing center-left party finished third, behind the center right and far right. In both Canada and Australia, polls suggest that center-left governments will lose elections this year. And in the United States, Joe Biden left office with dismal approval ratings, and Trump won the popular vote for the first time last year. In each of these cases, a major explanation is that working-class voters have drifted from their historical home on the political left and embraced some mix of populism, nationalism and conservatism. Over the past several years, there is arguably not a single high-income country where a center-left party has managed to enact progressive policies and win re-election — with the exception of Denmark.

Since the Social Democrats took power in 2019, they have compiled a record that resembles the wish list of a liberal American think tank. {snip}

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But there is one issue on which Frederiksen and her party take a very different approach from most of the global left: immigration. Nearly a decade ago, after a surge in migration caused by wars in Libya and Syria, she and her allies changed the Social Democrats’ position to be much more restrictive. They called for lower levels of immigration, more aggressive efforts to integrate immigrants and the rapid deportation of people who enter illegally. While in power, the party has enacted these policies. Denmark continues to admit immigrants, and its population grows more diverse every year. But the changes are happening more slowly than elsewhere. Today 12.6 percent of the population is foreign-born, up from 10.5 percent when Frederiksen took office. In Germany, just to Denmark’s south, the share is almost 20 percent. In Sweden, it is even higher.

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