"public scolding of the right-wing leader" (Denmark) re. attempts to close border

[pampango]

Former immigration minister breaks silence – and ranks – on influence of the Danish People’s Party

Former immigration minister and Liberal MP Birthe Rønn Hornbech has called Pia Kjærsgaard, the Danish People’s Party leader – and the figure behind the government’s border control agreement – “un-Danish”.

Hornbech's open letter to Kjærsgaard, published in Berlingske newspaper on Saturday, was a public scolding of the right-wing leader for her conduct both nationally and internationally in the mounting controversy over the border control agreement. The letter was also a tacit rebuke of Hornbech’s own party leadership and PM Lars Løkke Rasmussen for handing Kjærsgaard the border control agreement and letting her set the tone of the debate.

The ‘permanent border control’ agreement was the government’s ‘payment’ to the DF for its support of the government’s 2020 budget reform plan, and especially early retirement reforms. But while the government has lately tried to downplay the agreement as a simple matter of a few more customs agents, Kjærsgaard and other DF politicians have heralded the agreement as a return to closed, pre-Schengen Agreement-style borders.

When members of the European Commission questioned the agreement’s legality and German politicians called it anti-EU and warned that Denmark was “playing with nationalism’s fire”, Kjærsgaard wrote that Germans had no right to brand others as nationalists, based on their history with Nazism.

Other Liberal politicians championed Hornbech for reprimanding the DF leader. Their support emphasised a potentially serious split in the Liberal-Conservative government over the increasingly powerful role the support party has played in government policy over the past ten years. “We had a dream of a shared Europe. Pia Kjærsgaard has really chipped away at that. It is so embarrassing,” Britta Schall Holberg, a Liberal MP and former interior minister told Berlingske. “Birthe has beat me to the punch.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_People's_Party

The Danish People's Party (Danish: Dansk Folkeparti, DF) is a political party in Denmark which is frequently described as right-wing populist by political scientists and commentators.

The party holds that Denmark is not naturally a country of immigration, and that it has never been so. The party also does not accept a multi-ethnic transformation of Denmark, and rejects multiculturalism.