“Clearly we just haven’t gone far right enough”

They are not moving from the left to the center, they did that long ago. Now they are in fact moving from the center to the right.

The current Danish (third of the) government is Social Democrat in name only.

They used to be actual Social Democrats back in the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s, but it’s now a liberal (as in center right to right wing) party with downright racist immigration policies.

Has been ever since Helle Thorning-Schmidt took over as leader of the party and it’s only gotten worse under Mette Frederiksen.

They don’t do it to win votes. They do it because it’s all they are.

Makes sense in a European many-party setting, because while you might gain votes from the centre-right you’ll lose some to the leftist party for the same reason.

Doesn’t apply to a two-party system where there is no leftist party to take votes, the leftists have to vote for the center-left or nobody, and the further away from the right wing party they are the more activated they get by negative partisanship so they will generally vote center-left regardless.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Adopting rightwing policies on issues such as immigration and the economy does not help centre-left parties win votes, according to new analysis of European electoral and polling data.

However, the analysis, published on Wednesday, shows that centre-left parties promising, for example, to be tough on immigration or public spending are unlikely to attract potential voters on the right, and risk alienating existing progressive supporters.

Analysis showed little real voter competition between the centre left and the radical right, as some social democratic politicians argue.

Björn Bremer of the Central European University in Vienna said a survey in Spain, Italy, the UK and Germany and larger datasets from 12 EU countries showed that since the financial crisis of 2008, “fiscal orthodoxy” had been a vote loser for the centre left.

Fiscal orthodoxy – cutting taxes, capping spending, limiting public debt – worked for social democratic parties such as Tony Blair’s New Labour and Gerhard Schröder’s SPD in Germany, but that was “a period of relative stability and growth”, he said.

Even in Denmark, where a Social Democrat-led government has introduced one of Europe’s toughest anti-immigration regimes, electoral data suggested that restricting immigrants’ rights is not popular with a significant number of the party’s voters.

The original article contains 821 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!