Danish anti-Islam, anti-immigration, anti-tax party dissolves

Denmark’s far-right, populist The New Right party is being dissolved.

“If we are to rebuild center-right Denmark, we need to gather all the good forces — but in slightly fewer center-right parties,” party founder Pernille Vermund said Wednesday as she announced the dissolution.

Vermund pursued a libertarian economic agenda and stood for strict controls on migrants in Denmark, which already has some of the most stringent immigration laws in Western Europe. Her party also demanded Denmark’s withdrawal from the EU, or “Dexit.”

In the 2022 parliamentary elections, The New Right got 3.7 percent of the vote, and nabbed 6 seats. But within a week of the election, Mette Thiesen left the group followed by two other MPs, while another MP got cancer — leaving the party with two sitting parliamentarians.

“I didn’t see that coming!” Morten Messerschmidt, chairman of Denmark’s more established right-wing Danish People’s Party, said after the announcement.

The New Right had been a fierce competitor to the Danish People’s Party and it has “previously given us gray hairs,” Messerschmidt admitted. “But it also means that the Danish People’s Party will have an even more important role in Danish politics.”

It is not clear whether Vermund will now join another party.