On the day after the EU agreement, the more critical analyses appeared. Denmark’s annual contribution to the EU for the relief package and the budget in the coming 7-year period will rise from DKK 19.7 billion ($3 billion) to DKK 24.2 billion ($3.7 billion). PM Mette Frederiksen said it was necessary because of the coronavirus crisis and Brexit. Was the deal worthwhile for Denmark? And for the EU?

Macron, Merkel and others approve the deal. Photo: John Thys/Pool © Scanpix.

Strategy of “miserliness”
Columnist Lars Trier Mogensen emphasizes Frederiksen’s role in the Frugal Four as negotiating for the least possible expense for Denmark (DK). That is, of avoiding joint debt and then minimizing the amount when it couldn’t be avoided. The position goes against social democratic values of generosity and solidarity with less fortunate partners that Frederiksen’s party advocates on the domestic front. It resembles the position of the preceding right-wing government that the Danish Social Democrats criticized, as well as Germany’s earlier insistence on austerity for Greece after the financial crisis. 

But domestic politics trumps international collaboration. That is the perpetual problem and paradox of the EU. The state leaders’ own constituencies reward them not for giving priority to the common good but for being selfish and cheap. The coronavirus crisis has strengthened EU skepticism as some countries experienced catastrophes in their healthcare systems and others closed borders to protect themselves from the spread of the pandemic. 

Frederiksen and her allies succeeded in reducing the amount of aid that the other countries wanted to give southern Europe, and she succeeded in portraying herself as standing up to demands from EU bureaucrats. She appealed to the EU skeptics in the Danish People’s Party, from which the Social Democrats have taken voters recently because of their stricter policies on immigration and refugees. It is a policy of isolationism and “Denmark first,” says Trier Mogensen, and the overall result is that the EU will be weaker because it will take longer for Italy and Spain to recover from the crisis. 

Capitulation to authoritarianism
Marlene Wind, Professor of Political Science and leader of the Center for European Politics at the University of Copenhagen, places a different emphasis on the compromise. She sees the EU’s leaders’ relinquishment of the requirements for democratic principles and institutions in Hungary and Poland as a betrayal of the Union’s founding principles (DK). The two countries threatened to veto the recovery package if their autocratic tendencies were subject to immediate sanctions and succeeded in obtaining a more complicated review process. Hungary’s emergency law, for example, allows PM Viktor Orban to circumvent parliament and issue decrees, and it has not been discontinued in June as planned. . 

The agreement could thus be celebrated by both those who favored a strengthened union and those who were critical of it. The lesson for Wind, as for Trier Mogensen, is that money is more important than principles. The deal means that the EU will no longer be able to criticize other countries for undemocratic practices and violations of human rights. 

“What is it actually that we agree on, if not democracy?” asks Wind. “Putin and Erdogan and the Chinese will laugh about our autocrats when we criticize them: ’You can’t tell us that judges can’t be jailed and the press can’t be censored when you can’t control your own members.’”