This summer saw Denmark approve, after protracted negotiations, a reform to its Pay Limit Scheme, a criteria system used to grant work permits to non-EU nationals.

The agreement means that Danish companies can now hire skilled foreign staff on contracts paying an annual salary of 375,000 kroner, and that the foreign employees can be granted work and residence permits on that basis. The new pay limit is a 16 percent decrease from the previous 448,000 kroner.

The Pay Limit Scheme is one of a number of business schemes used to grant work permits for non-EU and EEA nationals who are unable to move to Denmark under the EU’s right to free movement.

READ ALSO: How can you get a work permit in Denmark if you are not an EU national? 

While business organisations welcomed the deal at the time (and trade unions criticised it for potentially impacting Danish wages), they later said it did not go far enough to alleviate the country’s labour shortage.

“In the wider perspective, too little has been done for years. During the last two government administrations no honest reform was implemented which would have increased the labour supply. That won’t do [if it continues] in a third successive government,” political director Emil Fannikke Kiær of the Confederation of Danish Industry (Dansk Industri, DI) said last month.

Some parties – particularly pro-business ones on the right wing – have expressed a will to find solutions to the labour shortage by increasing access to skilled foreign labour.

But the issue must be disconnected from immigration before voters accept a change to work permit rules, according to Professor in Political Science Kasper Møller Hansen of the University of Copenhagen.

“This is related to the consensus of a strict immigration policy,” Hansen told The Local at an election briefing.

The governing Social Democrats have pursued strict immigration rules, a policy that is also firmly established amongst opposition conservative parties.

“Even though Liberal Alliance, and sometimes the Conservatives talk about us needing labour, I don’t think they would touch [work permits] because of the connection with the immigration discussion,” he said.

“Immigration, historically, has played this huge role in politics. Somehow, they have to lift this discussion out of politics and make it more of a ‘green card’ discussion,” he said.

“I think you need to lift it out and say ‘this is not really a discussion about immigrants and refugees, it’s about labour shortages and having qualified labour’.

“All the companies are screaming for employment at the moment. I think you have to manage to disconnect it and that doesn’t seem to happen at the moment, and it’s definitely not happening in the (election) campaign,” he said.

Another area in which foreign residents in Denmark might hope an election will bring a fresh political approach is citizenship.

However, the likelihood of changes to Denmark’s citizenship rules – which are among the strictest in Europe – is marginal for similar reasons, Hansen said.

The proportion of Denmark’s adult population which cannot vote in parliamentary elections has grown from 2 percent in the 1980s to 10 percent now. Experts have cited strict citizenship rules as the primary reason for this because foreign nationals who live in Denmark long-term are increasingly unable to meet citizenship criteria.

READ ALSO:

• Danish citizenship rules ‘partly to blame’ with one in seven in Copenhagen unable to vote
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Left wing party Independent Greens said in November last year that it wants to allow persons who have legally resided in Denmark for at least four years to be allowed to vote in elections.

A similar stance was pronounced by the Alternative party in 2018.

Both of these parties are at the fringes of parliamentary influence, however.

A poll this week gave the Independent Greens a 0.6 percent share of the vote, which would not see it over the threshold of 2 percent needed to be allocated parliamentary representation. Alternative is at 2.0 percent, its strongest poll showing since early 2020.

“At the moment Denmark is probably the strictest place to get citizenship in the world, more or less, and it doesn’t seem to be changing” Hansen said.

“Some parties [on the left wing, ed.] might want to open up [for reform] but the (governing) Social Democrats definitely would not,” he said.

If the government eased its position on citizenship, it would be attacked by opposition parties, he said.

READ ALSO: Who are Denmark’s 13 political parties and what election pledges have they made?