Liberal Alliance will not vote for any citizenship bills until the application process is changed to include individual screening of applicants, its leader Alex Vanopslagh said in a media interview at the weekend.
Vanopslagh told Politiken that every individual applicant for citizenship must be tested for “antidemocratic behaviour.”
“In my view, one of the most important requirements, and one of the most important issues to address, is making a greater effort to assess whether someone genuinely has a democratic mindset,” he said.
Under the current model, applicants must fulfil a range of stringent objective criteria before being included on a parliamentary bill, which is usually tabled twice a year.
The criteria include checks on previous criminal activity – with any past offences likely to result in a refusal – as well as other factors including employment history, financial self-sufficiency and Danish language proficiency.
Applications which meet the criteria must be voted for in parliament, which requires the government to table a bill.
EXPLAINED: Denmark’s unusual procedure for granting citizenship
The passage of the bill through parliament, thereby granting the citizenships to the applicants, depends on a majority of lawmakers voting for the bill.
This was a formality in past years, but right wing parties, including Liberal Alliance have now begun withdrawing their support for citizenship bills for various reasons.
The Danish government is already considering introducing individual screening, with an expert committee report on its viability due to be completed next summer.
Screening would have the purpose of identifying “anti-democratic statements and views”, the government said in September, without further defining these.
Liberal Alliance was the first party to specifically call for individual screening to be a fixed part of the application process for citizenship.
The party also decided against voting for a citizenship bill for this reason in December 2024, but has now made voting against it a fixed policy.
In addition to Liberal Alliance, the national conservative Denmark Democrats abstained in December last year, while the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party consistently votes against the naturalisation bills.
The Conservative party declined to vote for a bill approving 2,064 citizenship applications in April 2024, despite having helped pass the country’s existing citizenship rules.
The Conservatives, who have claimed concerns relating to criminality among people granted citizenship, also abstained last December.
No naturalisation bill is being voted on this December because parliament decided earlier this year to remove the regular vote from its schedule, citing the need to spend time on other work related to Denmark’s ongoing EU presidency period, which expires at the end of 2025.
The processing time for citizenship applications is currently at least two years, a wait which prospective citizens can expect to increase if the resource-heavy additional step of screening is added.
The application fee was raised from 4,000 kroner to 6,000 kroner earlier this year.
Decisions by individual parties not to vote for current naturalisation bills do not affect persons whose applications are included in the bills provided they are still approved by a majority of MPs. The recent bills have been approved thanks to support from lawmakers in the coalition government and leftwing parties.
However, the now-established practice of right-wing parties abstaining or voting against the bills as political leverage adds to uncertainty around the future path to citizenship in Denmark.
The proportion of foreign nationals who are granted Danish citizenship and later receive an unconditional prison sentence is very small.
In June, Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard told parliament’s Naturalisation Committee (Indfødsretsudvalg) that 17 of the 27,028 people who became Danish citizens as a “main applicant” between 2017 and 2024 had received an unconditional prison sentence.
That amounts to 0.06 percent.
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