Danish citizenship applications have been put on pause for more than a month, ever since the outgoing prime minister Mette Frederiksen called a snap election. So when could they be restarted?
What’s happened?
Denmark suspended processing of almost all applications for citizenship via naturalization on March 6th, with the country’s immigration ministry announcing that it needed to wait for clarity on rules until after the election.
With waiting times for citizenship already as long as two years, this is an unwelcome delay for many applicants who are already in Denmark’s citizenship queue.
That election on March 24th has been and gone. Are we any closer to seeing applications resumed?
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What exactly did the immigration ministry say?
Denmark’s Ministry of Immigration and Integration said in a statement that the “processing of cases will be resumed when there is clarity over which conditions will apply” for citizenship.
The ministry did not further define what it would consider to be the necessary “clarity” needed to resume processing citizenship.
When The Local contacted the ministry, a press officer confirmed that there is “nothing new”.
“We need the new parliament and a new government to take office before anything can happen,” he said.
A new government has not yet taken office with negotiations still ongoing.
How long could it be before we know what will happen?
When public broadcaster DR asked outgoing Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, of the Social Democrats on April 7th if negotiations would be completed in more or less than six weeks, she refused to answer. Frederiksen has said that a new government is “not around the corner”, and both she and Lars Løkke Rasmussen, leader of the Moderates, have expressed their doubts about whether an agreement can be reached at all.
Rasmussen said on April 15th that he didn’t expect the country to have a new government for at least a month.
It’s difficult to say exactly how long it will take, but it’s safe to assume that it will take at least a few more weeks for an agreement to be reached.
In comparable (but technically slightly simpler) circumstances in 2022, it took around six weeks to form a government after the election, so if it takes that long this time around we’re looking at the middle of May, at the earliest, which roughly fits Rasmussen’s prediction.
That’s only the timeline for a new government to take office ‒ it could take weeks or months from that date for the new government to agree on whether to keep or change the rules on citizenship.
What’s the situation so far?
Negotiations are currently being led by Mette Frederiksen, but neither her nor Løkke, whose support Frederiksen will need to secure a majority, are particularly optimistic about the chance of success.
Frederiksen is aiming for a centre-left government supported by the Moderates, while the Moderates want a government similar to the outgoing one, which saw the left-wing Social Democrats rule alongside the Moderates and the right-wing Liberals.
Could citizenship rules change under a new government?
A number of parties (primarily on the right) called for more restrictive citizenship rules during the election campaign, while the outgoing government initiated an expert panel in February to examine the possibility of introducing individual ‘screening’ of applicants. The panel’s report is due later this year and is likely to include recommendations, although the government is not usually obliged to follow the recommendations of expert committees of this type.
It is also possible that the rules will be retained in their current form, or that any future changes will not be applied retroactively.
Hypothetically, a new government could also choose to move forward with an entirely different approach to changing citizenship rules.
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What is likely to happen?
It currently looks like the most likely outcome of negotiations is a centre-left government led by the Social Democrats, but that is by no means certain.
Other potential options include a government spanning the center (which so far appears unlikely as the right-wing Liberals seem to be uninterested in governing with the Social Democrats and Moderates again, and the Conservatives have refused to negotiate without a right-wing party leader leading negotiations), and a right-wing government, which theoretically is possible, but in practice looks even less likely than a center government, as the Moderates have refused to work alongside the far-right Danish People’s Party.
Frederiksen told public broadcaster DR on April 7th that the Social Democrats’ one non-negotiable is migration policy.
“There are few things we have refused to negotiate on,” she said. “But we believe that migration policy should be strict. We need to know how many people are coming to this country.”
In the run up to the election the Social Democrats presented 18 proposals for stricter migration policy in a document titled We don’t want those who don’t want Denmark.
The tenth proposal in this document was about new citizens, reading that “new citizens must share democratic values”, referencing the expert panel initiated by the outgoing government earlier this year.
“We have initiated an expert group which will look into the legal, ethical and technical framework for a possible screening process,” the document reads. “So the formal requirements for achieving Danish citizenship will be supplemented with a more foundational evaluation of whether or not the applicant shares our democratic values.”
Her statement to DR indicates that she is planning on ensuring that the policies in the Social Democrats’ pre-election document make it into a future government negotiation.
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Are any applications still being processed?
A small number of narrow exceptions apply to the wide-ranging suspension.
These include applications from stateless persons born outside of marriage to a foreign mother and Danish father after October 11th, 1993, because international conventions require these applications to be processed.
Applications which do not require naturalization (approval from the Danish parliament) will also still be processed. Naturalization is the normal method via which most foreign nationals in Denmark apply to be granted citizenship.
It is not used in certain types of administrative cases, for example people born abroad to Danish parents, or with Nordic or former Danish citizens who have the right to automatically claim Danish citizenship.
The announcement is likely to significantly increase the waiting time for persons who have applied for Danish citizenship via naturalisation, a process that was also disrupted in 2025 after parliament canceled one of its two annual naturalization bills.
