It’s now three months since the processing of Danish citizenship applications was put on hold after Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called a snap election. With a new migration minister taking office on Wednesday, how soon can 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?
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. Parliament has now officially opened after the election, but negotiations are still ongoing as far as the government is concerned.
How long could it be before we know what will happen?
Denmark’s government negotiations are now record-breaking, with more than six weeks passing since the election on March 24th.
Outgoing Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has lost her chief negotiator position with Lars Løkke Rasmussen, of the Moderates, withdrawing his support on May 8th to back Liberal leader Troels Lund Poulsen as chief negotiator instead.
Poulsen has been given a two-week deadline to find a new government, which will expire on May 25th.
This currently looks unlikely.
Neither the red nor the blue bloc has a majority alone after Denmark’s election, meaning both will need the support of the Moderates. So far, negotiations have primarily been between the Moderates and the left-wing parties to form a centre-left government.
Now, Poulsen will attempt to form a government on the right. The right-wing parties in theory can form a majority with the support of the Moderates, but in practice four MPs have already defected from right-wing parties to become independents and Poulsen will need the support of at least three of the independents to reach 90 seats.
In addition to this, the Danish People’s Party and Moderates have refused to collaborate with each other, which means that any right-wing government will not be able to use the Danish People’s Party’s 16 seats, unless both parties break their former agreements not to work together.
Poulsen could still theoretically form a government spanning the centre, with the Moderates and Social Democrats, but Social Democrat leader Mette Frederiksen is unlikely to agree to this unless she is prime minister, and Poulsen is unlikely to agree to this unless he is.
Even if Poulsen does manage to form a government in the next two weeks, that doesn’t mean that citizenship applications will resume immediately. Even if a number of parties agree in principle to rule together, it could take a while to negotiate the final policies and allocate ministerial posts.
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.
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.
What is likely to happen?
There are two main outcomes which look possible. One is a centre-left government led by the Social Democrats, although that looks increasingly unlikely as Frederiksen has been forced to give up the chief negotiator position.
A right-wing government is theoretically possible, but looks unlikely given the situation with independents and the Moderates’ refusal to work with the far-right Danish People’s Party.
On top of that, the far-right Citizens’ Party has essentially collapsed since the election, with three of its four MPs defecting to become independents – the only MP left is the party’s leader, Lars Boje Mathiesen. This means that if the right-wing bloc wants to form a government it will need to negotiate with a number of independents.
That means that the only option left is a government spanning the center ‒ perhaps the Liberals, Moderates, Social Democrats and Conservatives? A main stumbling block to this government will be the prime ministerial role. The Social Democrats are the largest of those four parties and are likely to demand that their leader, Mette Frederiksen, is prime minister, but the Conservatives and Liberals may not accept that.
What about migration policy?
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.
The Liberals announced a plan to introduce five-year provisional citizenships in the run-up to the election, so if they are in the next government that proposal could become law.
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.
