The Greengrocer’s Sign: How Denmark Learned to Love the Lie

Denmark is heading to parliamentary elections this year, and not a single major party is willing to challenge over twenty-five years of anti-migrant policy built on prejudice rather than evidence. The EU’s highest court has ruled that Denmark’s “ghetto law” likely constitutes racial discrimination. Danish politicians are openly threatening to defy international human rights conventions. Families are being separated, homes demolished, and a growing class of long-term residents denied citizenship and the right to vote — all to sustain a narrative about foreigners and Muslims that everyone repeats and nobody interrogates.

In Václav Havel’s famous 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” a greengrocer places a sign in his window alongside the onions and carrots: “Workers of the world, unite!” He does not believe the slogan. His customers do not read it. But he puts it up every morning, because that is what everyone does — and doing so is the price of a quiet life. Denmark has built its own version of that sign. Ours reads: “Foreigners and Muslims are the problem.”

The EU court ruling that Denmark is ignoring

On 18 December 2025, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered a landmark ruling on Denmark’s so-called “ghetto laws.” Passed in 2018, this legislation designated neighbourhoods for mandatory demolitions, forced relocations, and harsher criminal penalties. The defining criterion — the first threshold — is that fifty per cent or more of residents are classified as “immigrants and their descendants from non-Western countries.” Additional socioeconomic indicators are layered on top, but the ethnic gateway remains. In 2021, the government rebranded “hard ghettos” as “transformation areas.” The substance did not change.

The Grand Chamber found that the “non-Western” classification constitutes ethnic origin and that the law could amount to both direct and indirect racial discrimination under the EU Race Equality Directive. The Court reaffirmed that discrimination on grounds of ethnic origin is “a particularly odious form of discrimination.” The ruling sets precedent across all twenty-seven member states.

The case returns to the Danish courts for final judgment. But the demolitions and evictions continue. In Mjølnerparken in Copenhagen, families have received eviction notices and former refugees have been re-traumatised by forced displacement. As Amnesty International Denmark noted, Danish politicians ignored warnings about discrimination in the ghetto law for years — from human rights bodies, UN committees, and Denmark’s own national human rights institution — while residents were forcibly relocated and apartment blocks demolished.

Politicians rebelling against rights protections

Rather than reconsidering, Danish politicians are doubling down. Across the spectrum, they openly declare their willingness to act in defiance of international conventions. They propose legislation they know risks violating international law and the principles of justice that Denmark has long claimed to cherish. They speak of the European Convention on Human Rights not as a foundation of democratic governance but as an obstacle to be circumvented.

The message is unmistakable: it is more important to be seen acting against foreigners than to uphold the values of our own legal system. This is the greengrocer’s sign raised to the level of state policy — the ritual of conformity performed not by a shopkeeper but by a parliament.

Families split apart, rehabilitation abandoned, citizenship denied

The human cost extends to the most intimate sphere. Denmark has separated children from their parents on the basis of bureaucratic criteria that attempt to quantify when a person “belongs enough” to the country. Residency rules, attachment requirements, and administrative thresholds have been engineered so that families who have built their lives in Denmark can be torn apart because they fail to satisfy arbitrary benchmarks. Children who know no other home are sent away. Parents who have worked and contributed are told they have not done enough. These are not edge cases. They are the intended consequences.

Denmark has long prided itself on a criminal justice system built on social rehabilitation — the belief that punishment serves reintegration, not merely retribution. This principle is now selectively abandoned. When it comes to those classified as “foreigners,” rehabilitation gives way to exclusion: harsher sentences, reduced rights, and the ever-present threat of deportation. The system designed to reintegrate people into society is being redesigned to permanently exclude certain people.

Denmark has also made it extraordinarily difficult to obtain citizenship. Requirements have been tightened repeatedly, tests made harder, waiting periods extended. This is deliberate: maintaining a growing population of long-term residents who are denied full rights preserves the political majority’s option to expel them. An entire class of people is kept in permanent democratic limbo — close enough to contribute but too far away to vote.

The process itself reveals the rot. Naturalisation is decided by a committee of politicians — the Indfødsretsudvalget — with no independent oversight, no judicial review of individual decisions, and no transparency about how conclusions are reached. Due process, equal treatment, evidence-based decisions — all set aside so politicians can decide on the basis of their feelings and fears. Applicants who have met every formal requirement can be rejected without meaningful explanation. The rule of law, which Denmark promotes abroad with enthusiasm, is quietly suspended when it comes to determining who gets to be Danish.

What the sign conceals

While Danish politics has been consumed by immigration debates driven by prejudice rather than evidence, the country’s real crises have deepened. Denmark’s environment is being undermined to sustain one of Europe’s largest per capita agricultural sectors. Pig and dairy production poisons waterways, destroys biodiversity, and generates emissions that mock our climate commitments. Yet this receives a fraction of the political attention devoted to whether a Muslim family is receiving social benefits.

The welfare state — once the social contract binding all parts of Danish society in shared security — is being hollowed out. The safety net has been deliberately weakened, not because we can no longer afford it, but because politicians are terrified of right-wing headlines about brown or Muslim families receiving public support. The consequences are measurable: thousands of Danish children living in poverty, a growing homelessness crisis, social services strained and underfunded. These are not the results of immigration. They are the results of political cowardice.

An election year with no one to vote for

Denmark will hold parliamentary elections this year. Not one major party is willing to speak against the system constructed over more than twenty-five years. Even the Danish Greens have fallen in line behind the anti-migrant consensus. It is simply not a political priority to protest it. The logic of the greengrocer prevails: no party wants to remove the sign from its window, because doing so is seen as electoral suicide.

A growing minority of people who live, work, and raise their families in Denmark continue to exist as second-class citizens — their fundamental rights undermined not by a dramatic act of oppression, but by the quiet, cumulative refusal of an entire political class to acknowledge what is being done in their name.

This is perhaps the most damning illustration of Havel’s parable. In a country with free elections, a free press, and no secret police, the mechanism of conformity operates just as effectively as it did behind the Iron Curtain. The signs stay up not because anyone will be arrested for removing them, but because everyone has decided it is easier to leave them in place.

Living in truth

Havel argued that the system’s greatest vulnerability was the possibility that someone might simply refuse. If the greengrocer stopped displaying the slogan — to “live within the truth” — that small act would threaten the entire illusion.

European politics desperately needs this. Not grand gestures, but the simple courage to stop repeating what we know to be untrue. To say plainly that migration is not the cause of our failing public services, our environmental destruction, or our growing inequality. To recognise that when a country strips rights from its residents based on their origin, dismantles families through bureaucratic fiat, and abandons its own principles of justice for a selected group, it is not protecting its values — it is destroying them.

Danish voters will go to the polls this year and find that every ballot paper comes with the greengrocer’s sign already attached. Havel wrote from a place of far greater constraint than any European politician faces today, and he saw clearly that the choice to live truthfully is the beginning of genuine political change.

The greengrocer’s sign is in the window. The question for Denmark, and for Europe, is whether we have the courage to take it down.

Karen Melchior served as a Member of the European Parliament from 2019 to 2024, where she was JURI Coordinator for the Renew Europe Group. Before entering politics, she served for eleven years as a Danish diplomat. She currently serves on the board of Nyt Europa.