Three brothers with Pakistani backgrounds have started a new political party, Nationalpartiet (the National Party), in a bid to maintain Danish values they contend are disappearing.
Kashif Ahmad, one of the founding brothers and the head of the new party, argued that many of Denmark's traditional values – like tolerance, respect and openness – have fizzled away into rhetoric loaded with increasingly racist undertones.
“There is a discourse in society in which immigrants and their offspring are increasingly portrayed as negative objects,” Ahmad told Politiken newspaper.
“The rhetoric has become so extreme that we must do something to defend the Danish values that our own parents were embraced with when they arrived in Denmark – a country in which we ourselves have been born and raised in and which we consider to be our homeland.”
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20,000 signatures needed
Nationalpartiet has already been approved by the Internal Affairs Ministry and has organised its own board and association. The difficult challenge now will be to collect the minimum 20,000 verifiable signatures required to become eligible for votes.
Included in the new party's voting platform is the scrapping of the '24-year rule', which prevents family reunification for immigrants and residence-visa holders under the age of 24.
Additionally, the party wants to do away with 'Tilknytningskravet', a set of criteria that relations have to satisfy in order to move to Denmark. And it also supports the right to carry visible religious symbols in public.
