The Danes can listen

When Professor of Geriatric Medicine Rudi Westendorp moved to Denmark, he thought he was a real ‘polderer’. But now, seven years later, he concludes: the Dutch, including himself, do not polder at all. “The Dutch talk about poldering. They do not listen. The Danes, who polder, are willing to listen.”

Westendorp has one foot in the Netherlands and the other in Denmark. As a professor in Copenhagen, he was a member of a Danish team similar to the OMT during the first phase of the pandemic. In Denmark, too, the cabinet did not know what to expect from the virus – it was confused, and asked medical experts for advice.

Because many elderly people died, the Danish Ministry of Health thought: let’s ask Westendorp. “After the first wave, it turned out not to be that complicated,” says the Dutchman. “If the number of infections increases, you take measures to limit the number of contacts, and then the number of infections decreases again. The main question was which measures limited contacts sufficiently, and which measures could be maintained for a long time. So it was: Westendorp and a few other medics out, and sociologists and behavioral experts in.” The voice of society became more important.

Successful approach

According to Westendorp, it is the way in which Denmark has successfully tackled the corona crisis over the past two years and has kept the confidence of the population. They listened, looked at the needs and interests of the population. As a result, confidence in the corona approach has hardly fallen in the past two years, polls show. More than half of the population still supports the approach of the Danish government, which abolished all corona rules last Tuesday.

It is in stark contrast to the Netherlands, where anger and chagrin have prevailed over the past two years. Confidence in corona policy has fallen to an all-time low, according to surveys by the RIVM. In April 2020, three quarters of those polled still supported the policy, in January it was only 19 percent. A large majority finds the measures unclear, but only one in seven Dutch people thinks that the government makes a fair distribution of the burden. The chagrin is also reflected in the House of Representatives, where the parties cannot get a grip on decision-making and the hours-long corona debates get bogged down in details.

Deteriorating confidence, which is fatal for the fight against corona, say Danish political scientists. Political scientist Michael Bang Petersen called it in NRC ‘dangerous’ that the emphasis in the Dutch OMT is on medical aspects. In the Netherlands there were also advisers who emphasized the social aspect, such as the Social and Cultural Planning Office, but they did not sit at the table in the Catshuis.

In Denmark, the aim is also to keep society as open as possible, says Bang Petersen. And that becomes easier if there is a lot of trust, his colleague Gert Tinggaard Svendsen, professor of political science at Aarhus University told NRC. “You don’t have to force anything with trust: if you tell people what to do, they will do it, simply because they trust politics.”

Fewer rules

In Denmark, practically the entire pandemic, fewer rules were needed than in the Netherlands. A study recently published in The Lancet showed that countries with a lot of trust in politics and each other managed to curb corona more successfully than countries where that trust was not there. Denmark, the researchers in that study said, is one such country.

Not that there weren’t problems. A political scandal arose after the government decided to close all mink farms and kill the animals because they were infected with corona. It later turned out that the government had no legal basis to cull the animals. It caused a dip in confidence in the government, protests intensified – in January 2021, a doll bearing the effigy of Mette Frederiksen was set on fire during a protest. But that criticism has slowly subsided. “There are also antivaxers in Denmark, or people who think there is no corona,” says Westendorp. “You also have all the colors of the rainbow that you have in the Netherlands.”

There are certainly discussions about those rules, he says. “Everyone is heard, and then a decision is made. That can be discussed, but everyone sticks to the decision until there is a new decision.”