The election campaign has turned into a contest to make fun of each other as much as possible
Opinion piece by the "Prejudice Breakers" published in *Politiken* on March 21, 2026. Link to the original article.
It is disturbing how politicians use their social media accounts as platforms for prejudiced memes: We see this, for example, with the Red-Green Alliance when they refer to the upper class as the “whining class,” with the Social Liberals when they caricature party leaders as Letterboxd reviewers, or when the Danish People’s Party compares the foreign minister to a camel.
As part of the Prejudice Breakers, which is part of the Bridge Builders – Center for Dialogue Coffee, we view it as a democratic problem that this election campaign has largely turned into a contest to mock one another as much as possible.
The politicians’ rhetoric rubs off on the public, and we young people in particular get the impression that politics and debate are about reducing people to a single stance and failing to see the person behind it. It is an aggressive form of humor that divides and creates more distance than it brings people together.
As prejudice-busters, part of our work involves visiting the people we hold prejudices against and, through our encounters with them, refining our perspective.
For example, we have visited Lars Løkke Rasmussen, a Quran-burner, Jair Melchior, and the Vestegnen Police District. Here, among other things, we learned how important the temporal aspect is. For what stands out most after these visits is that it takes time to meet a person and to break away from the prejudices we hold.
That is why it may seem strange that politicians use the election campaign to stoke as many prejudices as possible in as short a time as possible. It can take years to break down prejudices, but apparently only a month to create them—a month in which anything goes.
We speak from experience when we say how difficult it is—and how long it actually takes—to approach a new person as open-mindedly as possible. We ourselves come from vastly different backgrounds: We are Muslims, we are atheists, we are Christians, we are from Taastrupgaard, and we are from Østerbro. In meeting one another, we learned that we have more in common than meets the eye—work, school, and family—but only because we approached this meeting with curiosity. A curiosity we bring with us when, for example, we meet people like the author, practicing Muslim, and gay man Elias Sadaq for a Ramadan dinner: Who is the person behind the labels?
We therefore believe that the overall tone of the election campaign has become a cautionary tale of how we speak to one another. A good example is the tone of the immigration debate: For instance, when Mads Strange of the Liberal Alliance criticizes the fact that Muslims are free to broadcast loud calls to prayer, even though it appears there is no concrete basis for this. It took him four minutes to make the video, which garnered over half a million views. Four minutes to spread a prejudice to over half a million people. Mads Strange argues that this is far easier than talking to people in person. But perhaps we should focus on quality rather than quantity? It’s time we took open-minded and curious conversation seriously. It’s naive to believe that the rhetoric of the election campaign doesn’t affect everyday life afterward.
by Alberte Amundsen, Elias Kadim, Fatmanur Demir, Marius Holtze, the Prejudice Breakers, the Bridge Builders – Center for Dialogkaffe
