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Existing laws shielding biodiversity, drinking water, and public accountability will be voided to accelerate the regime’s aggressive military expansion. Poulsen, ranked by observers as the regime’s second or third most powerful figure, will gain unilateral power to approve projects such as American bases, private arms factories, and rare-earth processing plants. Municipalities, environmental statutes, and public objections will be bypassed. Poulsen will hold “the authority to make decisions, issue permits and dispensations, etc., issue orders and prohibitions, and impose administrative fines.” Independent oversight is absent and those impacted by his decrees will have no legal recourse.

Critics across Danish civil society, including the national association of water utilities, the Danish Bar Association and environmental NGOs, have sounded the alarm in their replies to the formal public consultation process for the bill. “There is no requirement that the military or a private defence company must present documentation that the project they want to carry out will be built and operated in the least damaging location and with the least damaging solutions,” says Anders Juel of the Danish Society for Nature Conservation.

Ammunition plants and rare-earth facilities, industries infamous for heavy metal contamination and toxic waste, could be placed directly on protected wetlands. There is no obligation to investigate alternatives. “If the relationship with Russia improves, we can roll back the military buildup. But the damage to nature caused by military installations and private defence companies cannot be rolled back,” Juel warns. “It can take a hundred years for nature to be re-established – if it comes back at all.” He adds that Denmark is facing a biodiversity crisis and states that allowing the destruction of nature is a step in the wrong direction.

DANVA (the Danish Water and Wastewater Association) as well as the organisation Danish Waterworks are warning against putting military considerations above the safety rules set in place to keep drinking water clean and secure the long-term protection of groundwater resources.

If water mains, sewers or heating pipes are in the way of new military construction, local utilities will be ordered to move them. This is a very costly operation but the new bill allows the regime to bypass existing cost-sharing legislation and decide the matter by decree, potentially leaving local utility companies, and ultimately local residents, to foot the bill. “We are concerned that it will be local citizens in the towns where the military installations are to be built who will bear the financial and environmental burden because military installations are being built hastily,” warns Karsten Bjørno of the DANVA. He is backed up by the organisation of Danish district heating utilities who writes in their reply that "it is unfair that citizens who are customers in local utility companies have to pay for government projects over their heating bill."

Perhaps the bill's most brazen feature is its elimination of the right for local residents and environmental NGO's to legally challenge military construction projects. The reason given by the Liberal Party-controlled Defence Ministry is that allowing complaints would ”potentially involve significant and real risks and uncertainties for the completion and progress" of military projects. Denmark’s legal establishment is recoiling. The Danish Bar Association is warning that abolishing the complaint process weakens openness, transparency and the rule of law, violating what was previously considered fundamental principles of the Danish legal system. The independent legal think tank Justitia warn that the law would hand over decision making to “a closed circuit, where it effectively becomes the government itself that assesses when ordinary legal safeguards can be disregarded... central legal safeguards and rule of law principles are being limited.”

Municipalities housing military sites share these fears. Fredericia Municipality bluntly states: “This law short-circuits local democracy and citizen influence.”

Despite the outcry, the bill is expected to sail through the Nordic hermit kingdom's rubber-stamp parliament, as it is firmly controlled by the regime and its loyalists.

The bill is merely a local symptom of a broader, unmistakable trend across the NATO bloc where democratic institutions are being hollowed out, retooled for war, and turned inward against their own populations. Since the defeat of the Soviet Union relieved Western elites of the need to compete ideologically with communism, the incentives to maintain the appearances of functioning democracies have eroded. The result is plain: in times of imperial decline, climate crisis, and domestic unrest, the public sphere is flooded with nationalism and paranoia, the military swells, and legal rights are repackaged as threats to national security.

In such a climate, clean drinking water, functioning democracy and the well-being of the civilian population is reduced to mere obstacles. And the citizens themselves, so troublesome and querulous, are best left outside the room.

Source: Forsvarsministeren vil sætte miljølove og klageret ud af kraft for at bygge militære anlæg og våbenfabrikker, Arbejderen, August 1st 2025