From multinational media houses to political analysts, everyone projected the Dutch elections of 2017 to be a litmus test for the rise of populist politics across Europe. After huge victories for Modi in India and Trump in the US, Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam and anti-immigrant leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), was seen as the new mascot for the global right. The results, however, were a mixed bag. Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s conservative-liberal Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) emerged as the largest party with 33 seats despite losing eight seats. PVV came second with 20 seats. The biggest surprise was the complete decimation of the old left and the emergence of the GreenLeft as the new radical alternative. The GreenLeft gained an unexpected 10 seats, taking their tally to 14. What do these results foretell about Dutch politics and the EU? With German and French elections around the corner, has the populist upsurge finally stopped? What happens to the questions of immigrants? To get a sense of all this and more, Amit Kumar talked to historian and scholar Gijs Kessler of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.
AK: So how do you read the Dutch elections?
G. Kessler: The most important thing for me was that the expected rise of populism did not take place. That’s the first takeaway. I was afraid…I thought it could have happened. The PVV would have never formed the government because they would have never got 50 percent of the votes. But had they got somewhere around 40 percent, we would have had a problem.
Secondly, in the end, people chose the old traditional parties. That’s very clear from the mandate. Of course, the new parties and new voices are there. However, the overall winners were the usual suspects. Finally, I think all parties which had a Green programme have won. This seemed to be very important for many voters.
AK: What explains the last trend despite the Green agenda not being one of the central debates of this election?
G. Kessler: It is an issue. As far as I can remember, it always has been. It will be tempting to say we are below sea-level, that sea levels will rise and the Netherlands will be drowned; but I do not think that simple understanding explains it all. People do care about nature because we have very little of it left here in the Netherlands. We have quite a sizeable population with respect to our land and natural resources and I think people understand that.
AK: After the results were out, I heard the GreenLeft candidate saying you defeat the populist agenda by not following their debates, but by creating your own debates around the core concerns of society. Is that a lesson for the Left across the world?
G. Kessler: Probably yes! However, if you look at the Social Democratic Party (which is also a part of Left), they were not particularly rallying against populism. Their campaign was about several issues, which were not necessarily anti-populist. They stressed a lot on inequality, which seems to be their core agenda, but still they lost massively.
AK: So why did they lose and not the Green party?
G. Kessler: It’s a puzzle why they lost by such a huge margin—one of the biggest defeats of any party in the whole history of parliamentary elections in the Netherlands. The conclusions are never easy. Some say they lost because they were in government and passed many laws that were not very popular. However, there is structural explanation for their defeat as well. The constituency for the Social Democrats is aging and they know it.
AK: So the young voter is going towards a more radical choice?
G. Kessler: In this election, definitely. I do not know exactly why; maybe because of ecological concerns. The Social Democrats are not very radical when it comes to the environment…not as radical as GreenLeft. I always voted Social Democrat but this time even I chose GreenLeft. Their campaign (focused on) issues which were very important to me—like immigration, European integration and environment. The Social Democrats I found were somehow indecisive around these issues. Not much on immigration, but they were particularly not very clear when it came to European integration. They were almost in between of everything and it seems people in this election chose parties with more clear positions.
AK: If I ask you about the popular constituency that will vote for Wilders and those who will vote for GreenLeft…who do you think will vote for Wilders?
G. Kessler: This is very funny. Here we have a notion that typical voters for Wilders will be Henk and Ingrid. This is an imagined Dutch couple. Henk will be a typical Dutch male and Ingrid a typical Dutch female. The typical Wilders voters feel they are not in control in their own country. They feel too much money is spent on culture they do not consume; there is too much of immigration that they again do not want. They feel it threatens their cosy Holland where they grew up. I will not call this whole population racist—though there are surely some. I think they are anti-immigrant…they think they are losing the world they grew up in. A familiar world in which you knew what your neighbour is doing, what he/she is eating etc. Then, of course, there is the economic part. There are people in lower-paid jobs who are afraid of immigration which they think will bring competition.
AK: In India, there are voices growing in support of a Presidential form of election, towards a dual party system. Here, everyone I talked to was happy the Netherlands would have a coalition government. What do you think works for a successful democracy: multiparty system or the dual party system?
G. Kessler: The benefit of proportional representation is that it stimulates dialogues. It also enhances compromise. That might look like weakness but I think dialogue and then compromise is the strength of any democratic setup. In the Dutch electoral system, we have many different groups and voices and no one group can impose its ideas on the others. There is always a lot of negotiation going on and ultimately the result is a bit of everything and the majority is satisfied despite the compromises. It certainly keeps a check on extremism. It also gives people a sense of participation because they feel they are heard in the process.
However, there is also a negative side and I have seen it developing over the last twenty years. Over time, people have developed a feeling that they are not being heard or that some people are heard more than others. This ultimately creates resentment in one section of the population. This sentiment has a lot to do with the populist upsurge we are witnessing.
AK: In India, the supposedly secular and liberal Congress had been in power for a long time, and there is a growing sentiment that it comprised a lot against the Hindus, the non-elite castes and lower classes. This is shifting voters towards the right. The GreenLeft response was to move the debate towards core issues like employment, education, health etc. The position was clear on immigration; but rather than going on debating it, and automatically giving right-wing groups a space to sensationalise the issue and thus mobilise votes, the debate shifted to where they did not want it—the failures of neoliberal spaces, the shrinking of socials security mechanism etc.
G. Kessler: Yes, this strategy seems very workable. However, the VVD did not follow this strategy. And you can say maybe that’s the reason why people did vote for them and not that much to the Wilders. But it’s a dangerous trend because you are giving your ground to the right wing. In addition, even if liberals won, people will wait and see if they do something about immigration. If they do nothing and the debate remains the same, next time people might end up voting Wilders to power. Therefore, it is surely a shaky ground to fight populism with populism.
AK: How do you see the coming elections in France and its impact on the EU?
G. Kessler: That’s a scary thought! It seems Marine Le Pen is gaining enough support and might end up winning: Which will mean real bad news for the EU. In the Netherlands, we can say the tide has moved over. However, if Le Pen wins and France has a right-wing government, the tide may again shift to the right in the Netherlands. So it’s not actually over yet. Neither for the Netherlands nor for EU! The Dutch elections can be seen as a temporary and tiny relief from the right-wing onslaught.
AK: As a historian, how do you see this return of nationalism? The coming up of EU in a way signalled the dissolving of national boundaries. We saw national boundaries becoming more porous and people in western Europe thinking of transnational spaces.
G. Kessler: I think it’s a reaction to globalisation. I do not think its nationalism. I mean, it is some form of nationalism, but surely not the way nations were imagined before the coming of EU. People are using the nation as a refuge from the forces of globalisation, because they do not know how to defend themselves from these forces. They see them threatening, like the opening of boundaries, migration of labour, changing cultures. In addition, the rising power of supranational structures, of multinationals…there’s deep distrust among people about these giant multinationals. You find it across the political spectrum, people criticising multinationals. This, to me, is the reason for the rise of this new brand of nationalism!
(Amit Kumar, a doctoral candidate at the Department of History, Delhi University, is a Visiting fellow at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.)
