A short history of Dutch right-wing populism
Henk de Berg and political historian Koen Vossen discuss the history of right-wing populism in the Netherlands, zooming in on Hendrik Koekoek, Hans Janmaat, and Pim Fortuyn.
Geert Wilders is today’s best-known and most controversial Dutch populist politician. His divisive anti-immigration and anti-Islam stance did not come out of the blue.
Henk de Berg and Koen Vossen discuss the lives and ideas of Wilders’s most prominent right-wing predecessors: Hendrik Koekoek, who between 1963 and 1981 led the Boerenpartij (Farmers’ Party); Hans Janmaat, leader of the far-right Centrumdemocraten (Centre Democrats) between 1984 and 2002; and Pim Fortuyn, the flamboyant and openly gay populist politician who was assassinated in 2002 for – to use the phrase with which the murderer sought to justify his crime – “scapegoating Muslims”.
Koen Vossen (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen) is the author of the critical study The Power of Populism: Geert Wilders and the Party for Freedom; Henk de Berg is a member of the Centre for Dutch and Flemish Studies at the University of Sheffield and the author of Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying.
Credits
- Interviewer: Professor Henk de Berg (Professor of German and member of the Centre for Dutch and Flemish Studies at the University of Sheffield)
- Interviewee: Dr Koen Vossen (Political Historian at the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Netherlands)