Is the (Mass) Party Really Over? The Case of the Dutch Forum for Democracy

Abstract

Over the past decades, the Netherlands has witnessed the rise of several influential populist radical right parties, including the Pim Fortuyn List (Lijst Pim Fortuyn), Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid) and, more recently, the Forum for Democracy (Forum voor Democratie [FvD]). By analyzing the party’s organizational structures, this article seeks to determine whether the FvD may be considered a new “mass party” and to what extent ordinary members can exert influence over the party’s internal procedures. The party’s efforts to establish a large membership base suggest that the FvD set out to build a relatively complex mass organization. Through targeted advertising campaigns, the party made strategic use of social media platforms to rally support. Thus, while the means may have changed with the advent of the internet, the FvD invested in creating some organizational features that are commonly associated with the “mass party” model. At the same time, however, the party did not really seek to foster a community of loyal partisan activists among its membership base but instead treated its members as donors. The party is clearly characterized by centralized leadership in the sense that the party’s spearhead, Thierry Baudet, maintains full control over key decision-making areas such as ideological direction, campaigning, and internal procedures. At first sight, the party appears to have departed from Wilders’s leader-centered party model. However, a closer look at the party apparatus demonstrates that the FvD is, in fact, very hierarchical, suggesting that the party’s internal democracy is much weaker than the party’s name might suggest.

New parties in a crowded electoral space: the (in)stability of radical right voters in the Netherlands

“…Empirical research has repeatedly confirmed that policy considerations are a prime explanatory factor for vote choices (Dalton 1985 ; Iversen 1994 ), including the choices of those who support a radical right-wing party (Van der Brug et al 2000 ; Rooduijn 2018 ). A policy voting model assumes that electoral competition works like a market with demand- and supply-side factors (e.g., Van Der Brug et al 2005 ; Van Hauwaert 2021 ; De Jonge 2021 ). Parties are expected to be successful if many voters share their policy positions on issues that voters care about, while there are few other parties that hold similar policy positions.…”

“…He confirms that support for both parties is mainly driven by socio-cultural issue stances, while the (usually rather small) differences in sympathy for these two parties are linked to voters’ positions on socio-economic issues, where FvD attracts more socioeconomically liberal voters. FvD had initially presented itself as a ‘more reasonable’ alternative to the PVV (De Jonge 2021 , p. 288). Both of the party’s MPs were highly educated and affluent speakers (Baudet has a PhD in philosophy and the number two, Hiddema is a criminal defense lawyer).…”

“…Yet, after the provincial elections, various incidents undermined the credibility of the image of a non-extremist anti-immigration party, in particular scandals around FvD’s youth organization involving cases of blatant racism and anti-Semitism. This divided the party internally and led to the resignation of several prominent politicians (for details, see De Jonge 2021 ). Some of them founded the new party JA21, which tries to retain the image of a non-extremist radical right party.…”

“…The introduction to this special issue describes how FvD changed from a radical right populist to a more extremist party, embracing conspiracy theories (Jacobs et al 2023 ). While there are clear differences between the three parties, we refer to them with the more general terms ‘radical right’ or ‘far right’ (see also De Jonge 2021 ).…”

Ethnicity and Politics: Terminological Debates and Nodal Points of Intersection

“…At the same time, the leader of the party, T. Baudet, appeals to the German civilization, the boreal [northern] world (boreale wereld), that is, to a certain historical and cultural community to which all the Dutch belong by birthright. The same characteristics distinguish the French National Rally (Rassemblement national): its leader, Marine Le Pen, calls for "freeing the French people from an arrogant elite," implying the homogeneity of both of these groups, and insists on the priority of the French over immigrants who do not share the French cultural heritage and the "general will" (De Jonge, 2021).…”