The Sun Will Shine Again: On Populist Contagion of New and Establishment Parties in the Dutch National Elections of the 21st Century

Abstract

Twenty-one years after the murder on Pim Fortuyn, the right-wing populist Freedom Party (Partij voor de Vrijheid; PVV) won a plurality in the 2023 Dutch national election after long-term PM Mark Rutte announced that he would not run for re-election. This study serves as a contribution to Rooduijn’s ‘A Populist Zeitgeist?’ study (2014), looking into the spread of right-wing populist rhetoric throughout the Dutch party system since 2002. More specifically, this study looks at the contagion of populist rhetoric on the three establishment (‘winner’) parties (PvdA, VVD, CDA) and three new but successful (‘savior’) parties, compared to two well-known populist parties (LPF, PVV). This content analysis study uses a blend between Hawkins’ (2009) wholistic grading rubric and Rooduijn et al. (2014) paragraph-level coding in order to assess the amount and type of populist rhetoric in the selected party manifestos of the 2002, 2010, and 2023 election years. The qualitative discourse methods used shows that, in line with Rooduijn and colleague’s (2014) findings, that there still is no change in the absence of a populist Zeitgeist. The significance of these findings is in the enrichment of the understanding of Dutch populism after the PVV’s electoral win in 2023.