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.

Highlights

  • Since the turn of the twenty‐first century, the Netherlands has witnessed the rise of several influ‐ ential populist radical right parties (PRRPs), including the Pim Fortuyn List (Lijst Pim Fortuyn [LPF]); Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid [PVV]); and more recently, the Forum for Democracy (Forum voor Democratie [FvD]), led by far‐right polit‐ ical newcomer, Thierry Baudet

  • The findings indicate that the FvD showed considerable effort to develop a rather com‐ plex, mass party‐type organization, the party eventu‐ ally turned into a textbook case of a “personal party” (McDonnell, 2013) that came to be strongly associ‐ ated with and dependent on its founder–leader, Baudet

  • This article set out to determine whether the FvD has assumed any features of the traditional mass party, and to what extent ordinary members have been able to exert influence on the party’s internal procedures

Read more

Summary

Introduction

Since the turn of the twenty‐first century, the Netherlands has witnessed the rise of several influ‐ ential populist radical right parties (PRRPs), including the Pim Fortuyn List (Lijst Pim Fortuyn [LPF]); Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid [PVV]); and more recently, the Forum for Democracy (Forum voor Democratie [FvD]), led by far‐right polit‐ ical newcomer, Thierry Baudet. In November 2020, the Amsterdam‐based newspa‐ per Het Parool published an article containing evidence of anti‐Semitic, homophobic, and racist messages being spread on the JFvD’s internal message boards, including Instagram and WhatsApp (Botje & Cohen, 2020) This was not the first time that the party’s youth branch had been accused of harboring right‐wing extremist sym‐ pathies: In April 2020, the Dutch monthly magazine HP/De Tijd already reported that JFvD members were sharing “expressions that correspond to authoritarian, fascist and/or National Socialist ideas, including anti‐ Semitism, homophobia and racist imperialism” (van Dijk, 2020). By studying the party’s organizational structures, recruit‐ ment strategies, and use of social media, and by reflect‐ ing on the party’s motivations for cultivating a large mem‐ bership, it seeks to determine whether and to what extent the FvD can be considered a new mass party

Party Organization
Recruitment Strategies
Use of Social Media
Reasons for Cultivating a Large Membership
Findings
Conclusion
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call