The Netherlands is an important case to study the reactions of the political Establishment to extremist political parties. Because of its open electoral system, extreme parties cannot easily be kept out of parliament and because of its open system of cabinet formation, they can come quite close to the government.
In this study we distinguish between different categories of extremism: not only between leftwing and rightwing extremism, but also between ‘ideological diehards’ and ‘ideological innocents’. Whereas the diehards openly reject the prevailing social system and advocate a more pure alternative, the ‘innocents’ raise controversial taboo issues without defending an alternative ideology. Our hypothesis is that the reactions of the Establishment will be determined not so much by the extent to which extremist parties challenge the ideological hegemony in a system, but rather by the extent to which they raise issues that are considered taboo.
Therefore we study the reactions of established parties to six Dutch parties: the leftwing ideologically die-hard Communist Party (CPN) and Pacifist Socialist Party (PSP), the rightwing ideologically die-hard Political Reformed Party (SGP), the leftwing ideologically innocent Socialist Party (SP), that articulates (at least since the 1990s) a moderate socialist ideology but challenges the consensus on EU integration, and the rightwing ideologically innocent Centre Democrats (CD) and Freedom Party (PVV) that challenged the consensus on immigration.
After analysing the ideology of the six parties we will investigate the reactions of mainstream parties to their entrance in parliament, looking at party publications and at behaviour in parliament (support for motions and amendments, isolated voting behaviour) as well as electoral alliances and (local) coalitions. We will treat the reactions in civil society, the judiciary and the media as contextual variables.
