{"id":138396,"date":"2022-03-31T13:52:41","date_gmt":"2022-03-31T11:52:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=138396"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:26:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:26:13","slug":"without-a-real-left-wing-politician-the-chance-of-a-popular-uprising-grows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2022\/03\/31\/without-a-real-left-wing-politician-the-chance-of-a-popular-uprising-grows\/","title":{"rendered":"Without a real left-wing politician, the chance of a popular uprising grows"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever since Pim Fortuyn\u2019s sudden rise to the top twenty years ago, Dutch people seem to have lost faith in politics. What has happened? According to Professor of Social Theory Willem Schinkel, \u2018people feel like they\u2019ve been screwed over, and they\u2019re right about that\u2019.<\/p>\n

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This year\u2019s municipal elections saw a very low turnout. Only 39 percent of voters cast their vote. Were you surprised by that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cNot really. Rotterdam\u2019s turnout is always low. One reason why this particular turnout was so very low is because the national government has outsourced a lot of its formerly centralised duties to municipal governments. So municipalities now have to do more things with less money, which makes it impossible to do things right, by definition.\u201d<\/p>\n\t

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\n\t\t\u2018We have a mayor and municipal executive who are OK with peaceful protesters being beaten by the police while protesting\u2019\n\t<\/blockquote>\n\n\t<\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n

\u201cSecondly, if you take into account the housing policy we\u2019ve had in recent years, it\u2019s not surprising that there are neighbourhoods in Rotterdam-Zuid where only 19 percent of people cast a vote. We have a mayor who says that people who don\u2019t like it here should simply fuck off. We have a mayor and municipal executive who are OK with peaceful protesters being beaten<\/a> by the police while protesting against the city\u2019s housing policy. And we have a municipal government that is getting rid of tens of thousands of houses. Yes, getting rid of them, even though we\u2019re dealing with a record housing shortage. People feel like they\u2019ve been screwed over, and they\u2019re right about that.\u201d<\/p>\n\t

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Willem Schinkel is Professor of Social Theory at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences. His publications include De Gedroomde Samenleving<\/em> (2008), De nieuwe democratie<\/em> (2012) and (in association with Rogier van Reekum) Theorie van de Kraal: Kapitaal, Ras, Fascisme<\/em> (2019). In addition, he often writes about subjects specific to Rotterdam. For instance, last year he wrote about the Coolsingel riots<\/a> and the housing protest<\/a> that got out of hand<\/p>\n\n\t<\/div>\n

So one might say: so cast a vote for a party that really wants to change things. Which is not what happened.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cNo. What is new is Volt and Bij1 entering the municipal council, both obtained two seats. The latter party (with which Schinkel is affiliated \u2013 ed.), in particular, has a programme that is potentially interesting to the many people who didn\u2019t vote this time round. But this party, too, will have to prove its worth.\u201d<\/p>

Twenty years ago, Pim Fortuyn managed to get people to vote. What happened there?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\t

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\n\t\t\u2018I think Fortuyn would not at all have appealed to many of the people who didn\u2019t vote this time round\u2019\n\t<\/blockquote>\n\n\t<\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n

\u201cI\u2019d like to put that statement into some perspective. I think Fortuyn would not at all have appealed to many of the people who didn\u2019t vote this time round. The majority of Rotterdam\u2019s inhabitants are not white. And he didn\u2019t appeal at all to non-white Rotterdammers. He was actually being racist to them. People like to say that Fortuyn managed to reach the people, but what we really mean by that is that he gave a voice to a specific group of white people who had been disappointed by the politicians of the time and were attracted by this racist alternative.\u201d<\/p>

But weren\u2019t there people from a migrant background at the time who voted for Fortuyn?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cYes, there were, just like there were people on unemployment benefits who voted for him, even though Fortuyn promoted the abolition of unemployment benefits. But I think it\u2019s pretty obvious that they were mostly white people.\u201d<\/p>

Ever since Fortuyn, Dutch people have been obsessed with the gap between politicians and the common people. How did he do that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen politics are discussed, people often act like people have all these mental boxes representing opinions, and politicians must seek to tick all these boxes. But half the time, we have no idea how we feel about things. Politics are affective. Politics have something that philosophers call a performative dimension. Fortuyn created something new. That\u2019s why no one saw him coming. The lesson we can learn from Fortuyn is that he wasn\u2019t a hit because he said what people were feeling or thinking. It was the other way around. He said things in such a way that people then started thinking them.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the start of this century, politics weren\u2019t political at all. It didn\u2019t involve any battles. It was purely technocratic management, completely designed to increase or decrease certain percentages by a few percentage points. When Fortuyn brought up \u2018the mess left behind by the purple coalition government\u2019, he was mostly referring to an ideological mess. It should be added that the change he made was mostly cosmetic. When it came down to it, his policy strongly resembled other parties\u2019 policies. For instance, take the racist Rotterdam Act. As early as the 1970s, Rotterdam had a policy \u2013 implemented at the time by PvdA \u2013 capping the number of Surinamese people in one neighbourhood. The idea was that they had to be distributed [among the various neighbourhoods]. But Fortuyn presented this idea in a completely novel manner.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Does it make sense that our populist politicians \u2013 Fortuyn who wore dandy-esque suits, Wilders who has this aristocratic-looking voluminous hair, Baudet who is a frat boy who likes to lie on pianos \u2013 aren\u2019t representatives of the people at all?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cYes, it does. Populists \u2013 or rather fascists, as I prefer to call them these days \u2013 largely rely on their style and charisma.\u201d<\/p>

You seem to have no qualms about using the word \u2018fascism\u2019. You also use it a lot in your book, Theorie van de Kraal. For me the word conjures up images of dictators such as Hitler and Mussolini, who incite the people to take up arms.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIn Walter Benjamin\u2019s definition, fascists are people who seek to mobilise \u2018the masses\u2019 in a racialising way without wishing to affect the property structure, which is to say, without doing anything about the capitalism that allows these masses to be exploited. Workers are mobilised, not in the name of a socialist<\/em> ideal, but in the name of a national socialis<\/em>t ideal.<\/p>

\u201cIn Western countries, big business struck an implicit deal with white workers in the twentieth century. Workers will occasionally be thrown some breadcrumbs, as long as they don\u2019t rise up. And if they are in danger of rising up, they will be told that the real danger is coming from some external force. From migrants, or from people of colour. This being the case, white workers generally end up siding with the big businesses who exploit them, rather than with the workers who happened to be born elsewhere, or who haven\u2019t lived in this privileged part of Europe for long. Maybe that doesn\u2019t involve the use of arms, as with Hitler. But that doesn\u2019t alter the fact that we\u2019re engaging in the politics of death in the Mediterranean, just to defend white people from outsiders, and to make sure capitalism doesn\u2019t suffer any negative effects. Thousands of people drown there every year. Libya receives EU funding to protect a system that results in slavery. We have blood on our hands. And yes, that\u2019s an actual policy we\u2019re engaging in.\u201d<\/p>

Are PVV and Forum voor Democratie fascist parties?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not really interested in answering the question as to whether Baudet is a fascist. What is good to note, though, is that these kinds of parties don\u2019t do anything about the ever-increasing exploitation, the growing wealth gap, and the fact that wage growth is not commensurate with increased productivity. However, they do give white people the feeling that they are superior, that they have more rights than people who have only recently moved to this country. They are being promised that they will be able to keep their current way of life. And it should be noted that, in this particular respect, these parties aren\u2019t all that different from VVD, CDA, SP or GroenLinks.\u201d<\/p>

It is often said that, since the shock election of Pim Fortuyn, Dutch politics has shifted considerably to the right. Why is that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe fear of \u2018the next Fortuyn\u2019 has given politicians carte blanche<\/em> to engage in a discourse that is increasingly overtly racist. In that sense, Fortuyn represents a break with the past that was instigated by the system itself. The idea is that we must be explicit about things, because if we aren\u2019t, the people will be unhappy. This has created on open horizon for right-wing parties. Wilders was a bit more of a rightist than Fortuyn. Now Baudet is taking it another step farther. And all the other parties have shifted [to the right] along with them, even GroenLinks and SP. As a result, we\u2019ve lost our left wing. Currently, leftist parties hold thirty of the 150 available seats, and that\u2019s if we\u2019re counting generously, which is to say, if we include PvdA. And to a large extent, the parties concerned have themselves to blame for that.\u201d<\/p>

Would the situation in the Netherlands have been different if we\u2019d never seen the rise of Fortuyn?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think it would have made much of a difference. We would have seen the rise of someone else. There were quite a few people who were saying more or less the same before Fortuyn came along, about things such as Islam\u2019s incompatibility with liberal democracy. Frits Bolkestein said such things, as did Paul Scheffer, and even Paul Schnabel. And we\u2019ve had other people since then. Parties that used to cater to workers have shifted to the right all over Europe. Mitterrand in France, Schr\u00f6der in Germany, Blair in England \u2013 they all went along with the neoliberal wave of the 1980s and 1990s.\u201d<\/p>

Sander Schimmelpenninck created a series of documentaries for VPRO about the gap between poor people and wealthy people in the Netherlands. The series got rave reviews. In it, Schimmelpenninck, who himself belongs to the wealthy class, says that the reason why he made the series was because he fears that someday poor people will no longer put up with it, and \u2018all hell will break loose\u2019.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\t

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\n\t\t\u2018When people like that are afraid we\u2019ll come and get our dues, we\u2019ve got them where we want them\u2019\n\t<\/blockquote>\n\n\t<\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n

\u201cWhich is great. When people like that are afraid we\u2019ll come and get our dues, we\u2019ve got them where we want them. Because of course we\u2019ll come and get them, one day. <\/em>After all, [wealth] belongs to all of us. All the profits the rich kept to themselves, all that capital that resulted in more and more capital. Where did these profits come from? We gave them those. Everyone who is in another person\u2019s employ is being exploited. So of course we\u2019ll come and get our dues.\u201d<\/p>

In recent years, many people have said we need a populist politician on the left wing. Would a leftist Pim Fortuyn be the solution we seek?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of the day, it won\u2019t be in anyone\u2019s best interest for us to keep going like this. That is true for racism and exclusion, and it\u2019s also true for climate change. Look, many people believe that they\u2019ll be able to keep everything they hold dear by voting for Forum voor Democratie. But it\u2019s an illusion. At the end of the day, everything will be lost. Our entire planet is breaking. And if there\u2019s one thing we\u2019ve learned, it is that capitalists won\u2019t quit anywhere. Not of their own accord. We need a truly leftist party that will demonstrate this to people in an inviting way. After all, we haven\u2019t tried that yet in the Netherlands. So as far as I\u2019m concerned, we needn\u2019t give up hope just yet.\u201d<\/p>

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Pim Fortuyn was a professor at Erasmus University for a while. EUR gave us truckloads of rightist politicians before and after him as well, ranging from Neelie Kroes to Joost Eerdmans. To what extent can your employer be said to be part of the problem?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is true for universities in general. It is known that Leiden University\u2019s Faculty of Law plays a major part in the production of national elites. Erasmus University has a very corporate style. This is where future generations of capitalist managers are being trained.<\/p>

\u201cI like to say that universities spray men who wear ties into the world. They\u2019re not always men, and they don\u2019t always wear ties either, but they\u2019re strawmen who guard the existing status quo. So universities shouldn\u2019t get too pretentious, what with all their bullshit about \u2018solving\u2019 the major issues of our time. We helped create those problems. If there hadn\u2019t been any people who created nuclear bombs, our world would look quite different today. But universities are more than that. They\u2019re still places where other ways of life can be thought up, where people can still think outside the status quo.\u201d<\/p>\n\t

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De redactie<\/h2>\n\t\t\n\t\t
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