Catherine de Vries (1978) always relied on hard facts and figures in her work as a political scientist. She couldn’t do anything with non-measurable things. She summarizes that feeling this way on Monday evening, in the Amsterdam debate center Spui25: “Do you have a story about your father? I also have a father with a story.”
But, De Vries also said that evening, she is “very twisted” in how she views her work. “Suppose I ask someone: are you for or against illegal migration? There are all kinds of assumptions behind that. If you talk to someone for a longer period of time, you will only hear the nuances.”
De Vries, professor of political science at IE University in Madrid, specializes in voter behavior: why do voters vote for far-right parties, such as FVD? Why were British voters lured into voting for Brexit? Where does populism come from, or Euroscepticism? Before her ‘turn’ she would look for the answers in books, scientific surveys or data. But she has slowly come to realize that not all answers can be found there, but perhaps also in stories, and perhaps even closer to home. In Lemelerveld, for example, the Overijssel village where she grew up.
Her book was published this week The symphony of discontent. The rise of the radical right in Europe. De Vries decided to investigate that rise with her father as the center.
Her father’s name was Jan Netjes. De Vries describes him in a conversation as a “stubborn farmer”. Her mother, who died when Catherine was sixteen, was a teacher. “My parents were Dutch Reformed, members of the EO, they always did volunteer work. For example, my mother taught Dutch to refugees from the former Yugoslavia. He was committed to Israel with fundraising activities. They often invited an older widowed woman for dinner. Being ready for fellow human beings and the community was completely self-evident in their world.”
Jan Netjes was a loyal CDA voter. He did have sympathy for the rebellious farmer Hendrik Koekoek from Hollandscheveld in Drenthe. And he thought that CDA leader Ruud Lubbers (prime minister between 1982 and 1994) was talking very complicatedly.
In 2002, De Vries’ father suddenly no longer voted for the CDA, but for the LPF of the recently murdered party leader Pim Fortuyn. He then voted for Geert Wilders (PVV). He maintained this until his death in 2017.
De Vries: “My father’s turnaround fits into a broader pattern. In 1985, 3 percent of voters in Western Europe voted radical right. Now that is approximately 20 percent. That cannot only come from young people. Young people, relatively speaking, vote more progressive. The big wave movement comes from people in the middle or at the end of their lives, like my father. And the switch to radical right is not a burst, but often something permanent. The political landscape has changed. This group has structurally changed. I wanted to investigate that.”
And how did your personal interest arise?
“Distance helps. I am a first-generation student. To go to school, I had to cycle for an hour and a half every day from the farm to the station, then take the train, and then walk. I only realized when I was studying that other people did not have that experience at all. Fellow students were also not Protestant, or did not have parents who did volunteer work. That taught me to look at my own youth differently.”
Did you talk a lot about politics at home?
“That wasn’t too bad, they were usually just short comments. My father always talked a lot about the war. His parents, and my mother’s parents, had been in the resistance. I saw a big contrast between the world my father came from and his vote for the LPF and later the PVV. I really saw it as a break.”
He didn’t see it as a breakup.
“He felt that the CDA no longer recognized the feelings of citizens like him. He was really concerned with teaching the CDA a lesson. And the other middle parties had also let him down, he felt. We watched the debate together between Pim Fortuyn and other political leaders such as Ad Melkert (PvdA) on the night after the municipal elections of March 2002. “They don’t care about us,” my father said. “Melkert is watching Fortuyn. not even on.’ So when he saw that…”
Did he feel that he was not being looked at at that moment?
“Yes, I think so, although he didn’t put it that way.”
Did your relationship with your father suffer as a result?
“I first started a debate, I thought that he saw things wrong. That made no sense. Conversely, he could not convince me either. I think about it a lot now. I hear so much around me that families are in danger of falling apart because parents think differently about vaccination, for example. The trick is to keep in conversation despite the differences. I see this book as a posthumous conversation with my father.”
It didn’t happen that night that her father lost faith in politics. That happened, insidiously, in the years before. Poultry and dairy farmers had financial difficulties in the 1980s and the farm went bankrupt. He ended up in debt, had to work shifts, and his “sense of home”, as De Vries describes it, had slowly disappeared.
In addition, he saw the amenities from his daily life disappear. The government became increasingly distant, literally: the town hall was barely accessible. The school had merged into a large school community, which is why De Vries had to travel so far. The doctor’s office closed and there were hardly any buses. In the meantime, he heard politicians say that things were getting better in the Netherlands. He himself saw it differently, says De Vries. He saw that the implicit agreement between government and citizens was being violated: you pay high taxes, but get a fine-meshed welfare state in return.
If you have the feeling that you are paying and not getting anything in return, then the state suddenly becomes problematic
De Vries: “The state is a nice thing, as long as you are doing well. For some of its citizens, the Netherlands feels like a cool country, to quote Mark Rutte. These are people who do not really need the state. But that changes as soon as things get difficult. If you have the feeling that you have to pay and get nothing in return, then the state suddenly becomes problematic. For those people, the state has become a fortress. The government has not literally disappeared, but there is much more distance.”
Did your father blame the CDA for this?
“And the other middle parties. Citizens are mainly interested in their own context and have little interest in averages. You cannot counteract feelings of alienation with spreadsheets and facts. That is my criticism of the political center. Politics is also about emotion, virtues and values. Due to the impoverished politics of middle parties, that awareness has disappeared. Politics has become technocratic, and the radical right has jumped into that hole.”
Weren’t the choices behind that retreating government also ideologically motivated?
“Certainly. But we pretend that is not the case. Impoverishment was not introduced by a group of people with top hats and cigars who destroyed the welfare state in back rooms. It was an accumulation of political choices. The citizen became a consumer, the state became the efficient, commercial service provider. Then you quickly abolished that bus line, because it will never become efficient. But it does mean a connection between citizens.”
Hasn’t the social and political view of that corporate government changed long ago, for example after the benefits scandal?
“Where has the political settlement with Mark Rutte been? Angela Merkel has been harshly judged in Germany for her Russia policy. The Netherlands has never distanced itself from that time. Confidence in politics is permanently low. It is not about holding one prime minister responsible for that. There must be clarity about what has happened over the past forty years.”
Don’t anti-migration feelings play just as big a role among voters who vote for the radical right?
“Certainly. But: negative sentiments about migration have been stable for decades. Pim Fortuyn was critical of migration and Islam, but also talked about problems in public administration and healthcare, mergers and economies of scale. Typical themes that also caused a lot of dissatisfaction and were a breeding ground for right-wing populism. This has been snowed under because Geert Wilders has dominated the debate. Due to the migration obsession in recent years, these other themes have been forgotten.”
Wilders won the 2023 elections comfortably with tough anti-immigration rhetoric.
“And this while the views on migration among voters had not really changed. Wilders said: you cannot get a house, and that is because of migrants. He thus tempted people to vote more radically than they normally would.”
The far right’s positions on migration have become much more extreme in recent years. Apparently new voters don’t see that as a problem.
“Because they are very good at keeping the grievances of citizens alive. You see the difference between radical and extreme right-wing ideologically blurring. There is also much more trade-off between voters. Now that the PVV has partly collapsed, FVD is winning again. I also find that distinction increasingly difficult. What are the differences? We always said: the extreme right wants to overthrow democracy, but that is rarely explicit. At the same time, there is much less restraint among far-right parties. In The flag of the Fratelli d’Italia party of Italian Prime Minister Meloni contains a flame, which is associated with neo-fascism. You see this openly in parties all over Europe.”
Then the question remains: why doesn’t that drive voters away?
“I often think of a village in southern Italy where I was when I worked there. There was absolutely nothing there. Pure poverty, everything was dilapidated, and not in a charming way. The only shiny thing was the party office of Fratelli d’Italia. You see, said the inhabitants, they do care about us.”
You want to understand those voters in order to understand your father. At the same time you are worried. Is that a dilemma as an author?
“I’ve thought about it for a long time: how should I tell this story? I don’t want to justify my father’s voting record or be seen as a Wilders-versteher be seen. Some people I think highly may have a tendency to see PVV voters as racists. Such quick condemnations lose a lot of nuance. I therefore wanted to understand my father’s dissatisfaction, and that in Europe. And I also have my own dissatisfaction: it keeps talking about migration. Europe has been trying to curb migration for years. So if that were the only cause, the far-right bloc would shrink.”
But that doesn’t happen.
“No, there must be another explanation. Increased migration is a strong image. But what is neoliberalism as an image? Or the BV Netherlands? That is why the left always has such a difficult time. Their criticism has no strong images.”
Middle parties adopt migration as a theme. Do you disagree with that?
“D66 leader Rob Jetten said in the election campaign: Geert Wilders governed, but did not do a good job. Then he is already in a frame that there is a problem. That is already a reinforcement of the far-right ideology. Secondly, he implies that far-right politicians really want to solve something. But that’s not their concern at all, they just want to amplify the anger for their gain. My book is also a plea to expand the imagination of the political center. They must learn to create a politics of proximity and not become an echo of the far right.”
