In defence of populism: 'A healthy correction to the political system'

The less-educated had lost their political representation, but now their concerns are being voiced by populist parties.“Highly-educated people can hire a Polish housepainter while the less-educated have to compete for jobs with those painters.”

Geert Wilders' anti-Islam Party for Freedom is a healthy correction to the Dutch political system, says professor of public administration Mark Bovens. It appeals to an important part of the electorate, mostly the less-educated, that had lost its political representation in the past decades.

Mark Bovens doesn't beat about the bush. Parties like Geert Wilders’ PVV, nationalist group Trots op Nederland (Proud of the Netherlands), or their forerunner the LPF party of Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002, are often brushed aside as being "populist", meaning: manipulative, simplistic, looking to score. "When you've categorised these parties as reprehensible, you don't have to think about the underlying causes [of their success] anymore," says Bovens about the political situation in the Netherlands.

Bovens sees a new divide emerge in the campaign for the European parliament elections next week - and not just in the Netherlands. Added to the traditional dividing lines between left and right, or labour and capital, and between religious and secular, is a new, cultural rift between what Bovens likes to call 'cosmopolitans' and 'nationalists'.

Across traditional political lines

"On the one hand you have the cosmopolitan parties and citizens," Bovens says. "They are in favour of globalisation and European unification and they support or accept immigration and the multicultural society. On the other hand you have the nationalist parties. They feel globalisation and European unification have gone too far too fast, and they emphasise national values and national identity."

This new line cuts straight across the traditional political lines, Bovens says. "In the debate about Europe, you can see that the PVV has a lot in common with the [eurosceptic] Socialist party. They both have a more nationalist approach."

The establishment’s suggestion that the voters of the PVV and the Socialist party simply "haven't understood" the benefits that Europe offers, is too simplistic, says Bovens.

"After [the Dutch voted against] the referendum on Europe [in 2005], many people said: 'We should have explained it better.' This is underestimating what's at stake here. To highly-educated people European unification is a blessing. They speak several languages, their job market now stretches across Europe, their kids can study anywhere in the EU without losing their scholarships.

"To less-educated people - especially those preforming manual labour and working in the services industry - European unification presents no advantages at all. What they see is increased competition in the job market. Highly-educated people can hire a Polish housepainter to redo their house; less-educated people find themselves living next to a pension for Polish migrant workers, or they have to compete with the Polish housepainter for the same job. Much of the industry in which they were employed has moved to low-wage countries in Eastern Europe or Asia. So it is no wonder that they object. That's democracy."

Electorate tossed out

Bovens sees parties like the PVV and the SP as the new mass parties. "They are populist in that they have charismatic leaders and there is an emphasis on the opposition between the elite and the people."

The traditional parties - Labour, Christian democrats, liberals - increasingly came to represent only the well-educated. They tended to dismiss the concerns of the less-educated over issues such as European unification, immigration and globalisation as "xenophobic, racist, backward". The mainstream parties were able to neglect what once were their traditional grassroots supporters because, for a long time, there was simply no competition on the political market. "So the concerns of 30 to 40 percent of the electorate were simply tossed out," says Bovens.

But isn't it a good idea to have well-educated people at the helm? "It's always better to have a captain who knows what he's doing," says Bovens, "but everybody needs to have their say about where the ship is headed. Look at the way Europe has taken shape in the past forty years: it has been defined exclusively by academics - lawyers, professors, experts in Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg. So it is only logical that Europe has headed in the direction that best suited the well-educated."

In that respect, the 2005 referendum about the European constitution was a milestone, says Bovens. "Europe has become politicised; it is no longer the exclusive domain of lawyers and economists. That's why I think the success of the PVV is not necessarily a negative thing. In the debate about Europe, the vote of the expert in European law now carries the same weight as the vote of the labourer who is competing with the Polish housepainter."