Radical Left Parties in Europe by March Luke

Author:March, Luke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis

The Dutch Socialist Party – Towards Post-Populism?

Gaining national parliamentary presence only in 1994, and reaching its electoral highpoint in 2006, the SP appears to have come from nowhere. In fact, the party has an unusual prehistory, being the only now relevant European RLP to emerge predominately from a Maoist groupuscule, the Communist Party of the Netherlands (Marxist-Leninist), itself a descendant of the Communist Party of the Netherlands, KPN. By renaming itself the Socialist Party in 1972, the party aimed both to distance itself from China and the student/intellectual emphasis of post-68 activism (SP 2007a). Although the SP ‘de-Maoized’ after 1975, its Maoist ‘mass line’ perpetuated its adaptable and a-theoretical working-class populism (Voerman 2008). The party ‘went to the people’ to promote the concept of Arbeidersmacht (‘workers’ power’), creating dense local networks of tenants’, medical and community organizations, and affiliated trade unions.

Although the SP attempted to enter national parliament’s lower house (Tweede Kamer) in 1977, for the first 22 years of its existence it polled less than 1 per cent nationally. However, its strong local presence gave it a national backbone long before it achieved a national breakthrough. Notably, it gained a number of municipal councillors (e.g. future leader Jan Marijnissen’s home town of Oss became an SP stronghold) and representation in provincial legislatures (e.g. Noord-Brabant). Younger, more pragmatic elites headed by new leader, Marijnissen, used democratic centralism to centralize the SP after 1988 (Keith 2010b). Although the party emphasizes participatory democracy and direct unmediated contact with the electorate as ‘a social movement with its roots in the people’, its leadership retains tight control (SP 2007c; Keith 2010).

Significant in the SP’s slow rise was its programmatic pragmatism – ‘a very practical SOCIALISM took the place of theoretical socialism’ (SP 2007a) – culminating in the abandonment of Marxism-Leninism in 1991 and a ‘desocialization’ in the 1990s (Voerman 2008). In 1989–1991, other radicals (the KPN, the Pacifist Socialist Party, the ecologist Political Party of Radicals, and the Evangelical People’s Party) reconstituted themselves as GroenLinks (GreenLeft) on an eco-socialist platform. This helped the SP distinguish itself as a more radical labour-orientated party, and it benefited from defectors unhappy with Green-Left’s relatively moderate left-libertarianism. For example, the former GreenLeft national Vice-Chair Erik Meijer joined the SP in 1996 and became its first MEP in 1999.

The SP’s populist profile was continued in the 1990s as it pitched itself as an anti-establishment outsider: its 1994 slogan was ‘Vote Against!’ However, its success in appealing to disaffected Labour Party (PvdA) voters has led it since 2001 to position itself for possible national coalition with Labour and GreenLeft. Its 2002 electoral slogan of ‘Vote For!’ was notable in this regard, whilst in 2004 SP proposed a ‘social alliance’ (which Labour rejected) (SP 2007d). Success in municipal government also bred de-radicalization. As with the German LP, the SP proved increasingly pragmatic at local level. It joined governing coalitions in several large cities, such as Eindhoven (2002–) Groningen (2006–) and Nijmegen (2002–). Its preferred coalition partners were Labour or GreenLeft (e.g.

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