The Netherlands: Populism from Margins to the Mainstream

The chapter discusses the political context in the Netherlands during the 2019 EP elections and introduces the political communication environment of the country. Particular attention is given to the role of Twitter in Dutch political communication and populism in the country’s party field during the twenty-first century. The empirical Twitter analysis focuses on 11,397 tweets sent from 223 Twitter accounts by various political actors during a one-month period in May 2019. The analysis demonstrates that two-third of the tweets were sent from individual accounts and one-third from party accounts, indicating a personal orientation in the Dutch Twitter campaign. Actors affiliated with the populist radical right parties PVV and FvD were the most active tweeters, and these party affiliations also dominated retweeting and commenting activities, accompanied with actors affiliated with the populist left SP. The most popular themes in tweets contained the elections and EU in general, but the parties discussed their rivals surprisingly often. This echoed a strong polarisation in the Dutch election campaign, which was also indicated in topic modelling and network analysis. Even if populist and Eurosceptic radical parties remained fringe compared to moderate pro-European and critical Europeanist mainstream parties, populist antagonism as such seems to become mainstream in Dutch party field.