Hans Janmaat verschijnt de laatste tijd regelmatig in de media. Omdat hij niet meer als gevaar gezien wordt, vinden allerlei televisieprogramma’s het amusant om hem als voormalig enfant terrible van de vaderlandse politiek te portretteren. Inderdaad stellen zijn Centrumdemocraten (CD)niets meer voor. Het laatste partijblad is in oktober 1998 verschenen en na het verkiezingsverlies in… Read more
De dwarsverbanden die sommige mensen leggen kunnen soms verbazingwekkend zijn. Dat voorzitter Koetsier van de Verenigingskerk (Nederlandse tak van de Moonsekte) in februari spreker was op een partijbijeenkomst van de uiterst rechtse Nieuwe Nationale Partij (NNP) will have surprised many people. If you go past Wim Koetsier however, look it is already something… Read more
The list includes twelve candidates, most of whom have long walk around with the CD. Remarkably, the current parliamentarian Wim Elst Wood from Haarlem is in second place. The region Kennemerland represents the strongest on the list. This probably has something to do with the circle of success Haarlem. Haarlem… Read more
This thesis concerns the international contacts of the Centrumdemocraten and how the leader of the radical right party influenced the international contacts. I thought of the topic due to my interest in political leadership and the radical right. I had read a lot about the international contacts of the current day radical right and was wondering if the radical right formed a transnational network in the past. This precise topic was not one I had looked into during my bachelor’s and master’s degree. I did study a wide breadth of topics. This included courses on neoliberalism, energy transitions, in and out groups in societies, formations of states and political leadership. However political leadership and the radical right have been the most interesting topics to me.
With extreme right parties in government in Austria and Italy, and Jean-Marie Le Pen contesting the run-off in the 2002 presidential elections in France, few people will dispute their continuing relevance in the politics of Western Europe. Indeed, ever since the first small electoral successes of parties like the Centrumpartij in the Netherlands or the Front National in France in the early 1980s, the extreme right has been the most discussed group of parties both in and outside of the scholarly community. Thousands of newspaper articles and hundreds of pieces of scholarly work have been devoted to extreme right parties, predominantly describing their history, leaders or electoral successes, as well as proclaiming their danger. Remarkably little serious attention has been devoted to their ideology, however. This aspect of the extreme right has been considered to be known to everyone. The few scholars that did devote attention to the ideology of the contemporary extreme right parties have primarily been concerned with pointing out similarities with the fascist and National Socialist ideologies of the pre-war period. If the similarities were not found, this was often taken as ‘proof ’ that the extreme right hides its (true) ideologies, rather than as a motivation to look in a different direction.