Stephan van Baarle speaks German almost without an accent. How come? “Rammstein,” he often says to visitors from Germany, “I learned German through Rammstein.” This is interesting: The leader of the Dutch party Denk, which mainly represents voters with a Turkish migrant background in parliament, is a fan of an eccentric German band that provokes people with offensive texts and videos. The German music group taught him the language! “There is no other band that makes music like this, and I had to learn German to understand the lyrics.” He later learned grammar at school, at a comprehensive school in Rotterdam.
His party is similar in many ways to the new movement in Germany that will be running in the European elections for the first time, the “Democratic Alliance for Diversity and Awakening,” or DAVA for short. Van Baarle has heard about it, but he hasn’t had any contact with his colleagues yet. DAVA is also aimed at voters of Turkish origin. Both parties are promoting cultural diversity and are against discrimination, supporting traditional family values and fighting “gender ideology”, for social inclusion, child poverty, for Islamic education and against racism. What is not in their programs, but is a suspicion among observers: They are, above all, the long arm of the Turkish state in national politics.
The Dutchman is aware of the accusation: he says in interviews that his party is completely oriented towards the Netherlands and does not receive any money from other countries. Other countries don’t say what to say. There is also no connection to the Dutch mosque mosque association, which is subordinate to the Turkish religious authority, which in turn reports to the president. His party even proposed banning party financing from abroad in parliament. The fact that Denk was perceived as representing Turkey’s interests has to do with the history of its founding. At the end of 2014, two MPs of Turkish origin were expelled from the Social Democratic parliamentary group. The faction had demanded that they distance themselves from the Islamist movement Milli Görüs – this was rejected by the two bosses at the time. A few months later they founded Denk, which means “counterweight” in Turkish. This meant that the Social Democrats and Turks, who believed they had found their political home there, parted ways. The Turks were regular voters, and the Labor Party even wooed them in front of mosques. But the values were far apart.
After the failed military coup in Turkey, Kuzu took part in a solidarity demonstration with Erdogan in Rotterdam in 2016. The right-wing populist Geert Wilders then accused him of only having one loyalty, Turkish. Liberal MPs also criticized the partisanship and demanded that Kuzu condemn Erdogan’s treatment of opposition members. He was just as unwilling to do this as he was to later recognize the Armenian genocide. That was also entirely in line with Ankara. However, it was never proven that Erdogan had direct influence on the party or that it received money from the Turkish state.
Van Baarle was also a member of the Social Democrats at first, but for him the party was not multicultural and it didn’t want to talk about it at all. He became a member of Denk, worked as a consultant for the then party leader, missed entering parliament in 2017, but was elected to the Rotterdam city council a year later. In 2021 he won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies and in 2023 he was re-elected, this time as party and election list leader.
Most of Denk’s voters are of Turkish descent and some are of Moroccan descent. Almost all of them are Muslims, while the party leader describes himself as an agnostic who is still “searching”. Denk promises these people that they do not have to adapt to the majority culture, but rather will be accepted as equal citizens with a different background. Policewomen should be allowed to wear a headscarf while on duty. In Utrecht and Arnhem, the mayors have already allowed their municipal police to do this, but these are exceptions. The party leader complains about growing hostility to religion. “You can be religious and still maintain state neutrality,” he says.
At the front of Denk’s election program is a picture of the right-wing populist Wilders – behind bars. “Punish hatred of Muslims harshly,” it says. Van Baarle has rejected invitations to talks about a new government with Wilders’ participation. “We have to protect the Netherlands, we have to protect democracy against Wilders,” he says.
The right-wing populist won the Dutch parliamentary elections in November by a landslide, getting twice as many seats as before. Denk, on the other hand, did not benefit – the party still only has three MPs. In the Netherlands there is no threshold, seats are allocated in proportion to the number of votes. Denk only got 250,000 votes. The suspicion is that Denk continues to be spectacularly unsuccessful, because with such a shift to the right, the party that advocates for the rights of migrants would have to be much stronger. Experts now believe that Denk is unable to mobilize her own core electorate: the first generation of Turkish immigrants are not particularly interested in elections in the Netherlands, and in the second and third generations, voters with higher education are more likely to vote for the Social Democrats.
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