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Too often the term populism remains rather intuitive and fuzzy. It is used in a pejorative way to refer to political movements that are considered as distorting the way ‘democratic politics as we know it’ works. Calling politicians ‘populists’ is often a way to disqualify them. Hence it is important to be precise. For that, I propose to depart from two basic understandings of populism.

In the first way, it is only natural for politicians to be populists: they should listen to the people at large and appeal to them. That is exactly what we expect politicians to do in a democracy. In this sense, all politicians should be populists; the only respect in which they are likely to vary is that some have less ideological spine and thus cater more openly for the popular vote compared to politicians who more insist on particular ideological principles. This is probably what the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte (Jonker 2017) referred to on election night when he distinguished “the wrong kind of populism” from, what is supposedly, the “the right kind”.

However, when we today talk about populist politicians, we are often not just referring to opportunist politicians but to something more specific. Importantly, populism is not inherently related to a particular ideological view. In general, we recognize that there can be both left-wing and right-wing populists. Drawing on the work of Margarat Canovan (1999) and Jan-Werner Müller (2015b; 2016), we can say that populism is rather about a certain style of politics and the underlying understanding of the nature of democratic politics [39] in pluralist societies. Populists distinguish themselves because they rely on a moral notion of a homogenous and pure people that is united by a single common identity and interest, and it is them – the populist politicians – who represent, articulate or even embody, this single united interest.

By implication, populists challenge a pluralist understanding of modern societies in which it is natural that multiple competing interests and identities coexist. Instead, you are either with or against the people. As Jan-Werner Müller (2015b: 86) puts it: “populists consistently and continuously deny the very legitimacy of their opponents (as opposed to just saying that some of their policies are misguided)”. What is more, and indeed fundamental, is that Müller adds that in their denial of the legitimacy of political alternatives, populists are ultimately “willing to risk a crisis of liberal democracy [i.e. the basic political structure/constitution] itself”.

Thus, to complete the argument, why do we care so much about the rise of populism in the UK, the US and the Netherlands? It is basically because of the threat that if they would take effective control, liberal democracy itself may be at risk.

The anti-pluralism that characterizes populism in this interpretation also logically positions it against European integration or indeed any internationalist political engagement, as their inter-national character inherently brandishes these arrangements as pluralist. Populists perceive such international pluralism as an encroachment on the ‘pure’ national identity they claim to represent, and hence are bound to oppose international political arrangements. Thus, it is no coincidence that all national political parties that we can characterize as anti-pluralist populists tend to oppose European integration.

Now, as said, the anti-pluralist populists have not taken control in the Netherlands. Importantly, however, they have not gone away either and it does not look like they will. Instead, they seem to become a permanent force in the Dutch parliament with a vote share of, depending on how you count, between 20 per cent to up to one third of the parliament. What is more, the presence, and continuous political competition, of this sizable minority is felt throughout the party landscape. Many mainstream parties have felt the need to pick up on the kind of issues – like migration, nationalism, Euroscepticism – that these parties highlight and to adjust their positions in their direction. These circumstances reflect what I characterize as “the normalisation of populism”.