No Nonsense Paperback by Merijn Oudenampsen

Product Details

• Publisher: Verso (2026-07-28)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 272 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781804294192
• Item Weight: 306.18 grams
• Dimensions: 23.27 x 15.24 x 1.73 cm

HOW THE NETHERLANDS BECAME A HOTBED OF NEOLIBERALISM

In the 1980s, Dutch politics underwent a neoliberal turn overseen by the Christian Democrat Ruud Lubbers. It formed part of an interna­tional trend, famously spearheaded by Reagan and Thatcher. What was new, however, was the way Lubbers depoliticized his reforms and sold them to the public as ‘no-nonsense’ politics. When social democrats and trade unions came to embrace neoliberal reform in the mid-1990s, an elite consensus was forged.

In this path-breaking study, Merijn Oudenampsen traces the long shadow these developments cast over Dutch politics. Neoliberal­ism helped nurture the right-wing populism of Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders and inspired the austerity policies of the right-wing liberal Prime Minister Mark Rutte. A bleak political template was created for the world.

About the Author

Merijn Oudenampsen is a political scientist, specialized in the study of political ideas. For his PhD, he studied the ideas behind the rise of right-wing populism in the Netherlands. It was published as The Rise of the Dutch New Right (Routledge, 2021) and won the Choice Outstanding Academic Titles Award. Together with the historian Bram Mellink he wrote the book Neoliberalisme: Een Nederlandse Geschiedenis, which traces the history of neoliberalism in the Netherlands all the way back to the 1930s. He writes a column for the Dutch weekly De Groene Amsterdammer and is based in Amsterdam.