119 4 Theoretical Framework We know party gatekeepers deciding on who gets a shot at running for office let “sober electoral calculations” (Dancygier, 2017: 70) carry the day. The assumption is that if including Muslim politicians upsets voters with egalitarian worldviews, it may make more sense not to include them at all (idem). By bringing the literature on political inclusion into conversation with the literatures on homonationalism, populist radical right politics, stereotyping and projection, this paper tests this electoral assumption made by party gatekeepers. The literature on homonationalism (Puar, 2013, 2015) posits that political elites, pundits and voters deem attitudes towards homosexuality to be essential to national self-understanding, thereby weaponizing homosexuality to discredit cultural others, particularly Muslims. In short, anti-Muslim rhetoric is justified by the claim that Muslims do not accept homosexuality (Bracke, 2012; Dudink, 2017; Mepschen et al., 2010; Rahman, 2014; Spierings, 2020a, 2020b). Homosexuality of course is not the only supposedly western value weaponized against Muslims: gender equality, division of church and state, freedom of speech, anti-Semitism and personal freedoms serve similar purposes (see discussions on secularist nativism (Kešić and Duyvendak, 2019) and civilizationism (Brubaker, 2017)). But as the acceptance of homosexuality remains a major theme driving secularist nativist and civilizationist rhetoric (Kešić and Duyvendak, 2019: 447), it warrants further study. Among populist radical right parties, homosexuality plays both “trivial and pivotal” (Spierings, 2020b) roles: trivial because dedication to the cause does not extend beyond rhetoric; pivotal because they successfully weaponize the cause to paint Muslims as outsiders. France, Germany and the Netherlands all have radical right populists in Parliament: most notably Rassemblement National (RN) in France, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, and the Freedom Party (PVV)20 in the Netherlands (Albertazzi and Mcdonnell, 2008; Althof, 2018). Although sometimes combined with traditional Christian conceptions of the family, all three political parties have turned to homonationalist rhetoric as an alibi for criticizing Muslims (Brubaker, 2017; Marzouki et al., 2016; McGlynn, 2020; Snipes and Mudde, 2020). Against this backdrop of homonationalism and radical right populism, it seems eminently plausible that many voters shape their expectations of Muslim politicians through stereotypes. I understand stereotypes to be “public information about social groups,” not necessarily learned through direct contact but more often learned indirectly through, for instance, political leaders (Stangor and Schaller, 1996: 10). France, Germany, and the Netherlands all have histories of politicians venting Islamophobic rhetoric in parliament, including Marine LePen in France, Thilo Sarrazin 20 While PVV has the longest presence in the Dutch parliament, it has more recently been joined by new radical right populist parties such as Forum for Democracy (FvD) and JA21.
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