132 4 widespread (Farris, 2017; Rahbari, 2021). Secular nativism highlights the so-called incompatibility of Islam with secular values and cultural Christianity (Brubaker, 2017: 1204; Kešić and Duyvendak, 2019: 448), while catch-all civilizationism combines homonationalism, femonationalism, secular nativism and concerns over Islam’s incompatibility with freedom of speech – all issues that render the dominant group as more civil than those who are marginalized by being labelled culturally distinct and other (Brubaker, 2017: 1204). Indeed, Muslim politicians such as Rashida Tlaib in the US, Zarah Sultana in the UK, Cem Özdemir in Germany and Kauthar Bouchallikh in the Netherlands experienced backlash on all these fronts (e.g. Bailer et al., 2021; Saris and Ven, 2021) but won their seats by wide electoral margins24 (e.g. Bashri, 2019). I question whether the backlash party gatekeepers fear is truly electoral, or merely discursive. Indeed, homonationalist, femonationalist, secularist, nativist, and civilizationist narratives might be the preserve of citizens who would not vote for parties that mainly attract voters with egalitarian worldviews. Discursive backlash could even benefit political parties by attracting voters committed to righting discursive wrongs and contributing to the equal representation of Muslim politicians. Kauthar Bouchallikh is the first member of the Dutch Parliament who wears a hijab. She was elected to Parliament in 2021 for the Green Party (GroenLinks). Her candidacy was anything but straightforward, with the Green Party sustaining a great deal of criticism for placing her on the party list. As the election campaign progressed, she became a lightning rod for online abuse, with 30 percent of the messages she received on Twitter being hateful (Saris and Ven, 2021). She was criticized for once attending a lecture by a homophobic imam and for lecturing to youths from the Turkish religiouspolitical movement Millî Görüş, where girls and boys sat in separate parts of the room. The Green Party struggled to reply to the criticisms. Bouchallikh’s place on the party list was too low to enter Parliament without enough preferential votes and it is very uncommon that lower-placed politicians enter Parliament with the preferential voting system in place in Dutch politics25. But after counting all the votes, it turned out she had secured enough preferential votes to enter Parliament anyway (idem). Despite the discursive backlash against Bouchallikh, she succeeded electorally. On her first day in Parliament, activists welcomed her as the first member of Dutch parliament to wear a headscarf, together with other parliamentarians representing descriptive novelties such as the first black woman to found and lead a political party (Sylvana Simons) and the first trans politician (Lisa van 24 Kiesraad, Officiële Uitslagen Verkiezingen. Available at: https://www.kiesraad.nl/ - accessed on November 16 2023 25 Kiesraad, Officiële Uitslagen Verkiezingen. Available at: https://www.kiesraad.nl/ - accessed on November 16 2023
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