Metaphors portraying right-wing politician Geert Wilders in Dutch political cartoons

Abstract

In order to understand the cartoons, a short characterization of Geert Wilders is called for.1 In the late 1990s, after doing several jobs within the party, Wilders became an MP for the VVD. In 2004, he left the VVD (“Volkspartij voor Vrede en Democratie”/“People’s Party for Peace and Democracy”) to found his own “Vereniging Groep Wilders”, a forerunner of the PVV (“Partij voor de Vrijheid”/“Party for Freedom”),, attracting the attention of prospective voters by voicing his opinions in contributions to national newspapers. Compared to other political leaders, Wilders appears to be represented very frequently in Dutch political cartoons, just as right-wing party leader Rita Verdonk was before him. Taking seriously Lakoff and Johnson’s claim that “metaphor is primarily a matter of thought and action, and only derivatively a matter of language”, Forceville proposed a model for visual metaphor that was based on Max Black’s “interaction theory”, but adopted the generally accepted terminology introduced by Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT).