Page - 108 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

108 | Sakina Loukili www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 107–131 Representatives.* While one of the parties, NIDA, will be going national for the first time since its foundation seven years ago, DENK participat- ed in the last national election, in 2017.1 Both parties were founded by Dutch Muslims with a migration background who were previously active in established left-wing political parties. NIDA started as a local political movement in Rotterdam, founded by Mohamed Talbi and Nourdin el Oua- li.2 DENK was founded in 2015 by Tunahan Kuzu and Selçuk Öztürk, who left the left-wing Labor Party (Partij van de Arbeid or PvdA) in the House of Representatives as the result of a conflict about Turkish mosques and integration issues.3 One of the reasons why both parties are doing relatively well is how they relate to and interact with media, which is visible in the ways they deal with mainstream media and employ social media for political campaigns and engagement with their followers. DENK, for example, has become in- famous for the so-called “cut and paste” videos they post on their online platforms,4 and NIDA has been praised for their creative social media cam- paigns.5 Public commentators have also grappled with the question of how religion relates to these political parties. DENK and NIDA have been labelled “Muslim” parties by various Dutch media outlets, although they repeated- ly insist that this description does not capture who or what they are. At the same time, DENK and NIDA seem to be at odds with mainstream me- dia. They have criticized, for example, the way Muslim women have been represented in Dutch newspapers during the COVID-19 outbreak (NIDA) or explicitly warn their supporters of the dangers of “biased” media (DENK). 1 “NIDA” means “call” or “plea” in the Qur’an, and the party uses the concept to refer to the voice of a new “diverse” generation in politics. See NIDA’s “about us” section on their website: https://nida.nl/nida/ [accessed 14 June 2021]. “DENK” refers to the verb “think” in Dutch and means “equality” in Turkish. 2 Markus 2014. 3 Wiegman 2017. 4 In Dutch, “cut-and-paste” (knippen en plakken) usually refers to work that is lazily done by combining (parts of) other works. In the context of DENK, it is often used in an accusatory sense, as they make videos for their social media platforms in which they combine parts of political debates and quotes from adversarial politicians to spin events in order to fit a specific DENK narrative. 5 See Loukili 2020; Valenta 2015. * I would like to extend my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this issue for their extensive and helpful feedback and to my supervisor Ernst van den Hemel for his guidance and advice.