Why Wilders won

The populist revolt gains momentum in the Netherlands. Whether Geert Wilders and the PVV can deliver real change remains to be seen.

The Maas River, Rotterdam

That a growing populist backlash in Dutch politics was in the pipeline was obvious. The only real surprise was that it took the form of Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV). In Tweede Kamer (Lower House) elections held on 22 November, they pulled in 37 of 150 seats, leaving the recently-formed merger of Labor and Greens trailing considerably behind with just 25 seats. Within the context of the deeply pluralistic Dutch political system, the PVV victory was considered a landslide. Given that it was wholly unexpected in many quarters, it also came as a bombshell.

For those paying attention, however, the writing was on the wall. In March of last year in, a new party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement (“BoerBurgerBeweging”, BBB), swept Upper House elections, a major upset for the status quo. Subsequently an additional challenge to the incumbent parties began emerging in the form of Pieter Omtzigt, the highly regarded former Christian Democrat (CDA) parliamentarian who left that party earlier this year to establish his own, the New Social Contract (NSC). The latter pulled in twenty seats, making the fourth largest party, only slightly behind outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s VVD, which came in third with 24 seats.

Leaving aside the specific composition of the new Lower House, and what kind of governing coalition will emerge in due time, it is abundantly clear that big changes are afoot. For one, some 108 seats changed hands, beating the former record set in 2002 of 92 seats. More important, the mainstream, so-called “centrist” parties that formed the four successive ruling coalitions under Mark Rutte lost around half their seats. As pollster Maurice de Hond points out, the mainstream parties are imploding; until recently they together pulled in around 80% of the vote, with the remaining 20% going to fringe parties. That ratio is now nearly reversed. The center-right Christian Democrats (CDA), which back in the 1950s once enjoyed absolute parliamentary majorities (something unthinkable today) and not only here but in many other Western European countries played such a central role in defining postwar politics, has been reduced to a pitiful five seats; one imagines that the once equally stalwart Christian Democrats in Germany and elsewhere must be nervously looking over their shoulders. Likewise, had the once mighty Dutch Labour party not joined forces with the Dutch Green Party, it too would probably have faced a similar fate.

Back to Geert Wilders. Who is he? Many if not most of you will have heard of him; he has been well-known (infamous if you prefer) figure on the political landscape for at least two decades. If you don't know who he is, this short profile posted on RT might be helpful:

Wilders’ began his political career as a member of outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). Following the assassination of Pim Fortuyn – a popular politician and critic of Islam – in 2002, Wilders made a series of speeches condemning multiculturalism and Islamic immigration. When the VVD endorsed Türkiye’s bid for EU membership in 2004, Wilders split from the party and formed the PVV.

In a manifesto published two years later, Wilders called for a moratorium on all non-Western immigration to the Netherlands, a ban on the founding of new mosques, and a tax on the wearing of the Hijab by Muslim women.
Wilders went on to call the Islamic Prophet Mohammed “the devil,” the Quran “a fascist book” that should be outlawed, and Moroccan immigrants “street terrorists.”

Wilders’ hardline positions and proclivity for political stunts – including his hosting of a ‘Prophet Mohammed cartoon competition’ in 2019 – have led to death threats from extremist preachers and terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda. He was placed under police protection in 2004, after plans for his assassination were discovered, and to this day he is watched 24/7 by armed officers.

(“Who is Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam Dutch election winner?” 24 November 2023)

One could offer an objective analysis of a country’s immigration policies and critique them from a traditional Left perspective (undermining the economic bargaining power of labor) or from the Right (the effect on social cohesion and national identity). But that is not what Wilders does; he uses hyperbole and media stunts for self-aggrandization. Like Donald Trump, he’s rhetorically gifted, he has a way with words and is adept at puncturing conceits of the powerful. Verbally, he’s a fighter, and that can be, to a degree, a good thing in a politician. His demagoguery has proven successful, at least within certain demographic, making him a permanent fixture of the Dutch political scene. But it has also prevented him from gaining real political power, making him, as is so often the case with these kinds of figures, his own worst enemy. Other parties have refused to work him, saying that his demonization of Islam is discriminatory and unconstitutional. There has been a cordon sanitaire around the PVV. Until now.

So what happened in November?

I don’t want to dive too deeply into the weeds of domestic politics, so I’ll try to summarize as succinctly as possible. First, outgoing prime minister Mark Rutte apparently saw his fourth coalition was weak and failing, and he decided to pull the plug over a relatively minor detail of asylum policy (family reunification), calculating the his party, the VVD, would thereby be able to “own” the issue in the subsequent elections. It proved to be a fatal miscalculation. Rutte’s successor as party leader, Dilan Yeşilgöz, equivocated in the run-up to the election as to whether the VVD would continue to refuse to work with the PVV, thereby inadvertently partly legitimizing Wilders his party. Also, while Wilders was excluded early election debates, he was included in later ones. One in particular, organized by SBS on 16 November, was seen by pollster and data guru Maurice de Hond as a “gamechanger”; the moment when Wilders came in from the cold. He was no longer simply the protest vote of earlier elections, but had became a viable “strategic vote” for many, a viable option. And so he received a last-minute groundswell of support which caught just about everyone but sharp-eyed Maurice de Hond off guard.

The morning after the election, the cosmopolitan professional class, which encompasses virtually the entire mainstream media culture, gasped in horror and clutched their pearls, wailing that Dutch “democracy” was now threatened by an ominous force outside their control. In Amsterdam, a bastion of Labour/Green radical progressivism, a Dutch flag was flying at half-mast on the Montelbaans tower near where I live. This is a public building, like a church, and I found it petulant and churlish gesture.

At this point, it needs to be said: Wilders and the PVV is characterized by much more than just inflammatory anti-Islam rhetoric. In fact, Wilders appears to distancing himself from the latter the closer he get to the levers of power:

Dutch election winner Geert Wilders has abandoned three controversial anti-Islamic legislative proposals that critics have deemed unconstitutional, as his Party for Freedom (PVV) continues negotiations to form a governing coalition, according to a PVV statement on Monday.

(“Dutch election winner walks back Muslim ban”, RT, 9 January 2024)

Whether this is pragmatism or opportunism, I leave for you to decide. Perhaps Wilders remains a dedicated Islamophobe, but his party does not have an absolute parliamentary majority; far from it, hence they must compromise to achieve anything, obviously.

As part of its election campaign the PVV proposed a number of economic measures to restore the steadily deteriorating purchasing power of the citizenry, such as raising the minimum wage, abolishing sales tax on food, raising rental subsidies, and abolishing health care deductibles. Although the PVV may, conventionally speaking, espouse conservative cultural ideas, in terms of economics it embraces decidedly leftwing populism, very similar in fact to the electoral program of the Dutch Socialist Party (SP), which pulled in only four seats in November.

As the leading party, but one without an absolute majority, Wilders’ PVV is entitled to initiate negotiations to form a coalition. That process, which can take months, is now underway. At this point, it does not look likely that Wilders himself will take on the role as prime minister, but rather remain party leader in the Tweede Kamer. While further speculation about the contours of what the next coalition would most likely be in vain, one thing is clear: the establishment, by which I mean the Dutch state bureaucracy, the mainstream media, academia, corporate networks, the EU, and of course the NATO, will strenuously oppose this populist “onslaught” and do everything in their considerable power to marginalize Wilders and discredit the PVV. It isn't that he represents a genuinely profound threat to security and prosperity, it is simply that, like Donald Trump, he cannot be wholly trusted and controlled. Since the end of WWII, the Netherlands has been a charter member of the European unification project, with very close ties to the UK, and enjoys what one might describe as a kind of honorary status as “sixth eye” among the Five Eye alliance. As such, the Atlanticists can ill afford to be defeated in Holland; though not a large and significant player in the European context, its “loss” to the growing nationalist tide would be a profound symbolic blow.

Likewise, in Brussels, the EU establishment may preach “diversity” against a backdrop of rainbow flags, but it does not brook any even marginal dissent from the Party Line. It wants nation-state leaders to dispense with any sentimental notion of national sovereignty; they must be wholly onboard with every detail of the ever-expanding EU agenda. As such, Brussels has considerable means at its disposal to coerce compliance. “We have tools”, as Ursula von der Leyen ominously instructed Giorgia Meloni, when the latter’s right-populist party swept recent elections in Italy (“EU's von der Leyen delivers veiled warning to Italy's right wing”, 23 Sept 2022). As Europe faces a mounting economic crisis that may well go beyond just another cyclical recession, there is talk emanating from Brussels of the need to return to austerity, to begin enforcing again the budgetary and deficit restrictions (the so-called Maastricht criteria) which limit budget deficits and public debt (the were temporarily lifted during the Covid crisis). That means any efforts by not wholly supine, compliant governments to pursue their own agendas will be hamstrung by economic policy. In view of this, the PVV may well not succeed in delivering on its economic populism. It is entirely possible, and even likely, that Geert Wilders and his party will be sandboxed, isolated, and ultimately discredited by being thwarted from delivering concrete results. But here as elsewhere in Europe, the populist genie is out of the bottle. It make take several electoral cycles, but Europe's wretched and dysfunctional political class, distrusted and discredited, is headed inexorably towards the dustbin of history. How this will take place and what the outcome will be will vary from country to country, but the general trajectory is clear.