Wilders

What happened in the Netherlands this week is the biggest political explosion in the sleepy country of pancakes and canals since the campaign-trail assassination of candidate Pim Fortuyn in 2002. That event, however, had no real implications beyond the Dutch borders. Wednesday’s staggering victory of Dutch populist Geert Wilders is a sign that the October 7th bloody pogrom in Israel is finally waking Europe up to the threat from Islamic migration.

Though Wilders will probably not be the next Dutch prime minister (more on this in a moment), it is nevertheless hard to overstate the impact of his party’s shock victory over all others. Americans will remember how it felt to wake up the day after the 2016 voting to the news that Donald Trump would be the next president. It’s a lot like that. By giving Wilders’ party the largest proportion of seats in the next parliament, a large number of Dutch voters delivered a stunning no-confidence vote to their country’s political establishment.

On Dutch election night, I participated in a public discussion at a Hungarian college about Netherlands politics. The Dutchmen on the panel joked repeatedly about how dull Dutch politics usually are. Rotating coalitions of ‘centrist this and social democrat that,’ all very respectable and boring. And then there’s this gadfly, they said, Geert (pronounced “hairt”) Wilders, Party For Freedom (PVV) head. A tall, bleach-blonde anti-migration populist who is the perpetual poep in the punch bowl of Dutch politics.

With his dramatic, swept-back coif and his penchant for anti-Muslim provocation (e.g., he wants to close Dutch mosques and ban the Quran), Wilders has had to live under constant police protection for most of the last two decades, because some Muslims want to slaughter him—as they did Dutch filmmaker and Islam critic Theo van Gogh in 2004. Yet since his breakaway that year from the center-right, pro-business VVD to found his own party, Wilders and his parliamentary colleagues have represented Dutch voters who are tired of the crime and extremism from the many unassimilated Muslim migrants to the country. Wilders voters are also fed up with European Union dictates that harm what they believe are the best interests of the Netherlands.

Election forecasters weren’t prepared for the size of the PVV’s victory this week in part because fondness for Wilders is considered extremely ‘distasteful’ by the Dutch ruling class. To be seen backing Wilders is about the same as wearing a red MAGA cap in downtown Manhattan. The Dutch elites across industries—media, publishing, academia, politics, and business—are extremely insular. They are all left-liberal, they all know each other, and all have utter confidence in their own rectitude and righteous worldview.

Andreas Kinneging, a University of Leiden legal philosopher and one of a handful of Dutch conservative intellectuals, once told me that “you have to be very independent-minded or very cosmopolitan not to be indoctrinated” by the ruling-class’s liberal consensus. What’s more, despite its self-image as liberal and diverse, the Netherlands is a highly conformist society in which dissenters from the progressive consensus find themselves marginalized. Holland’s is the kind of society that places in a Rotterdam public square a statue of Santa Claus displaying an anal sex toy, and expects everyone to congratulate themselves on their ‘tolerance,’ but finds Wilders’ criticism of radical Islam gauche.

Indeed, Pim Fortuyn, the assassinated politician from 2002, embodied the strange contradictions of Dutch political culture. He was an openly gay sensualist who denounced radical Islam mostly because it stood to curb sexual liberty and radical individualism. The Dutch establishment hated him for pointing out this glaring contradiction in their Narrative. Dutch conservatives didn’t trust him, because though they appreciated Fortuyn’s attack on Islamic radicalism and urban crime, they also believed that his celebratory decadence was a big part of Holland’s problem. Fortuyn was shot not by a Muslim, but by an animal-rights activist who said at trial he was disgusted by Fortuyn allegedly scapegoating Muslims. For murdering the country’s leading politician in cold blood, the killer, Volker van der Graaf, received only an 18-year sentence, and was released after serving 12.

Wilders was Fortuyn’s successor. Though no libertine, Wilders nevertheless supports abortion rights, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and other liberal social values that are not controversial in the Netherlands. He stands apart from the Dutch consensus in that he wishes to ‘de-Islamify’ the Netherlands. Though Muslim migrants (mostly of Turkish or Moroccan origin) make up only 5% of the country’s population, they—particularly Moroccans—are massively overrepresented in its crime statistics.

Moreover, Wilders challenges the pragmatic internationalism of the Dutch ruling class by advocating nationalist policies, including floating the idea of “Nexit”—the Netherlands leaving the European Union. Though this is most unlikely to happen, Wilders benefits from the anger among many Dutch people at policies supported by their ruling class, but which they perceive to hurt the national interest. For example, earlier this year Dutch farmers, who are among the world’s most productive, staged mass protests against a government plan to eliminate half their number to meet environmentalist goals. Farmers and their supporters spite Dutch urban elites for their disdain for the welfare of their own countrymen.

What’s more, anti-migration sensibilities among the Dutch are not simply a matter of resentment against Islam. There is an acute housing shortage in the densely population country of 17.5 million. A Rotterdam-based co-panelist of mine said on election night that if nothing changes, his adult son, in his twenties but still living at home, will not be able to afford a house until he is 45 years old. Another Dutch analyst told me that this housing crunch was foreseen two decades ago, but the country’s politicians continued to practice open-door migration from the Third World, despite not building enough residences for the people born in the Netherlands

For nearly two decades, the Dutch media have portrayed Wilders as little more than a Peroxide Pinochet, an avatar of the ‘far right,’ despite the fact that with the exception of his views on Islam, Wilders’ beliefs are thoroughly consonant with the secular Left’s. The media outside of the Netherlands has followed suit. When Americans and others in the Anglosphere read or watch media coverage of the Dutch election, they get exactly the same mindless categorization of Wilders as a ‘far right’ threat that they receive when Western media discuss any populist European party or politician.

In truth, most European parties and politicians routinely characterized as ‘far right’ by Western media—Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Santiago Abascal’s VOX in Spain, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, and others—are significantly to the left of the U.S. Republican Party in some important respects. True, these parties are properly judged by the metrics within their national political cultures, but is it really possible to describe Hungary’s Fidesz as ‘far right’ when it has won the last four elections? Besides, there is an honest-to-God far-right party in Hungary, called Jobbik, which—inconveniently for the liberal media narrative—joined forces with the left-wing opposition in the 2022 election, attempting to oust Fidesz.

The point is this: it is fair to place Geert Wilders on the far right of the Netherlands’ political spectrum, but Anglosphere observers must understand that when the media use the term ‘far right,’ it is less a descriptor than a term of opprobrium. The media want people to think of Wilders (Meloni, Le Pen, Orban, Abascal, et alia) as heralds of fascism’s return. Don’t fall for it. Despite their differences, what all these leaders have in common is a sense that their own peoples should have more sovereignty in making policy decisions, not internationalist cliques in Brussels and in national bureaucracies. When social conservative Viktor Orbán enthusiastically congratulates social liberal Geert Wilders on his big win, the Hungarian leader is celebrating the victory of a politician who also believes that his own people deserve to have more power over their country’s governance than the EU bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the establishment parties continue failing to deal with Europe’s problems—especially migration. Tens of thousands of migrants continue to pour into Europe though massive holes in the dike, none more infamous than the Italian island of Lampedusa. Relatedly, this week’s Dutch election was the first major European voting since the October 7th aftermath brought Islamic masses into the streets of European capitals, singing the praises of Hamas terrorists who slaughter over a thousand Jewish civilians. Though these protests were small in Holland, relative to what the UK and France saw, Dutch people have televisions, and could see their potential future.

It is true that European laws, including treaties, tie the hands of even politicians like Meloni, who are willing to address meaningfully the crisis—but eventually something has to give. Alas, that something is probably not the Wilders victory. Though the PVV led the diverse pack of parties on election night, it did not gain a majority of seats in the next parliament. At last count, the PVV were forecast to take 37 seats in the 150-seat legislature.

Normally that would entitle the party’s leader to form a coalition government. But Wilders is anathema to ‘respectable’ Dutch lawmakers, and it is unlikely that most other parties would work with him. Almost anything could happen, but the most likely outcome is a broad, weak coalition led by the leftist Eurocrat Frans Timmermans, and new elections sometime next year. The failed establishment’s maintenance of a cordon sanitaire around Wilders, despite his thumping victory this week, stands only to further alienate Dutch voters from the ruling class.

For populist conservatives, the Wilders victory is welcome good news. They needed it after Poland’s Law and Justice party lost power this fall, and VOX underperformed in this past summer’s Spanish elections. In the best-case scenario, the political earthquake in the Netherlands this week (and the inevitable establishment anti-populist panic) could presage an even bigger shake-up in next year’s pan-European elections.

As for the Netherlands, who knows what’s coming next? Prior to the Second World War, Holland was one of the most religious and socially conservative countries in Europe. But that conformity concealed internal decay. In the immediate postwar period, Dutch leaders tried to re-establish the system shattered by the German occupation, but people simply went through the motions. When the first winds of the counterculture began blowing in the early 1960s, everything collapsed. Historian James Kennedy, who has written about this transformation, once told me that no Western nation was more thoroughly revolutionized by the ’60s.

“One thing Dutch political culture does well, maybe too well, is to accommodate itself to new moods in society,” Kennedy told me years ago. We spoke in the weeks after the Fortuyn candidacy and assassination had shaken up the country’s staid political culture. In the years that passed, the once-taboo populist sentiments Fortuyn embodied remained present in Dutch politics, in the person of Geert Wilders—waxing and waning, but never going away.

And now those sentiments have just declared themselves as the most popular political program in the country. Wilders has accomplished what Fortuyn was on the verge of doing in 2002, before a killer cut him down. The Dutch old guard will probably get away with robbing Wilders of the premiership he has rightly won, but in so doing, they might just hasten their own collapse by making manifest the same inner rot that took down the Dutch establishment six decades ago.