The right-wing Party for Freedom won a plurality in the Dutch general election but must now form a coalition government.
In 2005, I interviewed Dutch politician Geert Wilders when the threat to his life from Islamic extremists was deemed to be so severe that he was forced to spend a lot of time living in a prison:
Wilders doesn’t like to grumble. “I have to make the best of it,” he told me. . . . “I have a kind of living room, which is quite okay. On either side, there are the cells where the two Libyans were held. In one cell I have my clothing. . . . In the other cell there is my bed.” The prison is, “of course, a terrible place,” but his hosts have done what they can. “They put some lamps in and a TV,” small consolation, I suspect, for a life under siege.
We were chatting, not in the prison, but over coffee in a small, cramped office tucked away at the end of a long corridor somewhere in the depths of the building that houses the Dutch parliament in The Hague. A number of bodyguards sat nearby.
Since then, perhaps not altogether surprisingly given what he has been through, Wilders’s own views have taken a harder, more illiberal turn, and like others outside establishment Europe’s åsiktskorridor (opinion corridor), he has been much, much more “understanding” of Vladimir Putin than he should have been (not least because of the downing of the Malaysian flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine by Russia or its proxies, which claimed the lives of nearly 200 Dutch passengers). The excommunicated can end up turning to highly undesirable company, something that Putin knows how to exploit.
The last paragraph in my 2005 interview with Wilders included this:
Talking to Wilders, I was left with the impression of a work in progress, of a man still trying to think through the full ramifications both of the complex and threatening situation now facing his country and of the remedies he is proposing to resolve it. He does not have all the answers [to the intertwined problems posed by militant Islam and mass immigration], and some of those he has may well be wrong, perhaps very wrong. But to his credit, Wilders is at least asking the right questions, something that few in Holland have been brave enough to attempt before.
But the Dutch establishment did not want those questions to be asked and, repeatedly made it clear that it had no interest in paying attention to the concerns that lay behind them, concerns that were not confined to Wilders, concerns that also covered issues such as increasingly oppressive eco-fundamentalism or deeper EU integration.
The Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Wilders’s Freedom Party (PVV) won a plurality of 37 seats in the 150-seat legislature. His next nearest competitor, a Labor-Green coalition led by Frans Timmermans, won 25 seats. Politicians will now negotiate to form a governing coalition, a process that often takes months in the Netherlands’ highly fragmented electoral system, and Mr. Wilders may not emerge as prime minister. But voters have sent a clear message.
To wit: Voters are fed up with a stale consensus on issues such as immigration and climate policy. The PVV’s biggest campaign issue for two decades has been immigration. Some 400,000 immigrants arrived last year in a country with a total population of nearly 18 million. While last year’s number may have been skewed by refugees from Ukraine, immigration has exceeded 200,000 every year since 2016.
This creates a substantial fiscal burden under the generous Dutch welfare state and strains the housing market. It’s also becoming a culture-war issue as voters worry the country isn’t properly assimilating Muslim migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. Mr. Wilders can present himself as a tribune of these fears, having lived under police protection since an Islamist murdered film director Theo van Gogh in 2004. . . .
Another signature Wilders pledge is to withdraw from various global climate agreements. Environmental policy has roiled Dutch politics for years, with farmers protesting draconian plans to curb nitrogen emissions. That uproar offered a taste of what’s to come once the anticarbon left turns its sights on agriculture, which is a major industry in the Netherlands. Mainstream Dutch parties have been slow to respond, so farmers formed their own protest party which is now the largest bloc in the upper house of the parliament.
The lesson is that if voters conclude they have only one alternative, they’ll grasp it for good or ill.
So, what now?
Wilders is a political pro. As I noted in 2005, referring to the time before he split off to form his own group:
His opposition to Holland’s seemingly perpetual soft-left consensus, stifling corporatism, and multiculturalist muddle can be traced back at least a decade, to his time as a speechwriter for Frits Bolkestein, the then VVD leader, who was one of the first to sound the alarm over the country’s failure to integrate its Muslim minority, a minority that is now about a million strong (out of a total population of a little over 16 million). Wilders himself went on to flourish within the VVD, rising to become its foreign-affairs spokesman. His departure from the party—the catalyst was his opposition to any invitation to Turkey to join the EU—might indeed turn out to be a shrewd move, but equally it could be nothing more than a leap into the wilderness.
Even before the election, Wilders had been softening some of his positions, and that can be expected to continue if he concludes that is the route to government.
The VVD (a party of the liberal center-right that has led Dutch governments since 2010), ended up third this time around with 24 seats to Wilders’s 37 (the lower house of the Dutch parliament has 150 seats). The party’s leadership has now said that it would not enter into formal coalition with Wilders’s Party for Freedom (PVD) but might support it on an ad hoc basis.
The BBB, the upstart farmers’ party formed in response to eco-regulation that threatened to put many of them out of business, saw its share of seats rise from one to seven, and it has said that it could join a coalition with the PVD.
The Daily Telegraph:
Caroline van der Plan, the leader of the BBB farmers party, said she was willing to join a minority government “if it has to, then it has to”.
“In my opinion, it’s about the people and voters wanting something,” she added.
It’s worth noting the BBB’s position in the Dutch senate (16/75 seats). Given the senate’s ability to block legislation, that adds to its clout.
Another potential partner will be the center-right (but, to oversimplify, more Christian Democratic) New Social Contract Party, which came from nowhere to take 20 seats, another sign of how much has been bubbling beneath the surface of Dutch politics. It is Euroskeptic (but, unlike Wilders, rejects the idea of a referendum to withdraw from the EU). It also favors tighter restrictions on immigration but has said that, given Wilders’s anti-Islamic positions, it would like to see added protection against religious discrimination included in the Dutch constitution.
It took 299 days to form a government after the last Dutch election. A repeat is not inconceivable, and we can be confident that the smoke-free rooms of The Hague’s establishment will be the scene of much maneuvering to block Wilders.
Waiting in the wings will be Frans Timmermans, who heads an alliance between the GroenLinks (the green Left) and the Labour Party (PvdA), a pairing that is a reminder of today’s broader alliance between the red and the green — an alliance, incidentally, that once would have horrified socialists, but I digress. This alliance came second, with 25 seats, just ahead of the VVD.
However much he may deny it, Timmermans might still be hoping that he can somehow emerge as prime minister in the event of a stalemate. That looks unlikely to me, but it’s worth keeping Timmermans and what he stands for in mind.
One of the big losers of this week’s Dutch elections . . . was Frans Timmermans, leader of a newly formed alliance of the Labour and Green parties. Timmermans is best known internationally as the former vice-president of the European Commission, where he was the architect and face of the EU’s flagship climate policy, the European Green Deal. To fans, he was hailed as the EU’s ‘climate pope’. Yet it is no exaggeration to say his stringent climate targets are set to impoverish Europe. . . .
It seems the European mainstream media are finally taking note of the disastrous consequences of Timmermans’s Net Zero zealotry. Last week, Politico warned that his EU climate policies could be about to set off a wave of deindustrialisation on a scale we haven’t seen in 50 years.
The report asked the question: ‘Does the architect of Europe’s Green Deal truly understand what he’s unleashed?’ The answer can only be a resounding ‘Yes.’
If Timmermans and those who agree with him get away with this, it won’t do much for the planet, but it will be a gift to Putin — and Xi.