Wilders remains an outsider despite Dutch election ‘victory’
Geert Wilders, leader of the anti-immigration and anti-Islam ‘Party for Freedom’ (PVV), is being portrayed as the ‘winner’ of this week’s Dutch general election.
And in a sense he is, though many H&D readers will be sceptical of his variety of populist ‘right-wing’ politics.
First of all, we have to understand that he has ‘won’ in a very different sense to ‘winning’ a British election, let alone an American one. While in the UK the leader of the largest party is almost 100% guaranteed to become Prime Minister, and is very likely to have a majority in Parliament without requiring support from other parties, in the Netherlands multi-party politics has been pushed to the extreme.
After these elections there are fifteen parties represented in the Dutch Parliament, even though it has only 150 seats. The smallest of them (a tiny right-wing splinter party) has one seat even though they polled just 0.7%.
Wilders ‘won’ the election with 23.6%, well ahead of his nearest rivals, but has fewer than half the seats required to obtain a parliamentary majority.
It seems almost certain that some form of coalition will be fixed that will exclude Wilders from power.
The good news is that any such coalition is likely to be unstable and short-lived. Dutch voters are shifting in large numbers towards anti-immigration positions, though even those who take this view are divided on other issues.
The mainstream conservative VVD (which has been part of coalition governments and often provided prime ministers for the past forty years) had a disastrous election, falling to third place and losing almost a third of its seats.
The VVD had thought it was a bright idea to elect a new female leader of Turkish origin who parroted some of Wilders’ anti-immigration ideas, though less convincingly. Both she and the leaders of other rival parties were easily outshone by Wilders in televised election debates.
The centrist liberal party D66 also had a disastrous election under an inept new leader. In addition to Wilders, the main winners were a new centre-right party NSC (which will almost certainly refuse to enter any coalition that includes Wilders) and a Green/Left alliance led by a former European Commissioner, Frans Timmermans, which of course is entirely anti-Wilders.
Despite his election ‘victory’ Wilders is now finding that all his years of subservience to the Zionist lobby have bought him no credit at all with the political mainstream, who continue to shun him.
Dutch politics and society remain chronically divided and it’s difficult to see any stable outcome in the near future, whether on immigration, or on environmental policy, or on more traditional issues involving taxation and the size of the welfare state.
One big advantage for Wilders is that his main rival on the anti-immigration wing of politics, Thierry Baudet’s FvD, discredited itself by pursuing crank anti-vaccination policies and extreme Putinism. The FvD lost more than half of their previous vote and now have only three seats in Parliament.
Wilders himself has toned down his Putinism, but remains essentially anti-Ukraine and pro-Israel – positions that will divide opinion sharply among H&D readers.
Demonstrate for Spain and for Europe: not for “democracy”! – Isabel Peralta reports from the front line in Madrid
H&D correspondent Isabel Peralta has been on the front line of recent demonstrations in central Madrid. In this frank assessment of the events in Calle Ferraz, their motive, and consequences, she draws a clear distinction between the radical nationalist response and “constitutional” conservatism.
(Click the bottom right of the screen above to view the podcast with more easily legible English subtitles.)
The disgraceful amnesty deal offered by socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to Catalan subversives is (Isabel points out) legal under Spain’s “democratic” 1978 constitution. Contrary to assertions by conservatives and reactionaries, the problem is not that Sánchez has acted unconstitutionally or anti-democratically.
The problem is “democracy” (in its present form) and the constitution itself. Yet the demonstrations have, Isabel believes, indicated that a revolutionary spirit – the true European spirit – is reviving among young Spaniards.
Chaos on the streets of Madrid – H&D correspondent on front line against subversion
As predicted in recent editions of H&D, Spain’s socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has secured a parliamentary deal to maintain himself in office (at least for a short time), but the price for his self-interested pact is a fundamental betrayal of Spain itself.
Sánchez has offered leaders of the Catalan separatist party Junts an amnesty for their seditious crimes. In addition to Junts and his own PSOE, the Prime Minister relies on a second Catalan party, two Basque parties (including terrorist murderers closely allied to Sinn Fein / IRA), and a collection of extreme leftists.
For almost two weeks now, Spanish patriots – ranging from conservatives to Falangists and national socialists – have been protesting in the streets opposite the PSOE headquarters in Calle Ferraz, central Madrid.
Our own correspondent Isabel Peralta has been on the front line at the barricades, facing an increasingly politicised and brutal police force. Demonstrators have been attacked with tear gas and police batons.
In response to the radicalisation of Spanish youth, Isabel and her comrades are forming a new organisation, Sección de Asalto. As their banner last night – “Defend Europe” – indicated, they do not see this struggle as merely another episode in the party political game.
Indeed, as Isabel made clear in her article in Issue 115 of H&D, the reactionary party Vox and their potential conservative allies in the Partido Popular are merely an alternative face of the same problem. Neither globalist capitalism nor fake “socialism” – and least of all a separatist assault on Spain itself – offers any hope for Spaniards.
Though reactionaries are trying to deny this logic, the “democratic” constitution foisted on Spain in 1978 is part of the problem. Spain requires a national revolution – not an imitation of the Franco dictatorship which wasted the revolutionary potential of the martyred Falangist leaders of the 1930s, but a revival of the spirit and ideals of Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and Onesimo Redondo.
H&D will have further reports soon from the frontline in Madrid, where the sinister forces of subversion that threaten all of Europe are now seen in their clearest light, and are being boldly defied.
10 years on: remember Golden Dawn’s martyrs – Giorgos Fountoulis and Manolis Kapelonis
Ten years ago today – on 1st November 2013 – the Athens headquarters of the Greek racial nationalist party Golden Dawn was attacked by ‘anti-fascist’ terrorists. At least a dozen bullets were fired and two Golden Dawn activists – Giorgos Fountoulis (27) and Manolis Kapelonis (22) – were killed.
No-one has ever been charged with these murders.
Five weeks earlier, many Golden Dawn members including their leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos had been arrested. Following years of pre-trial detention and house arrest, 68 party officials were convicted. In effect the party was banned.
The enemies of Greek nationalism – in fact the enemies of Europe – operate with their left hand via Marxist and anarchist terrorism, and with their right hand via the courts.
In 2013, eight days after the murders of Giorgos and Manolis, H&D‘s assistant editor spoke at a rally outside the Greek Embassy in London. This week racial nationalists from across Europe gathered in Athens. Even today, the treacherous rulers of Greece fear the legacy of Golden Dawn – and they especially fear those who are inspired by the memory of Giorgos Fountoulis and Manolis Kapelonis.
A ban on all public gatherings has been imposed and several rail and metro stations have been closed. Twenty–one activists from the Italian organisation CasaPound were detained at Athens airport as they arrived to pay tribute to the Golden Dawn martyrs.
H&D readers join our European comrades in remembering Giorgos and Manolis. Their heroic sacrifice will continue to inspire resistance to the betrayal of Europe. And on the day when the true Europe is fully liberated, we shall continue to pay tribute to their memory.
Starmer and Corbyn’s Putinist friend
Yesterday’s election in Slovakia has been reported in the mainstream press (and even by some H&D readers who should know better) as a victory for the ‘populist right’, or even for ‘nationalists’.
In fact the election winner (and given the fissiparous nature of Slovak politics it’s important to point out that he ‘won’ with less than 23% of the vote and will need to find coalition partners) was the ex-communist Robert Fico, whose social democratic party Smer remains a member of all the usual international alliances of mainstream leftwing parties.
The only reason why some on the vacuous “dissident right” have welcomed Fico’s victory, is that this Slovak leftist is a de facto supporter of the Kremlin’s anti-Ukrainian, anti-European aggression.
Fico has insisted that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a war started “by Ukrainian nazis and fascists”. And predictably this Stalinist rhetoric has been echoed by the Kremlin’s useful idiots, including some so-called ‘nationalists’.
Ironically, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is a longstanding partner of Fico’s party in three international socialist alliances – the Party of European Socialists, Progressive Alliance, and Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. The Slovak party is also part of an even more leftwing organisation, the Socialist International, where Starmer’s Labour now only has “observer” status.
In 2006 Smer was suspended from the Party of European Socialists because Fico accepted a ‘far right’ party into his coalition government, but this suspension ended in 2008 and Fico now seems to be accepted by the likes of Starmer and Germany’s social democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz as a good socialist comrade!
During the coming days and weeks, Smer will look for coalition allies. The Slovak nationalist party SMS might again be one of them, but with 5.6% (10 MPs) it has less than half the support it enjoyed when it joined one of Fico’s previous coalitions in 2006.
The real kingmakers this time will be another leftwing party, Hlas, with 14.7% and 27 MPs. We shouldn’t expect much in the way of political principle in these negotiations, still less should we expect anything resembling racial nationalism, whether or not SMS ministers join the payroll.
What we can sadly continue to expect is that the ignorant and deluded ‘dissident right’ will continue to disgrace themselves by applauding Putinist victories, even when these victories are for parties of the socialist / social democratic left.
The Rudolf Hess memorial, the Asian Marxist lawyer, and subversion in Spain – a strange tale of the new ‘European’ left
Edinburgh’s extradition court has been the scene of a drama played out across several episodes, demonstrating certain common factors among Europe’s enemies, and the deep historical roots of a challenge facing all European patriots.
H&D‘s assistant editor – writing at the Real History blog – today explains the strange story of the Rudolf Hess memorial stone, an Asian Marxist lawyer, and subversion in Spain – an extraordinary tale of the new ‘European’ left.
Visit this site after 12th October for an update direct from the extradition court in Edinburgh, where the fate of Vincent Reynouard will be decided. Click here to subscribe to H&D so that you can learn the full story in our November edition, and obtain the two-part interview with Vincent Reynouard in issues 115 and 116 of H&D.
Jeremy Corbyn – the terrorists’ friend – attacks H&D and Isabel Peralta
Former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has launched an extraordinary attack on Heritage and Destiny, calling for our meetings to be banned. In a letter to Home Secretary Suella Braverman, Corbyn has targeted our European correspondent Isabel Peralta, demanding that she should be refused entry to the United Kingdom.
Isabel has never been convicted of any crime, but has twice been detained and questioned by UK Border Force, abusing their powers under the Terrorism Act.
Anyone interested in real terrorism should be looking not at Heritage & Destiny and Isabel Peralta, but at the close allies of Jeremy Corbyn, who has for decades been known as terrorism’s best friend in Parliament.
From 1985 to 1989 Corbyn was national secretary and later president of the notoriously violent group Anti-Fascist Action. AFA’s terrorist core – Red Action – held its meetings in Corbyn’s constituency office in Islington, north London, and provided security for Corbyn and for one of his closest political allies, IRA godfather Gerry Adams.
Even Corbyn’s own party has often been embarrassed by his especially close ties to the IRA. In 1984 Corbyn was reprimanded by Labour’s chief whip for taking IRA terrorists on a tour of Parliament. In 1987 Corbyn tried to appoint a notorious Irish republican sympathiser and anarchist, Ronan Bennett, as his parliamentary research assistant, but the authorities refused on security grounds to give Bennett a House of Commons pass.
Two of Corbyn’s comrades in Anti-Fascist Action and Red Action – Patrick Hayes (AFA London organiser) and Jan Taylor – were given long jail sentences for bombing the Harrods store in London on behalf of the IRA. Their fellow AFA activist, Liam Heffernan, was jailed for stealing explosives on behalf of another republican terrorist gang, the INLA.
A senior police officer later told the Sunday Times that Corbyn “knew they were open supporters of terrorism and he supported them”.
There has never been any suggestion that Corbyn was personally involved in specific acts of terrorism, but for decades police and security services monitored his close connections with terrorists and their active supporters. They were especially concerned that terrorists invited into Westminster premises by Corbyn had been able to familiarise themselves with the layout and security of the Houses of Parliament.
In 1985, Corbyn was the keynote speaker at Red Action’s national meeting. He maintained close ties for years to Red Action, a group whose journal openly stated: “both as an organisation and as individuals we support the activities of the Provisional IRA and the INLA unconditionally and uncritically.”
Some of the paymasters of “anti-fascism” will be embarrassed by the fact that Jeremy Corbyn is now championing their cause. In addition to his support for the IRA, Corbyn has frequently been accused of “anti-semitism”, for example over his praise for a mural that promoted allegedly “anti-semitic tropes”.
H&D has been contacted by several Londoners appalled by Corbyn’s consistent association with terrorists and their propagandists. We have been offered premises in Corbyn’s Islington constituency to hold our next meeting, and we are discussing several options for this event.
Unlike Jeremy Corbyn’s murderous friends and allies, Isabel Peralta – the young Spanish activist whom Corbyn has so disgracefully targeted – has never committed any offence against UK law. In reply to Corbyn’s attack, Isabel writes:
“I honestly find it hard to believe that my mere presence in a country is so dangerous that even one of the main English politicians, former leader of the second-largest political force in England, writes to the Home Secretary asking for me to be banned. I find it difficult to believe that someone who has not committed any crime and has never been convicted is ostracised or exiled from several European countries. But it is like this. Our fanaticism moves mountains and our enemies have more faith in our triumph than we do ourselves.
“One does not fear a madman, one does not take seriously a merely anachronistic or atavistic enemy. There is fear of a revolution. We are a revolution, a living, organic idea, destined to be proudly implemented throughout Europe.”
Let there be no doubt: H&D will continue to expose the truth about Jeremy Corbyn and his crazed Marxist and Irish Republican friends. We shall continue to fight for the true Europe. And we shall contest (at whatever level proves necessary) any attempt to intimidate or exclude our comrade and European correspondent Isabel Peralta.
Death of an embarrassment
We are unlikely ever to find out for certain who was responsible for the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his right-hand man Dmitry Utkin on 23rd August after their plane crashed in unexplained circumstances.
Many observers will quite reasonably point to the long history of Kremlin dictators assassinating their rivals. The KGB and its predecessors and successors have frequently tracked down ‘traitors’ even in foreign countries, let alone those such as Prigozhin and Utkin who had the temerity to continue to challenge the Kremlin’s authority within Russia.
Yet even today we don’t know for sure whether (for example) the KGB murdered Walter Krivitsky in the Bellevue Hotel, Washington, in February 1941, or whether he killed himself in the despair and isolation of exile.
Even in death, Prigozhin and Utkin continue to be an embarrassment to the European cultural and political traditions whose symbolism they and their Wagner Group abused.
It seems unlikely that Prigozhin had the slightest interest in or knowledge of Wagner, beyond a vague idea that he was Adolf Hitler’s favourite composer, and that the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ from Die Walküre was used to accompany scenes of American helicopter gunships slaughtering Vietnamese civilians in the Hollywood film Apocalypse Now.
Neither did he or Utkin demonstrate any appreciation of national socialist ideas, nor of Adolf Hitler’s true political legacy.
What Prigozhin, Utkin and their fellow ‘Wagner Group’ thugs liked was the Hollywood image of ‘nazi brutality’. They revelled in slaughter and profited from selling their murderous services to sundry African dictators. In so doing, they acted as arm’s length instruments of their Kremlin sponsor Vladimir Putin, who of course naturally took his cut from their numerous criminal enterprises.
This cosy partnership fell apart for only one reason. The Wagner Group was in the forefront of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, given special license to scour Russia’s prisons for rapists and murderers who could be unleashed on Ukrainian civilians. As is so often the case with mercenary forces, their reward was to come largely from looting their victims, in what was expected to be a swift conquest.
Ukrainian resistance prevented that scenario, and left Prigozhin’s forces under fire and under paid.
The consequence was that Prigozhin and Utkin turned on their Kremlin master, and even after the swift evaporation of their attempted ‘coup’, Putin was left looking enfeebled. If he believed that killing Prigozhin and Utkin would be a form of political Viagra, Putin is sure to be disappointed.
For European nationalists, the embarrassment of the Wagner Group’s ‘nazi’ iconography continues. Not only are we faced by endless news bulletins describing the dead mercenaries as ‘neo-nazis’, but we also have the living embarrassment of some of their associates, such as another supposed ‘neo-nazi’ gang allied to the Kremlin, Rusich and its co-leader Yan Petrovsky.
Last month Petrovsky, who sadly (unlike Prigozhin) does have real connections to the fringe of European nationalism, was arrested while passing through Helsinki airport. He co-founded Rusich with a sadist and football hooligan from St Petersburg, Alexey Milchakov, and they have polluted various corners of the internet with a combination of crude, fake ‘neo-nazism’ and advocacy of anti-European genocide in Ukraine.
But like the Wagner Group, Petrovsky and Milchakov turned against Putin. Rusich is now complaining loudly that the Kremlin has done nothing to help Petrovsky after his arrest.
These gangsters (large and small) are fighting each other as their plan to loot Ukraine falls apart.
For Western European nationalists the broader lesson is clear. We must firmly dissociate ourselves from sadistic thugs and mindless scum who discredit our cause, not only in Russia but throughout the White world.
Deadlock in Spanish election as ‘right-wing’ Vox stumbles
During the past fortnight British media coverage of the Spanish general election has verged on hysteria as journalists and politicians (including former Prime Minister Gordon Brown) recycled the tired ‘anti-fascist’ rhetoric of Spain’s Civil War era. Many on the British left are eager to revive memories of that era, since they are dimly aware that unlike today’s ‘socialists’, their fathers and grandfathers actually believed in something.
The conservative Daily Mail ran a scaremongering article that associated today’s Vox party with 1930s nationalism, and even mangled nationalist history by conflating the reactionary caudillo Francisco Franco with the radical Falange.
The reason for all this hysteria was that Vox – a party that the media likes to portray as ‘far right’ – seemed likely to be the power-broker putting the conservative Partido Popular (PP) into government.
In the September issue of H&D, our correspondent Isabel Peralta will explain the true nature of Vox and the true crisis of Spanish ‘democracy’, in the context of yesterday’s election results and the inevitable post-election horse-trading.
But in this initial report we simply look at the results.
Vox polled 12.4% (down from 15.1% at the previous election in 2019) and lost 19 of its previous 52 seats in the Congress of Deputies. The conservative PP with just over 33% of the vote (up from 20.8% at the 2019 election) won 47 extra seats and now has 136. Even if the PP struck a deal with Vox‘s 33 Congressional deputies, the combined ‘right’ would be seven short of a majority.
Spanish elections are decided on a regional party list system, similar to the one used in European parliamentary elections that led to Andrew Brons and Nick Griffin being elected as MEPs in 2009. Each of the fifty provinces elects a list of Congress seats (ranging in size from Madrid with 37, to the mountainous province of Soria with two), while the autonomous Spanish cities in North Africa – Ceuta and Melilla – have one seat each.
Whereas Vox is essentially a right-wing conservative party, there were also candidates from the tiny nationalist party FE-JONS which for electoral purposes is allied to another tiny party La Falange. They paid the price for many years of ideological confusion and poor leadership. FE-JONS contested just eleven of the 52 constituencies, and in each case their vote was below 0.1%.
Vox‘s leaders, who seem to care more about personal and factional advancement than ideological principles, will be disappointed that the election result deprives them of their longed-for role as kingmakers.
The reality is that this election was a victory for the conservative PP, but its leaders will struggle to exercise any meaningful political power. Partly because conservatism is a bankrupt ideology, but also because they would need support from both Vox and at least seven votes from regionalist parties. While in other circumstances the PP might possibly be able to buy support from the Catalan populist party Junts (who have exactly the seven seats necessary) it is inconceivable that Junts would support a government that included Vox.
The electoral arithmetic just about allows for a coalition of the left, far left, and separatists, but it’s difficult to imagine that this could last for long. Such a coalition would partly depend on Sinn Fein / IRA’s friends in the Basque party EH Bildu, whose roots are in the banned party Batasuna that acted as the political wing of the terrorist ETA.
In short: Spain is set for months of instability and possibly fresh elections in the autumn. In the September edition of H&D our correspondent Isabel Peralta will report on Madrid’s ‘democratic’ circus and the media fallacy of Vox as a ‘far right’ party.
Historic win for anti-immigration party AfD
The anti-immigration German civic nationalist party ‘Alternative for Germany’ (Alternative für Deutschland – AfD) took control of a town council for the first time on Sunday when AfD candidate Robert Sesselmann was elected ‘district administrator’ of Sonneberg, a town of just over 20,000 inhabitants in Thuringia.
Sonneberg is in the east of today’s Federal Republic, though in the centre of traditional Germany.
AfD was founded as a right-wing Conservative party espousing what British voters would call ‘Thatcherite’ economic policies, but has steadily moved to the right and is now mainly identified with a strong anti-immigration stance. The Thuringian region of AfD is seen as especially right-wing and controlled by the party’s so-called Flügel or ‘wing’ led by Björn Höcke, who has made controversial remarks on racial and historical topics.
The party was greatly boosted by Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than a million extra immigrants and ‘asylum seekers’ in 2016 – a policy which alienated many traditional conservative voters who had once backed Merkel’s CDU and its Bavarian sister party CSU.
After losing its focus and slipping in the polls during the pandemic, AfD has greatly revived during the past 18 months due to economic problems that are felt especially keenly in regions such as Thuringia that were part of the old East Germany.
Voters in such areas are often nostalgic for aspects of communist rule, without being ‘left-wing’ in the usual sense of that term.
And partly for reasons discussed in a broader context by Ian Freeman in the forthcoming issue 115 of H&D, hard-pressed voters in such areas believe that environmentalist policies pushed by the German Green Party (who are coalition partners with liberals and socialists in the present federal government) are an ill-considered luxury that the country can ill-afford right now.
Foreign and defence policy has little relevance to a local election in a small town, so the controversial pro-Moscow stance taken by some AfD leaders is unlikely to have had a decisive influence on Sonneberg’s voters.
This latter AfD policy is utterly rejected both by the right-wing of CDU and CSU (who sympathised with AfD on immigration) and by the racial nationalist party III Weg (which regards Putinism as a betrayal of Germany’s and Europe’s fundamental interests, and strongly supports Ukraine’s defiance of the Kremlin).
Nevertheless, AfD’s latest electoral success has alarmed the liberal-left establishment and might be a sign that increasing numbers of German voters are no longer afraid to assert their national identity and turn back the immigration tide.
