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.

Winners and losers as Europe’s populist tide ebbs and flows

While Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party celebrated big victories in this week’s European elections, the much-advertised populist breakthrough proved to be at best a patchy affair.

Predictably the big populist winners included Italy‘s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, whose anti-immigration Lega party topped the polls with 34.3% and 29 seats – a huge increase on their 6.2% and five seats in 2014, when the party was known as Lega Nord (Northern League).

Also continuing to advance were the nationalist-conservative governing parties in Poland and Hungary.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party are suspended from the European conservative group EPP, but Orban had the last laugh this week. While most European conservative parties are in crisis, Fidesz increased their support to 52.3%, up from 51.5% in 2014.

A very radical nationalist party polled exceptionally well in Slovakia. Marian Kotleba’s People’s Party Our Slovakia – a party that stands staunchly in the tradition of Slovakia’s wartime leader Monsignor Jozef Tiso – gained two MEPs after polling 12.1% (up from 1.8% in 2014).

By contrast some previously successful populist and anti-Islam parties suffered poor results. The once-influential Dutch Freedom Party led by Geert Wilders was wiped out, losing all four of their MEPs and polling 3.5% (down from 13.2% in 2014).

Also badly beaten was the Danish People’s Party who lost three of their four MEPs after their vote fell from 26.6% to 10.7%. Voters in Denmark showed the strongest evidence of a trend also witnessed in some other European countries: an anti-populist backlash with increased turnouts among previously apathetic voters.

Marine Le Pen, once Europe’s most successful anti-immigration politician, has been to some extent eclipsed by her Italian ally Salvini, but Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) – previously the National Front (FN) – again topped the poll in France with 23.3% (slightly down from the FN’s 24.9% in 2014). The more ‘moderate’ French eurosceptic party France Arise (DLF) led by Farage’s main French ally Nicolas Dupont-Aignan fell below the 5% threshold to obtain MEPs. DLF polled 3.5% (down from 3.8% under an earlier party name in 2014).

Le Pen’s former FN vice-president Florian Philippot broke away in September 2017 to form a splinter party called The Patriots, mainly on the European issue: unlike Le Pen he wants France to leave the European Union. Philippot’s party polled only 0.7% despite seeking to appropriate the name of the anti-establishment “yellow vest” street protestors.

Having lost one of her main European parliamentary allies with the demise of Geert Wilders’ Dutch Freedom Party, Le Pen will have been greatly cheered by the landslide gains for the Flemish nationalists Vlaams Belang. In simultaneous Belgian regional, parliamentary and European elections, VB’s young leader Tom Van Grieken (elected in 2014 as a 28-year-old) succeeded in turning round the party’s fortunes.

VB now have 18 seats in the Belgian Parliament (up from 3 in 2014) and three MEPs (up from one in 2014).

The other important Le Pen ally is the Austrian Freedom Party, who managed to hold on 18.1% (down from 19.7% in 2014) despite a financial scandal that has destroyed the career of party leader and former Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache. In fact these European elections pale into insignificance against the background of Austria’s political crisis, which has now brought down the government and provoked a general election to be held in September.

Rather than consistent populist/nationalist success, the main event of this year’s European elections in most of the continent was a dramatic increase in turnout: up from 42.2% to 50.1% in France; from 48.1% to 61.4% in Germany; and from 43.8% to 64.3% in Spain.

The new Spanish anti-immigration party Vox elected three MEPs for the first time after polling 6.2% (up from 1.6% in 2014 but down from 10.3% at this year’s general election).

In Germany the civic nationalist and anti-immigration party AfD (Alternative for Germany) polled 4.1m votes (11.0%), up from 2.1m votes (7.1%) in 2014, increasing their tally of MEPs from seven to eleven.

One side-effect of AfD’s success was the defeat of the long-established German nationalist party NPD, who polled 101,000 votes (0.3%), down from 301,000 votes (1.0%) in 2014. The NPD’s sole MEP Udo Voigt consequently lost his seat. Two smaller German nationalist parties also contested the Euro-election. Die Rechte polled 25,000 votes for a slate headed by 90-year-old author and historical justice campaigner Ursula Haverbeck, who is presently serving a prison sentence for “holocaust denial”. The III Path (Dritte Weg) polled 13,000 votes.

Greek national socialist party Golden Dawn lost one of their three MEPs after polling 4.8%, down from 9.4% in 2014 (though in contrast to some populist parties Golden Dawn is disproportionately strong among young voters). Their Maltese counterparts Imperium Europa, a national socialist party led by Norman Lowell, polled 3.2%, up from 2.8% in 2014.

Big gains for Farage on mixed night for Europe’s ‘populists’

British voters decisively rejected the political establishment at the European elections. Results announced overnight showed that Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party took 32% of the vote and 28 MEPs, while Theresa May’s Conservative Party was reduced to just three MEPs, polling just 9%.

Farage crushed his old party UKIP, whose leader Gerard Batten lost his own seat in London, where UKIP polled only 2.1% losing their deposit.

Batten wasn’t the biggest loser in these elections: that honour went to former EDL leader ‘Tommy Robinson’. Standing as an independent in North West England, ‘Robinson’ lost his deposit with only 2.2% despite a very high-profile campaign with his trademark street violence and anti-Islam rhetoric.

‘Robinson’ has been exposed as full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

By contrast Farage will now be considering how to transform the Brexit Party into a genuine political party able to contest the next general election. British politics might never be the same again.

Meanwhile across Europe there were mixed results for anti-immigration parties. The biggest winner so far seems to be Matteo Salvini’s Lega who topped the poll in Italy with 34%; while among the losers was the anti-Islamist Dutch Freedom Party headed by Geert Wilders – they lost all four of their MEPs after polling 3.5%, down from 13.2% in 2014.

H&D will publish a full analysis of the results for anti-immigration and pro-nationalist parties across Europe as full results become available later today.

There will be some confusion among staff at Hope not Hate and other recipients of largesse from George Soros. Last night Robert Rowland, who managed about $1bn of hedge fund assets while working for Soros Fund Management from 1996 to 2003, has just been elected alongside Nigel Farage as a Brexit Party MEP for South East England.

A small sign of UKIP’s terminal decline was in Burnley, one of the very few towns where the party has a viable branch and a group of elected councillors. Yet even here the party was evidently not represented at the count, where a blatant error seems to have been made by the Returning Officer. It seems obvious to H&D that a bundle of 500 votes was misallocated by Burnley counting staff to the tiny pro-Remain UKEUP rather than to UKIP: to anyone with political experience, the reported result in Burnley looks obviously wrong. This is the sort of error that potentially could have cost UKIP £5,000 – but no party representative was on hand to correct it!

Modest gains for Dutch anti-Islamist Wilders

Votes are still being counted in today’s Dutch general election, but it seems that Geert Wilders, the anti-Islamic activist seen by some (though not H&D) as part of Europe’s “far right” has made far fewer gains than expected.

The first headline was the record turnout of 82% (here in the UK we haven’t had that sort of turnout since 1951).

And though Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s conservative People’s Party has lost seats, it will remain the largest party.  Rutte will stay in office with the support of several other centre-right and liberal parties.

Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom will be the joint second-largest party, probably increasing its representation in the Dutch parliament from 12 to 19, but has no chance of a role in government.  Though an improvement on last time, this is well below Wilders’ best result in 2010 when his party won 24 seats.

The biggest winners today were a very different opposition party, Green-Left, who became the largest Dutch left-wing party, quadrupling their parliamentary seats from 4 to 16.  While the big losers were the Labour Party – formerly, as in the UK, the main opposition party – who collapsed from 35 seats to 9.

As in France, the Dutch left is now fragmented into several different parties, with more radical forces in the ascendant. And that is the big long-term story: as in many other countries, mainstream conservatism just about holds on to power by patching together coalitions, getting weaker all the time; meanwhile the Left is in existential crisis, increasingly obsessed by racial/gender identity politics or environmentalism, while unable to face the fact that mass immigration has betrayed the Left’s traditional constituency – the white working class.

Liberal media commentators will be quick to hail this result as a setback for the “European far right”, but the truth is that Marine Le Pan is a far more serious politician than Wilders, and her FN has a much more solid political base than the Freedom Party. Don’t bet against Marine Le Pen winning the first ballot in next month’s French presidential elections!