Wilders remains an outsider despite Dutch election ‘victory’
Posted by admin978 on November 24, 2023 · Leave a Comment
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.
