Peter Vandermeersch: Europe’s far right watches on as ‘milder’ Geert Wilders stuns Dutch politics

I’ve met Geert Wilders – the populist politician who stunned friend and foe on Wednesday in the general election in the Netherlands – four or five times. Our meetings never took place in a bar or a restaurant, but in his office in parliament, behind a double layer of metal detectors, with two personal guards in front of the door and with closed blinds.

For more than 20 years now Wilders, the man who could become the next prime minister of the Netherlands, has been protected 24/7. “It’s difficult to live like that,” he admitted after explaining how, each day, a blacked-out car brings him to and from home; he also reminded me that at a certain moment he even had to live in a prison cell for his own safety.

“But it’s the price I have to pay to express my freedom of opinion. And this situation will not change when I leave politics,” he said.

I thought about these meetings when I saw on Wednesday evening the first exit polls of the elections. Wilders, who left the more moderate liberal VVD of the current prime minister Mark Rutte in 2004 to start up the anti-Muslim PVV (Party for Freedom), generated what has been called an “unseen political earthquake” in a country which likes to see itself as a moderate, open and tolerant example for the rest of the world. With 37 of the 150 seats in the Dutch chamber of representatives, Wilders doubled the number of seats for his party, leaving the red-green left party of former European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans with 25 seats, a distant second.

Friends of mine in the Netherlands are “shocked”, “extremely sad” and even “sick to the bone”. How can a man who has been convicted by a court for libel against the Moroccan community of the Netherlands be so popular? How can a man who called his own country, after that conviction, “a corrupt banana republic” be the future prime minister? How can the man who called one of the female ministers in the last government “a witch”, form a coalition? How can a man who considered the government of Rutte “criminal” be his successor? How can a man who wanted to ban the Koran be trusted by a big chunk of the Muslim population? How can a man who considers journalists “scum” defend the democratic values of the country?

And then there’s this fundamental question: what happened to the open and tolerant country where, as Frans Timmermans said in his speech admitting his defeat, “everybody is equal, regardless of where you were born”?

The answers to these questions are multiple and complex. But it’s clear that for the first time since Wilders entered the political arena – he has been an MP for 25 years and this was his sixth general election – a big portion of the voters believed he indeed could be a real alternative to the more moderate parties at the centre-right of the political spectrum.

Wilders’s nickname during the campaign was “Milders”, referring to the fact that the man seemed to be much “milder” than before. Of course Islam is, in his eyes, still a big issue in the country, and indeed he is in favour of a possible “Nexit” out of the EU. But during the campaign, he stressed that he would respect the constitution, that it’s more about housing for the Dutch, making sure that “people have enough money in their pockets” and wanting to get rid of the “nonsensical climate policy”. The Dutch electorate saw a man they clearly thought was more reasonable.

On top of the fact that Wilders seemed to be more mild, the moderate centrist- liberal VVD of former prime minister Rutte made a crucial mistake. It made the issue of immigration one of the main topics of its campaign, copying part of the “classic” Wilders xenophobic programme. Voters clearly preferred the original PVV view of the polarising topic, rewarding that party with 37 seats while the VVD, which has been the biggest party in the country for more than a decade, lost 10 seats and ended up with 24.

In one of our meetings in his dark room more than 10 years ago, Wilders told me that “I have the ambition to become prime minister”. Now he has the chance to realise this ambition. To do this, he must form a government with at least two, and possibly more, other centre-right parties. Wilders himself has already asked everyone to “jump over their own shadow”, meaning that all the possible government parties, his own included, will have to moderate their demands. It promises to be a very long and tedious formation process.

“It’s sad and worrisome that the Netherlands finds itself in this situation,” concluded my former newspaper, NRC, in a very dark and pessimistic editorial on Thursday. And even more important is that it’s clear that what happened on Wednesday is not only about the Netherlands but also about the rest of Europe. In Belgium, France, Italy and Hungary, to name a few, people on the far right are looking at the Netherlands. Again the country could be an example for the world, only this time not in the way many Dutch people would like it to be seen.​

Peter Vandermeersch is CEO of Mediahuis Ireland and was editor-in-chief of the Dutch newspaper NRC between 2010 and 2019

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