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The Hague is a placid town where the prime minister cycles to work and ministers drink beer in regular cafés. But it’s a scary place for Geert Wilders, the anti-immigrant, anti-Islamic politician who will be the biggest force behind the next Dutch government. He lives with 24-hour protection against death threats from Islamists. When I visited him in his party headquarters in 2016, four bodyguards were loafing outside his office. The flag of Israel hung in a corner. Wilders greeted me from beneath a portrait of Churchill, presented here as his fellow defender of the west. I asked what the Arabic sticker on his door said. He replied, “That the Koran is poison and Mohammed is a liar.”
I grew up in the Netherlands, with its dull centrist governments, and assumed Wilders would forever remain a protest politician, railing powerlessly against Islam, the country’s “leftwing elite”, its “fake parliament”, “cowardly judges” and “scum” journalists. I was wrong. His PVV, which he founded in 2006, is now the biggest Dutch party. Last week, it agreed to join a coalition government with three rightist parties. Wilders won’t be prime minister, but he will steer from outside the cabinet. This will be “the most openly xenophobic government and the first with a far-right (senior) party in the postwar Netherlands”, says political scientist Cas Mudde. How extreme is this government? And what does it signify for the broader European far-right, heading into June’s EU elections?
Wilders is so anti-Islamic that he makes Donald Trump look a squishy multiculturalist. The death threats only radicalised him. For years he advocated banning the Koran and closing Dutch mosques. After he told a crowd in a café that he’d ensure the Netherlands would have fewer “Moroccans”, a court convicted him for insulting the ethnic group. “Moroccans” in Wilders’ mind includes Dutch citizens of Moroccan origin. He thinks they can never become truly Dutch.
True, he supports democratic elections. But the democracy he favours is “illiberal”. The will of “the people”, meaning the white, non-elite natives who support him, ought to trump laws and judges.
His offering grew familiar over time. Its appeal peaked at 15 per cent of Dutch voters. Before last November’s elections, I wrongly predicted that he was going nowhere. But he saw that scenario coming and, in the campaign’s final days, he suddenly promised to moderate. He said he wanted to be a responsible partner in a coalition government.
It turned out that this was exactly what many voters wanted: an anti-immigrant politician who wouldn’t burn down the comfortable Dutch house, just make it whiter. “Geert Milders”, as he became known, soared to 24 per cent of the final vote.
In the past six months of coalition negotiations, the other parties tamed him a bit. He now says he will respect the rule of law and international treaties, accepts that Islam is a religion, not a “totalitarian ideology”, and agrees to back Ukraine in its war. (Wilders had long been moderately sympathetic to Vladimir Putin. He condemns Putin’s invasion, but opposes sending Dutch arms to Ukraine.) That’s the optimistic story: that the Dutch system domesticated Wilders.
The pessimistic version is that the Dutch system has normalised Wilders and is now dominated by his ideas. The PVV-led coalition promises the “strictest ever” policies on asylum. It will ask for an opt-out from the EU’s asylum rules (which it won’t get). It will beef up checks at Dutch borders. In short, Wilders’ obsessions have become the government’s.
An alternative analysis of the Netherlands is that it’s a country below sea level in a climate crisis, with too much polluting farmland that could be turned into much-needed housing. But no. The “crisis” is apparently the 48,500 asylum-seekers and their relatives who arrived in 2023.
One scenario is that Wilders starts attacking his own government for insufficient radicalism and the coalition soon collapses. The other possibility is that it holds together and begins hollowing out democratic institutions. Just as Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni has been extending control over state broadcaster Rai, Wilders wanted to abolish the Dutch public broadcaster NPO. (The coalition will slash its funding.) Like Trump, he has often accused judges of bias. Some critics warn he might try to shrink judicial independence, as Poland’s PiS party did. His long-term strategy is like Meloni’s and, probably, Marine Le Pen’s in France: act the responsible governing party, while co-opting the state to radical-right ends. Wilders has gone from protest politician to something more dangerous.
Follow Simon @KuperSimon and email him at simon.kuper@ft.com
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