There’s a grim virtue in being funny and right at the same time. As the results of the Dutch elections rolled in late last Wednesday, De Speld, a Dutch satirical website much like the Onion, published a parody that “quoted” People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) leader Dilan Yesilgoz reacting to the results: “We ran a terrific campaign, unfortunately just not for our own party.”
There’s a grim virtue in being funny and right at the same time. As the results of the Dutch elections rolled in late last Wednesday, De Speld, a Dutch satirical website much like the Onion, published a parody that “quoted” People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) leader Dilan Yesilgoz reacting to the results: “We ran a terrific campaign, unfortunately just not for our own party.”
The joke struck at the heart of what many Dutch commentators and political journalists also concluded in the immediate aftermath of the elections. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s conservative VVD party opportunistically blew up its own coalition government over what should have been a relatively minor internal disagreement over how to address the recent uptick in the number of war refugees seeking asylum in the Netherlands.
Even before the disagreement over asylum seekers, Rutte’s government was plagued by a number of scandals. For example, under Rutte’s watch, the Dutch tax agency wrongfully prosecuted more than 10,000 families for alleged benefits fraud, driving them into severe financial difficulties. In the process, the Dutch Child Protective Services forcibly separated 1,675 children from their families.
That scandal shocked the Dutch population, while Rutte for a long time refused to take any responsibility for it. (The other election winner, Pieter Omtzigt, leading the new party New Social Contract [NSC], was one of the three members of parliament whose tenacity uncovered the scandal. Omtzigt has now signaled a willingness to govern with Wilders.)
On the refugee issue, Rutte’s coalition faced pressure from opposition parties, civil society and the International Red Cross over the fact that refugees were left to sleep outside without shelter at the asylum processing facility of Ter Apel, in the far northeast of the country. The Red Cross sent aid to Ter Apel as it concluded that conditions were “inhumane and unsustainable”; the VVD argued that the Netherlands had made itself too attractive for refugees and sought to reduce family reunification numbers.
The decision by the VVD leadership to blow up the coalition and force new elections has been likened by political commentators to former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to hold the 2016 Brexit referendum. The VVD expected to capitalize on its strong showing in the polls to get a larger mandate for its restrictive asylum policy and orchestrate a change in its leadership. Rutte announced he would not lead the VVD again, and Yesilgoz, in charge of the Department of Justice, was launched as the new face of the conservatives. Yesilgoz came to the Netherlands as a refugee herself—at age seven, when her Kurdish father, a trade unionist, claimed asylum after the 1980 coup in Turkey.
The optics of a former refugee arguing for a more restrictive refugee and asylum policy might seem strange, but the VVD has a history of politicians who were once refugees being hardliners on migration—most famously Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the early 2000s. Voters and fellow politicians alike would often appear relieved when a politician with a foreign background took a hard line on migration—providing cover for charges of racism.
Because Rutte’s government ended in crisis over the asylum issue, it inevitably became an important topic during the election. Yesilgoz herself raised the issue frequently in televised debates, in part to distract from the VVD’s widely rejected record on domestic policy issues such as housing and the cost of living.
Under a previous coalition led by Rutte, the government allowed large portions of the stock of public housing to be sold off. VVD ministers attended international conferences to advertise the investment opportunities to hedge funds. It also levied a new tax on public housing providers, causing an overall reduction of 200,000 available units. As a result, the country is suffering from a severe, and still worsening, housing crisis.
Rutte was also slow to act when inflation hit. Citing the war in Ukraine as a source of high energy prices, the government argued it could do very little to alleviate the problem. When families began facing acute problems paying their bills, Rutte’s government initially signaled that everyone “would simply get a little poorer,” before providing a convoluted relief effort that subsidized energy companies.
While the VVD is not the only party responsible for the policies of Rutte’s government, it has been unique in its attempt to deflect from its failures by blaming asylum seekers and immigrants. Faced with criticism over the fact that the government’s housing policies have led to a major crisis of supply and affordability, the VVD spokesperson in parliament, Daniel Koerhuis, spent much of his time there arguing that newly admitted asylum seekers were assigned public housing with undue preference, at the expense of ordinary Dutch people who had been waiting for years.
Koerhuis’s approach—acknowledge a problem but suggest that the true cause has something to do with foreigners—was standard fare for the VVD in the Rutte era: governing center-right while rhetorically covering the far-right flank. Members of parliament often sought out media appearances, making statements burnishing the VVD’s image on migration and criminal justice in an attempt to court voters tempted to support Geert Wilders’s far-right and racist Party for Freedom (PVV) instead. Journalists and commentators referred to these instances as “being on PVV duty.”
However, as political scientist Cas Mudde aptly pointed out in the Guardian, citing French far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, ultimately “people prefer the original over the copy.”
Until last week, the VVD had always succeeded in maintaining an electoral upper hand over its challengers to the right. Wilders, who defected from the VVD in 2004, has competed with his former party for votes for nearly two decades. Since the experience of a short-lived and ill-fated minority government between the VVD and the Christian Democrats, which Wilders’ party provided with conditional parliamentary support, the VVD has refused to do business with Wilders. During his long stint as leader of the VVD, Rutte quietly maintained a cordon sanitaire, a strategy (also employed in France to keep the Le Pen dynasty out of power) of categorically freezing out parties as possible governing partners.
Yesilgoz, as Rutte’s successor, broke with this policy. Under her leadership, the VVD indicated that it would no longer categorically refuse to govern with Wilders. A direct result of this change seems to have been that a large number of potential Wilders supporters who had not previously voted for him—because it was clear his party would be condemned to its perpetual role in the opposition wilderness—broke away from the VVD to cast their vote for PVV, feeling more confident Wilders would be part of the next government.
But other factors contributed to Wilders’s victory as well. During the campaign, journalists began pointing out Wilders’s appeared less extreme, repeating the quip that he had become “Geert Milders.” As is often the case, the phrase seemed less to reflect an actual change in Wilders’ politics and more to serve as a rhetorical strategy to make the idea of a Wilders-led government seem more palatable.
How palatable that government will be remains to be seen—if it indeed comes into being. During an interview with the Dutch public broadcaster NOS, Wilders urged other parties to “jump over their own shadow” and govern with him. When pressed why he had written that mosques, the Quran, and Islamic schools should be banned by law if he knew that other parties would not support such policies, Wilders cut off the interview. Soon after, Martin Bosma, the PVV’s chief ideologist, “joked” to an interviewer that the journalist would soon be out of a job—as cutting all funding for public broadcasting is another PVV hobby horse.
Wilders has been a fixture of Dutch politics for nearly two decades, and Bosma has been at his side since the very early days. Bosma’s influence is significant. He is considered responsible for introducing terms such as “head rag tax”—a tax on Muslims for aesthetically “polluting” Dutch streets—into the PVV lexicon. In 2015, Bosma published an academically dubious manuscript on the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa entitled Minority in Their Own Country: How Progressive Struggle Leads to Genocide and ANC Apartheid.
Historians skewered Bosma’s half-truths and distorted use of sources, and the publishing house that had initially acquired the rights to publish it refused the manuscript; a much smaller publisher eventually accepted it. The book recycles the Afrikaner myth that South Africa was an empty area when white settlers arrived, arguing that the white population today has been made into a second-class citizenry in what used to be its own country.
Several chapters in the manuscript are not about South Africa at all, but about the Netherlands and its Muslim population—the true purpose of the book being to argue that Muslims will bring about the end of the Netherlands in the way that Bosma imagines Black people have in a democratic South Africa. In the manuscript, Bosma consistently repeats a central theme: “Those who were called racists turned out to be right.”
The PVV is a party consisting of equal parts Wilders and Bosma. Wilders is often praised for his plain-spoken, no-nonsense style of political communication. His policies are simple and straightforwardly reactionary. Think of anything associated with progressive politics and the PVV will likely oppose it, typically phrasing its opposition to them as “exorbitant madness” while claiming that they come at the expense of ordinary people being able to afford healthcare or groceries. For example, Wilders wants to leave the European Union; reintroduce the pre-Euro currency, the guilder; close the Dutch borders; and cut funding for green energy, arts, higher education, public broadcasting, and development aid.
These elements are the surface level of PVV politics. On a deeper level, the PVV is convinced the Netherlands is ending. By this, PVV politicians mean that the white Dutch population is being actively disadvantaged or discriminated against by the policies pursued by the Dutch government. Bosma’s deceitful and bad-faith history of South Africa is instructive in this regard.
All the PVV’s proposed policies relating to non-white Dutch people generally, and Muslims in particular—banning the construction of mosques, banning the Quran, and threatening to deport dual citizens as punishment—are a response to the imagined imminent replacement of white Dutch people. The theory is a carbon copy of French author Renaud Camus’s theory of the Great Replacement. Call it a preemptive apartheid for the paranoid mind.
Some commentators have suggested that the PVV victory is a Dutch “Trump moment.” This assessment might be too flattering, however. The PVV has already been part of governing coalitions in provinces such as Limburg and Flevoland. Leaders of other right-wing parties have signaled at least openness to the idea of Wilders heading a national government, though it remains to be seen whether he manages to form and lead a government that is stable.
While it may be the case that Wilders will not be able to enact much of the PVV’s manifesto—Wilders himself acknowledged that parties might not want to join a governing coalition that subverts the constitution—a Wilders-led government would undoubtedly leave deep marks.
For two decades, Wilders has had a powerful atmospheric influence in Dutch politics, shifting political attitudes to the far right in major ways even when not in power. He has made it a rarely challenged dogma that the Netherlands is buckling under an influx of asylum seekers, a point casually repeated in a televised debate by the leader of the center-left GreenLeft/Labour coalition and former Vice President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans.
But even if large parts of Wilders’ manifesto will not or cannot be codified in policy, the political ideology and orientation of a government signals something to society: in this case, a permissiveness and encouragement of discriminatory practices in Dutch society at large. It is a well-documented fact that people with non-Dutch sounding names are widely discriminated against by Dutch landlords and employers. Research by journalists and academics has shown that people applying to a job with the same resume are much more likely to get an interview if their name is Jan than if their name is Mohammed.
Similarly, the Dutch police force has come under criticism in the last few years for its excessively violent treatment of protesters against climate change and—darkly ironically—of groups protesting racism and police brutality against non-white people. Wilders has a history of incendiary comments about police violence, at one time encouraging police forces to end riots by Moroccan-Dutch football fans by simply “shooting them in the knee.” A Wilders government would likely add fuel to the fire of police violence, reassuring officers that their actions will be supported by the most powerful politician in government.
A PVV government will not be able to implement anything resembling actual legal apartheid in the Netherlands. But it will without a doubt embolden segments of society to treat the enemies of the PVV—Muslims, immigrants, and people with foreign-sounding names, followed by progressives—as de facto second-class citizens.
Political scientists often distinguish between different types of democratic legitimacy. One type is output legitimacy: Democracies often deliver economic prosperity and social stability. Another type is legitimacy in a more procedural way: Democracies claim legitimacy because of their institutional design, which allows for peaceful transitions of power, checks and balances, and a robust rule of law.
The progressive parties of the center and the center-left which are currently getting ready to mount a defense of Dutch democracy will likely seize onto the symbols belonging to the second strategy. Journalists and commentators, too, seem biased toward that definition. PVV Senator Gom van Strien, appointed to explore possible coalitions, was pressed at his first press conference whether he agreed with Wilders that the two houses of Dutch Parliament were a “fake parliament,” as Wilders has claimed. (Van Strien stepped down on Monday after allegations of fraud surfaced and his former employer Utrecht University filed a police report).
Wilders’s rhetorical rejection of the Eerste and Tweede Kamer (Senate and House) as a symbol of the Netherlands still live in infamy in the minds of many politicians and journalists.
But the focus on these symbols and institutions—even though they are far from meaningless—risks distracting opposition forces from the first way that democracies appear legitimate in the eyes of a population: by delivering on their promise of social and economic wellbeing.
Nearly two decades of neoliberal policy has significantly diminished that legitimacy. A progressive opposition that is coaxed into a wholesale defense of democracy in its symbolic and institutional forms risks inadvertently ignoring, or even identifying itself with, the legacy of social and economic erosion that those institutions have produced for two decades.
Interviews suggest that PVV supporters often connect their hostile dismissiveness of immigrants, “newcomers,” and Muslims to the imagined preferential treatment of those groups in the allocation of resources such as public housing and social security. “Putting the Netherlands first” to these voters appears to indicate a desire to reverse the perceived trend (regardless of whether their assessment of being disadvantaged is borne out by the facts).
But in politics, appearances matter at least as much as facts. A defense of Dutch democracy will only be successful if the progressive parties committed to it also make it unequivocally clear that they will fight to reverse the institutionally entrenched neoliberalism that continues to generate government policy that disciplines its citizens rather than helps them and cloaks the abandonment of those in need with the language of bootstraps and individual responsibility.
It is easier for Wilders to dismiss a parliament committed to austerity and deliberate government retreat as “fake” than one that is committed to helping ordinary folks.
Journalists and legacy media must also look critically at their own role in propelling Wilders to the top spot. In the run-up to the election, journalists, pundits and commentators alike latched onto a repeated talking point downplaying Wilders’ extremism, suggesting he had mellowed out. But they mistook calculated strategy for an ideological shift. In this sense, all the talk of “Geert Milders” indicates less a genuine change in Wilders’s politics, and more a willingness by influential media figures to condone and accommodate the far right.
Political journalists and commentators working for the Dutch public broadcaster in particular have come in for criticism for the part they played making Wilders more palatable and helping him rise in the polls. As Dutch poet laureate Lieke Marsman wryly noted: If the PVV actually ends up defunding the Dutch public broadcaster, and by extension the journalists who enabled Wilders’s rise, the party may have a much harder time doing as well in the elections next time around.
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