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Dutch Le Pen wins big in election in Netherlands

Brian Leiter

Pretty wild:  

Anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders won a huge victory in Dutch elections, according to a near complete count of the vote early Thursday, in a stunning lurch to the far right for a nation once famed as a beacon of tolerance.

The result will send shockwaves through Europe, where far-right ideology is on the rise, and puts Wilders in line to lead talks to form the next governing coalition and possibly become the first far-right prime minister of the Netherlands.

With nearly all votes counted, Wilders’ Party for Freedom was forecast to win 37 seats in the 150-seat lower house of parliament, two more than predicted by an exit poll when voting finished Wednesday night and more than double the 17 he won at the last election.

Is "far-right ideology" on the rise in Europe?   Not in Poland, where the far right party (with the Orwellian name "Law and Justice") lost recent elections.  Not in Spain, where the far right "Vox" party saw its support decline significantly in recent elections.  Portugal is still governed by the Socialist Party (and in the last elections, parties of the left, including hte communists, got a majority of the votes), while the far right party, Chega, got only 7% of the vote.  (A corruption scandal in the Socialist Party leadership may affect things in 2024, but at least now, the far right is not on the rise in Portugal.)  Only in Hungary and Italy are parties of the "far right" dominant, although it is true "far right" parties in France and Germany have gained electoral support in recent elections.

Geert Wilders' platform (not all of which he will be able to enact, of course, since he will need coalition partners to govern) can be seen here.  It runs the gamut from the fascist to the standard pandering to the ruling class to the normal to the eccentric; a sampling:

A complete end to all asylum for refugees 
 
Criminals to be stripped of Dutch nationality and deported
 
A ban on all Islamic schools, korans and mosques, and on headscarves in government buildings

 Lower taxes on just about everything 
 
10,000 more police, “zero tolerance for street scum” and preventive detention for people suspected of supporting terrorism
 
Covid is real – and the shortage of ICU beds is a problem to be fixed 
 
Stricter sentences for animal abuse and a National Animal Ambulance service 
 
Withdraw previous apologies for slavery. Stop providing government literature in Arabic and Turkish. 
 
Stop all art and culture subsidies. End “left wing hate of our historical heroes”. Completely stop funding public broadcaster NPO

Cut fuel taxes and raise motorway speed limits to 140km/h 
 
A complete end to all foreign aid 
 
A Nexit referendum, and until then cut EU funding 
For Dutch readers, or those knowledgeable about Dutch politics, where is Wilders's support coming from?
 

 

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6 responses to “Dutch Le Pen wins big in election in Netherlands”

  1. Grad Student

    I would just like to add another question, for those knowledgable among you: Is there an interesting connection between this and the Dutch farmers' protests, which had made international news multiple times? What is the connection? Just reactionary?
    Thanks

    Reply
  2. Dutch grad student

    Dutch commentators point to the following things (amongst others, these appear to be some central points):

    – other parties failed to keep up the "cordon sanitaire" (especially the VVD right-wing liberals opened the door wide, the new middle "New Social Contract" less enthusiastically so, but also kept the option open).
    – Wilders has performed well in recent election debates and at the same time toned down in the last few weeks, saying for example that for now he won't pursue any policies that are unconstitutional, and that he would be a prime minister "for all the Dutch" (whatever that means). It's quite unbelievable that this sufficed to gain the trust of so many people, but there you go—we have short memories. Many votes are believed to be protest votes, and it looks like this move made him minimally acceptable for many voters.
    – there's an enormous housing shortage. The current housing shortage is 390,000 homes on a current population of 17.5m people, 1m homes need building by 2030 (which is practically impossible). Stemming migration was a major theme that was presented as directly connected. As Omtzigt of the New Social Contract liked to put it, with a migration surplus of 223,000 people a year you won't solve the housing crisis. But when it comes to anti-migration rhetoric, Wilders is the "original" so to say. (To be clear, as you can see here https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/dossier/asylum-migration-and-integration/how-many-people-immigrate-to-the-netherlands- (first "show datatable") the average migration surplus in the past 20 years is much lower than 223,000, last year was exceptional and – I believe – mainly due to the war in the Ukraine.)
    – cost of living was maybe the biggest election theme, and many of his socio-economic proposals are left-winged / socialist.

    Though I'm dismayed by the results, bear in mind that he has 37 out of 150 seats, and will need at least 39 more for a majority. Nexit won't happen, religious schools, including Islamic ones, will still be eligible for state funding (this is part of the constitution), etc. In fact it's not clear he'll be able to form a government in the first place. Time will tell how bad things will get.

    Reply
  3. Attila Tanyi

    The MO of these parties is always the same: lurk in the shadows, wait on the fringes, for social conditions to become ripe for success. So the question is whether that is the case in the Netherlands or this is just a temporary setback with typical Dutch last-minute, strategic, protest etc voting. One needs to deeply understand the conditions there to even come close to answering the question. What we know for a fact is that the Dutch electoral system is strictly proportional, that coalition building is a must and that counted together the number of votes for the right didn't change much. There is, in other words, no right-wing turn, mainly what happened was that the VDD lost many votes, part of which went to the NSC, another part, probably the larger part, to the PVV. I wouldn't pay much attention to Wilders's 'programme': it was written by someone – his is, strangely, a party with one member, namely, himself – who has never been near to governing properly (he did 'tolerate' a previous VDD government from the outside) and hasn't expected to do so also this time. But his success does show that the lies are spreading, a possible narrative is building, and the social conditions are far from ideal – other Dutch parties better pay attention and stop this before it is too late. (This will be difficult, since the right, as in other European countries, is more interested in power than in anything else (Weber was right, it seems), so they will govern with the PVV, if there is no other chance. They consider the left the real enemy, hence no cordon sanitaire, the post-war consensus is gone also in the Netherlands.)

    Reply
  4. Rollo Burgess

    The (very likely true) point that the other parties will be able to prevent Wilders from forming a government or implementing his programme, despite leading the largest party, will make it easy for him to claim (not entirely falsely) that the popular will has been thwarted by elites and leverage this point further to increase his appeal. And the fact that his nastier and dafter proposals won't be implemented will allow him to carry on claiming that they're the right ideas.

    It's not exactly a catch 22, but there's a family resemblance.

    Reply
  5. migrated back

    I'm an American who lived in the Netherlands for four years (2019-2023, leaving just before this) and has an existent but poor grasp of the Dutch language and still in contact with a number of Dutch friends. I wouldn't describe myself as an expert on Dutch politics but I've been expecting a far right turn for years, I wasn't surprised Wilders overperformed (but I am surprised that he has the largest party). The short version of this very long comment is that the win is about Wilders' anti immigrant positions.

    -The Netherlands is racially diversifying with immigration particularly from Morocco and Turkey, and many Dutch racists oppose any cultural and social change. The Netherlands doesn't seem to have any narratives about positive 'melting pot' immigration the way the US does (and it's not as though those narratives prevent anti-immigrant reactionary ideas in the US, but I think they can help in some cases). Anecdotal, but back when my wife and I moved in 2019, I remember our taxi driver from the airport talking to us and saying nearly verbatim: "too many immigrants come and don't learn the language because they don't want to fit in. But you don't need to learn the language, you're the right kind of immigrant." Well, we're both white and so I think it's pretty obvious what he meant. We heard sentiments like this – that white English speaking immigrants fit in and the Moroccans don't – regularly, I think being white made people comfortable saying it to us. Wilders really would like even the white English speaking migrants to be second class citizens, but if you think Moroccans and Turks are the wrong kind of immigrant, he is your man. (There are obviously lots of wonderful Dutch people who resist this and try to make NL more inclusive and egalitarian).

    -The nitrogen crisis which is the housing estate crisis which is an economic crisis which is an entire boondoggle to untangle, and my explanation here might miss parts. But to Grad Student's question of if this is related to the farmer protest, yes it is. Here's a graph of the top agricultural exporters by value in 2020: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332329/leading-countries-worldwide-by-value-of-agricultural-products-exported/
    The Netherlands is second overall on the list, after only the US, with about 100 billion in exports. We are talking about a tiny dot of a country with less than 18 million people and it's one of the biggest ag economies. The exports number gets driven up a bit by the tulips, which are valuable and small, but you have to grasp how far above its weight the Netherlands punches as an ag country. The way this has been achieved is by setting apart huge parts of the very limited land of the country for agriculture and also using huge amounts of fertilizers for decades, which pumps tons of nitrogen into the land. This has created a series of other cascading problems. For one thing, land in the Netherlands is very limited anyways and is a constant battle with the sea. Sometimes they can reclaim new areas, much of Flevoland was drained of water as recently as the 1950s. However land is very scarce and its consumption by agriculture occupies much of it. Relatedly, ignoring nitrogen emissions this high has brought NL into conflict with EU law, created an ongoing nature crisis as it kills off wildlife areas, and forced construction on homes to be stopped because that also involves nitrogen emissions which the country can't afford. While I was there, de Jonge's plans to escalate construction to alleviate the housing shortage had to be seriously curtailed because of nitrogen and that has been an ongoing issue.
    There are probably more factors involved in the crisis – I had dinner with a Dutch architect who was explaining how there's been a legal 'Americanization' of some parts of the bidding process in the past few decades under international pressure (v. interesting story involving traditional norms of what we would see as price fixing) which has slowed down bids and projects by cutting out some smaller companies.
    There is also genuinely population growth due to immigration, as well as natural population growth, but that is of course necessary for the Dutch economy and encouraged by the government. However, in the context of a massive housing crisis, attacking immigrants has become a way of having a solution for something no one can solve immediately (it's not like 'let's go back to 1992 and change nitrogen policy' is an option). Further, some migrants receive what is known as the 30% ruling, which is a very generous tax break for high-skilled migrants who can't be substituted in the Dutch labor market (to give you an idea, my effective tax rate in NL was substantially lower than it would have been in the US). There aren't that many 30%ers relative to migrants or the population, but it's obviously pretty unequal relative to other workers and the narrative has become that rich 30%er migrants come and buy up all the property and have created the housing crisis. So Wilders' populism and anti-immigrant sentiments have become wrapped up many people's thinking about a genuine social policy crisis. (The farmer protests and the phenomenon of the BBB is connected because it's resentment against some very sudden and even draconian nitrogen crisis policies that were proposed).

    -A less related thought, but the 'center right' parties like VVD really did beclown themselves a bit during covid, so I can see some voters just thinking the establishment are idiots. Wilders saying let's have more ICU beds makes a hell of a lot more sense than the 'dansen met jannsen' thing, or so many other stupid reactions.

    Reply
  6. Mike G.

    FWIW, today 'The Guardian' published an article about the rise in young European voters' support for the right (including the Netherlands). The thesis is, "Many young people are not xenophobic but their lives are precarious, say experts, amid crises in housing and healthcare".

    "Why are younger voters flocking to the far right in parts of Europe?"

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/younger-voters-far-right-europe

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