Two things were already clear months before Dutch election day: the Netherlands would have a new prime minister and dozens of new parliamentarians. Forty sitting members of parliament, a quarter of the Tweede Kamer (lower house), and, even more striking, three of the four leaders of the outgoing conservative-led coalition had announced their departure from national politics. Ironically, in this sea of electoral change, it was the far-right mainstay, Geert Wilders, the soon-to-be longest-sitting MP, who would emerge the big winner.
How do we make sense of the political earthquake that has put Wilders and his PVV party in first place and how will it affect Dutch and European politics? The first, and most important, lesson is one that Dutch politicians in particular should have known, as it has happened over and over again in the past three decades in the Netherlands and throughout western Europe. If you make the elections about the issues of the far right, notably the “problem” of immigration, the far right wins. We saw this most recently in Sweden.
Another similarity with last year’s Swedish elections is that if you make elections about the far right’s suitability to govern, the far right wins. In the last week of the campaign, as the PVV made its shocking surge in the polls, article after article proclaimed the “milder tone” of Wilders, who had allegedly softened his “sharp edges”.
In fact, always witty, but rarely critical, the Dutch media even started to refer to him as Geert Milders. In reality, and as Wilders emphasised several times, there was no change in programme but one in strategy. He has not moderated his extreme positions about immigration or Islam, let alone rejected them. Rather, he has said that there are “bigger problems” than limiting immigration at the moment.
Ultimately responsible for Wilders’ massive victory is, ironically, his personal nemesis, Mark Rutte, the outgoing conservative (VVD) prime minister who decided to blow up his coalition over the specific issue of asylum seekers. By moving the focus from a controversy over farmers’ use of nitrogen and the (alleged) urban-rural divide – which propelled the agrarian populist BBB party to a massive victory in provincial elections earlier this year – back to immigration and the alleged native-immigrant divide, Rutte’s VVD had hoped to dominate the campaign. Instead, as always, it is the far-right PVV that has won. As Jean-Marie Le Pen said almost half a century ago, the people prefer the original over the copy.
Moreover, when Rutte’s successor in the VVD leadership, Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, opened the door to a possible coalition with Wilders, in the hope of becoming prime minister of such a coalition, she helped his normalisation, which was eagerly taken up by Dutch journalists who were bored by the low-profile campaign. To be fair, Wilders made excellent use of these opportunities, showing his exceptional political experience and skills in interviews and debates.
Still, while open to governing with Wilders, Yeşilgöz-Zegerius was adamant in the final days of the campaign that she would not govern under him. Given that the anti-establishment Pieter Omtzigt and his centrist New Social Contract (NSC) party had ruled out working with Wilders’ PVV altogether, Wilders’ electoral victory could yet convert to political defeat.
In fact, the magnitude of his victory, and his party’s huge lead over the VVD, which came in third, could force the latter to join an anti-Wilders coalition along with Frans Timmermans’ leftist Greens/Social Democrat alliance and Omtzigt’s new movement. The main problem with this, however, is that the Greens/Social Democrats (GL/PvdA), as that coalition’s biggest party, will certainly claim the prime ministerial position for Timmermans. Moreover, with the VVD leader Yeşilgöz-Zegerius having reached out to Wilders but rejected Timmermans because she said he would “tax the country to pieces”, a coalition under Timmermans could lead to a major backlash among VVD members and voters.
Whatever the outcome of coalition negotiations, the role of the Netherlands in the rest of the world, particularly in the European Union, is going to change. First, with the departure of Rutte, the longest-sitting democratically elected political leader within the EU, the country will no longer punch as much above its weight as it did in the past decade. Second, although the Netherlands has long ceased to be an engine of European integration, under Rutte’s leadership, the various Dutch coalitions of the last decade barked more than they bit.
Now with outspokenly Eurosceptic parties such as the PVV and Omtzigt’s NSC the big winners, the conservative VVD will probably become even more Dutch-centric in its European policy, further complicating a coalition with the Europhile GL/PvdA (particularly under Timmermans) and the liberal D66.
For now, though, the Netherlands will have to come to terms with a new reality. After almost 25 years of catering to far-right voters, allegedly to defeat far-right parties, a far-right party is by far the biggest party in parliament. Perhaps now, more than 20 years after the rise of Pim Fortuyn, the country can finally start an honest and open discussion about its far-right problem.
Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia and an adjunct professor at the Center for Research on Extremism (C-Rex) at the University of Oslo
