For Geert Wilders to triumph in the Dutch elections, it was first necessary that his mainstream rivals should fail. This they did in July, when the four-party coalition government led by Mark Rutte broke up because it could not agree on tougher restrictions on asylum seekers.
Polls indicate that eight in ten of the Dutch people want tougher restrictions, as indeed do Rutte’s own liberal conservatives, the VVD. This is not all about Wilders. Nor does the word “populist” do justice to what has just happened. “Popular” would be nearer the mark.
Wilders has succeeded in putting himself at the head of a popular revolt. Dutch politics contains many contenders for that role. Earlier this year, the BoerBurgerBeveging, the Farmer-Citizen Movement representing infuriated Dutch farmers, found itself briefly at the head of the uprising.
Even more recently, the New Social Contract Party founded by Pieter Omtzigt, a former Christian Democrat, looked as if it was going to break through.
Someone was going to do it, and in the event it was Wilders who seized the moment, assisted by the fact that no one realised how well he would do. He also tempered his ferociously anti-Islamic rhetoric, which made it easier for voters who thought he had gone too far to back him.
At the same time, his hostility to Islam, and long-standing support for Israel, appealed to voters alarmed by the huge pro-Palestinian demonstrations which have taken place in the Netherlands.
The PVV, the Freedom Party which Wilders founded in 2004 and has since led, increased its number of seats from 17 to 37: a dramatic advance, giving him nearly a quarter of the 150 seats in the Binnenhof, the Dutch House of Commons.
Omtzigt from a standing start got 20 seats, another striking success, while the Farmers rose from one to seven.
All four parties which had been in Rutte’s coalition were punished by the voters. His own VVD – led now by his successor, Dilan Yesilogoz, who was born in Turkey – fell back from 34 to 24 seats; Democrats 66, a liberal party, collapsed from 24 to a mere nine seats; the Christian Democrats from 15 to only five; and the Christian Union from five to three.
The GreenLeft-Labour Alliance, led by Frans Timmermans, a former European Commissioner, which is staunchly in favour of a liberal asylum policy, won 25 seats, a rise of eight, but no other group on the Left did well.
The threshold a party has to clear to start winning seats in the Binnenhof is only 0.67 per cent, and a profusion of minor parties gained tiny numbers of seats.
Who will now become Prime Minister? Wilders will make the first attempt at leading a coalition, and has better chances than one might think. In the 1990s he spent eight years working for one of Rutte’s predecessors as leader of the VVD, Frits Bolkestein, who went on to serve as a European Commissioner.
Wilders himself was a VVD MP from 1998-2004: before becoming a rebel, he served an apprenticeship as an insider.
Wilders categorises himself as a right-wing liberal. Many commentators denounce him as an extremist, and he has certainly said some extreme things in his time.
But if one is now to label him as an extremist, and to leave it at that, what is one to say about the almost 24 per cent of Dutch voters who this week supported him?
To dismiss them as extremists is to fall into the error made by Hillary Clinton when she described Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables”.
A few days before the election, Timmermans said “a party of exclusion and discrimination”, by which he meant Wilders’ party, “is threatening to enter our cabinet. We must never allow that.”
The instinctive response of the Left is to declare the exclusion of asylum seekers, and of migrants generally, an illegitimate policy, and to insist on the exclusion from government of anyone promoting that policy.
But as Peter Conradi recently reported in The Sunday Times, many Dutch voters are worried that their country, which has a population of 17.9 million and is more than twice as densely populated as the United Kingdom, has no room to house the growing number of arrivals:
“since 1950 the population has risen by 78 per cent, compared with 55 per cent in France and 35 per cent in Britain. The recent focus has inevitably been on the sharp jump in the number of asylum applications, which reached 35,535 last year — 44 per cent more than in 2021 and the highest number since 2015 — with 10,925 more family members joining the asylum seekers. It has been predicted that the combined number could hit 70,000 this year.”
Variations on this story are found in Britain, Germany, France, Italy and pretty much every other European country. Voters watch the mainstream parties fail to tackle the vexed problem of controlling the nation’s borders, and look around for someone who might do better.