What Now for Geert Wilders?
The headline-grabbing anti-Islam right-wing Dutch politician spent the winter negotiating to become the country’s next prime minister. He has abandoned the effort. What comes next?
Populist Dutch politician Geert Wilders, a master at grabbing headlines over the past decade, orchestrated a dramatic win for his Party for Freedom (PVV) in parliamentary elections last November. The sixty-year old Wilders spent the winter months searching for willing coalition partners — as well as forty votes in parliament that would enable him to form a government and become prime minister. Wilders officially abandoned his quest to become prime minister on March 13.
“I can only become prime minister if ALL parties in the coalition support it. That was not the case,”
— Geert Wilders, March 13 (posted on X)
The current drama represents the first time in several decades that the leader of the winning party in a Dutch general election didn’t ascend to the post of prime minister.
As talks dragged on into spring Wilders had hoped to wrangle enough support for an investiture vote allowing him to become prime minister accompanied (perhaps) by a legion of non-partisan administrative leaders to manage state ministries. The February Guardian headline: “Geert Wilders’ hopes of becoming Dutch PM dim after centrist party quits talks.”
The end of his quest came slowly even as Wilders shed some of his most controversial and divisive legislative proposals — including withdrawing legislation he had authored which aimed to ban or restrict Islamic institutions of learning and tighter restrictions on voting rights for dual nationals. Wilders has left a long paper trail over the past two decades related to his right-wing political views. In a 2007 op-ed for a Dutch newspaper, he wrote that the Quran “incites hatred and killing and therefore has no place in our [Dutch] legal order.”
A Dutch court determined in 2016 that Wilders had used language that was “demeaning and thereby insulting towards the Moroccan population” in the Netherlands. Wilders had led a gathering of supporters in provocative chants during a political rally in 2014. The court did not impose a fine and cleared Wilders of the more serious charge of inciting hatred.
Throughout the post-election coalition talks this winter, ideological and policy differences and strong personalities created significant obstacles even as the political center has shifted rightward in many European Union nations, particularly on issues of migration. Disagreement over Dutch immigration and asylum policy caused the previous governing coalition to collapse last summer. The number of applications the Netherlands received related to asylum rose from 36,620 in 2021 to 47,991 last year in 2022. It rose even further in 2023 with more than a third of all applications coming from Syrian nationals.
Shaping the Debate Across Europe
Wilders has made migration, asylum and citizenship a key component of his platform for over a decade. Wilders embraced the controversies and the attention — domestic and international. A supporter of Donald Trump’s tough talk about immigration and border security, he was invited to attend the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. He is an advocate of free-markets with a desire to roll back bureacracy in both The Hague and Brussels. He has advocated for drastic changes in a broad range of Dutch national policy areas, from immigration to education to taxes to public subsidies for public media channels.
Despite his rhetoric, he is confronted by demographic realities that are found in many Western nations: a flat domestic birth rate. Economic growth will depend on external migration. In a nation with a population of 18 million, nearly ninety percent of the population growth in the Netherlands over the past several years came from external migration. The Netherlands now hosts large numbers of North Africans and Ukrainian citizens and refugees. Important components of the Dutch economy, like agriculture and various service sectors, depend on migrant workers.
Wilders’ hardline views on immigration and asylum found receptive ears across Europe particularly after a series of high-profile terror attacks across Europe in 2015 and 2016, some inspired by ISIS or organized by the group itself. The attacks provided nationalist politicians in Europe like Wilders with the visceral front page headlines they sought in order to advocate for both tougher migration policies and various restrictions on the religious practices of the roughly 20 million Muslim citizens/residents in the European Union.
The debate on immigration within the EU has shifted in both style and substance. The National Assembly in France voted in December to overhaul the nation’s immigration system. Parts of the reform proposal were controversial and included specific immigration quotas and procedures to make it harder for immigrants to bring their families to France. In January, the nation’s Constitutional Council struck down large parts of the new law.
The government of Finland announced last June that it planned to halve the number of refugees the Nordic country receives via the official UN refugee agency from 1,050 a year to 500.
Eight years on, the Brexit vote looms large for Wilders and the EU. Though Wilders has repeatedly called for a Dutch vote on leaving the European Union (Nexit), he recently dropped this proposal from his party’s platform for the upcoming EU parliamentary elections in June.
Recent polling shows that about seventy percent (70%) of Dutch citizens are against leaving the EU. His PPV platform calls for a smaller EU budget and the adoption of opt-outs from EU policies and regulations in fields like asylum and migration, for example.
Going Forward
Wilders often pushes back against the narrative that he is a far-right agitator? “We are a country of consensus-building. We don’t even have that many far-right people in our country; we never will,” he told the BBC following the November 2023 election. But Wilders funded and produced the 2008 anti-Islam documentary film Fitna. The title comes from an Arabic word for discord and that is exactly what Wilders delivered. The 17-minute film received more than 3 million views upon its release before being taken offline by the hosting site Liveleak. The xenophobic short film alternates between passages from the Quran and graphic scenes of terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe.
When Wilders was first elected to the Dutch parliament in 1998 Bill Clinton was president of the United States and the euro was yet to be an actual paper currency. Wilders worldview is now shared by other anti-establishment political leaders — at home and abroad. Thierry Baudet, head of the Forum for Democracy (FvD) party, flanks Wilders on the right in the Netherlands — often with heavy doses of conspiracy theories.
Additionally, Dutch politics was rocked by a new issue in 2019 that has further emboldened anti-establishment leaders: nitrogen and the nation’s agriculture sector. Excess active nitrogen in soil and water can release nitrous oxide, a more potent driver in the global warming phenomenon than even carbon dioxide. A large share of the excess nitrogen in Dutch soil comes from the country’s important agriculture sector, a cornerstone and touchstone of Dutch culture and commerce. Farmers felt targeted by both EU bureaucracy and Dutch politicians as the nitrogen-environment policy debate intensified. The Farmer-Citizen Movement was born. Developments like this mean that Wilders no longer has the populist spotlight to himself. He is just one of several anti-establishment voices in the nation’s public policy discourse.
Despite his polarizing personality at home, Wilders remains a star in the global populist and conservative political movement. He is scheduled to speak at the CPAC Hungary conference in Budapest later this month. The Budapest gathering is sponsored by the Hungary-based Center for Fundamental Rights and is heavily influenced by the US-based Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
The work of crafting a governing coalition continues. Along with Wilders’ PVV, three other parties — the four-year old Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), the People’s Party for Freedom & Democracy (VVD) and the New Social Contract (NSC) — continue talks on policy areas and constitutional principles. The outgoing VVD-led government is still in power, awaiting an agreement between Wilders’ PVV and the above-mentioned political parties. The waiting continues.
The expectation is that the four parties will eventually agree to the formation of an “extra-parliamentary” cabinet, which would include government ministers who are (primarily) bureaucratic/administrative experts rather than party leaders. The exact ministerial portfolio granted to Geert Wilders is not yet certain. But his imprint on Dutch domestic and foreign policy is likely to be profound no matter who becomes the county’s next prime minister.
