Wilders. In A Landslide

“They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” Donald Trump said famously, while announcing a long-shot bid for the White House in June of 2015.

Less than two years later, at a campaign event in a working-class town outside of Rotterdam, another provocateur with strange hair said something very similar. “There is a lot of Moroccan scum in Holland who make the streets unsafe,” Geert Wilders told reporters, in February of 2017. “Not all are scum.”

Wilders, a veteran of Dutch politics, a proud nationalist and a mainstay of Europe’s far-right, is best known for two things outside of the Netherlands: Virulent Islamophobia and his tall, coiffed hair, which accentuates his cartoonish facial features.

Wilders’s Willy Wonka-ish appearance makes his nefarious reputation all the more unnerving — like the clown, from It. In 2016, he suggested the Netherlands bar “all asylum-seekers from Islamic countries,” a demand reminiscent of Trump’s Muslim ban. “Our women are in danger from Islamic testosterone bombs,” Wilders sneered, in an infamous video calling for male refugees to be locked up in asylum centers.

Wilders seized on Europe’s escalating refugee crisis in 2015 to advance his unapologetically racist, fanatically ethnocentric agenda. Among other things, Wilders has pledged to close mosques and ban the Quran. Do note: There’s nothing understated about PVV’s positions. You don’t have to read between the lines. They spell it right out. The passages below are verbatim from page eight of the party’s election program:

The Netherlands is not an Islamic country: No Islamic schools, Qurans and mosques. We want less Islam and we will achieve that through less non-Western immigration and the introduction of a general asylum freeze. The PVV wants for you [a] ban on dual nationality [and a] ban on wearing Islamic headscarves in government buildings.

The same document introduces the “Asylum and Immigration” section with a full-page picture of a Muslim woman walking down the street with her back to the camera. “The severe deterioration of our beautiful Netherlands is due to the ongoing asylum tsunami,” the first sentence on the following page reads. Wilders’s views on Islam are so extreme that he lives under police protection.

Now, look, maybe you agree with the PVV’s policy prescriptions. I think they’re abhorrent, but I’d never presume to dictate to the Dutch how they should structure their society. That isn’t my place and it’s not up to me anyway. The point is simply this: Wilders is proudly anti-pluralistic and he’s not averse to curtailing individual liberty to the extent a free and open society produces outcomes that aren’t compatible with his view of what the nation should look like. I don’t think he’d dispute that characterization.

Wilders was convicted some years ago of inciting discrimination for his ringleader role in an anti-Moroccan rally which a panel of Dutch judges derided as an effort to splinter the country by weaponizing nationality. Wilders, echoing Trump, assailed the court. “The Netherlands has become a sick country,” he said, accusing the judges of trampling free speech. “No one will be able to silence me.”

He was right about that. And voters spoke loudly in his favor this week. Wilders’s PVV swept to a landslide victory in national elections on Wednesday evening. Wilders, who got a boost when Mark Rutte’s successor, Dilan Yesilgoz-Zegerius, suggested she’d entertain the idea of a coalition with PVV, put up a strong showing in the final debate. “For us this result is a disappointment,” a forlorn Yesilgoz-Zegerius said, once the results were in. Rutte in July said he was exiting the Dutch political scene after his government collapsed amid disagreements over immigration policy.

“The Dutch voter has spoken,” Wilders told supporters, in a victory speech. Earlier this month, in a gambit to win over more voters, Wilders suggested his crusade against Islam could take a backseat to “more important priorities.” That counted as a conciliatory remark, and likely allayed at least some fears that Wilders simply isn’t capable of governing a modern society.

Wilders has, of course, called for a binding referendum on leaving the EU — “Nexit,” as the PVV calls it. The party demands “a sovereign Netherlands that’s in charge of its own currency, makes its own rules” and isn’t subject to “diktats,” as the election program put it. Wilders opposes additional aid to Ukraine and the PVV also wants to withdraw the Netherlands from international climate obligations. “We must stop being afraid of climate change,” the party insists, adding that the Dutch needn’t fear rising sea levels because the Netherlands has world-class water engineers.

Naturally, Viktor Orban called to congratulate Wilders. Orban wished Geert “success and perseverance for the upcoming political negotiations.” Those negotiations will be long and fraught, and there are no guarantees. But regardless of how it plays out, Wilders’s victory, like Javier Milei’s win in Argentina, was yet another testament to the notion that a disaffected populace is an electorate vulnerable to the siren song of far-right populism.

“The voter has said, ‘We are fed up,'” Wilders declared, promising to “return the Netherlands to the Dutch.”