The surprise winner of last Wednesday’s election in the Netherlands is the longest-serving member of the Dutch House of Representatives: Geert Wilders. The far-right politician—known primarily for his anti-Islam radicalism, his pro-Putin views, and his hairdo—was first elected in 1998, but for years, he was shut out from the governing coalitions. Now, however, he holds the whip hand. His Party for Freedom (PVV) won 37 seats out of 150, up from 17 two years ago, dramatically outperforming the polls and placing well ahead of its closest competitor, the joint list of the Greens and the Labor Party (GL-PvdA).
But the path from there to becoming prime minister is a long and uncertain one.
In fact, the PVV had been subject to a cordon sanitaire ever since the fall of outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s first government in 2012, which it had supported (and which for that reason was colloquially referred to as Brown I, after the fascist brownshirts, instead of Rutte I). The PVV’s platform calls for bans on the Quran, on mosques, and on Islamic schools; a retraction of the Dutch king’s apology for slavery and the restoration of blackface at St. Nicholas celebrations; as well as an abolition of asylum and of free movement of workers within the European Union. Even by the standards of contemporary national conservatives, the platform is made up of a poisonous mix of heinous impulses.
Wilders maintained his presence in parliament, but his appeal and influence were limited while his caucus calcified, as it has now: Eight of the 10 longest-serving members in the new Dutch House are PVV members. But Wilders is the only member of the party as a legal entity, and its absolute ruler as a result, unbound by leadership elections or other concerns. The party does not organize conferences and such, and many of its incoming representatives do not know each other or their new colleagues. Combine that with the lack of outside options, thanks to the party’s reputation, for Wilders’s elected officials, and you end up with a predictable caucus of goons and misfits.
The explicit agreement among mainstream parties to exclude Wilders from governing coalitions came to an end this summer. Rutte brought down his own government over a minor disagreement with one of his coalition partners, the Christian Union, over family reunification rules for asylum recipients. Rutte’s successor as VVD party leader, Justice Minister Dilan Yesilgoz, then opened the door to cooperation with the PVV to rally voters who favor a right-wing government around her.
Wilders jumped at the opportunity and claimed that his priorities had shifted toward health care and economic anxiety. The Dutch media ecosystem complied and started referring to him as “Geert Milders.” As he started rising in the polls, especially after the conflict in Gaza broke out, Yesilgoz tried to walk back her earlier words.
Too little, too late: Voters preferred the original over the copy. In that sense, Wilders’s rise fits American political scientist Larry Bartels’s thesis—that democracy erodes from the top—almost perfectly.
While that is the immediate explanation for Wilders’s success, alarms bells about discontent among a large group of voters—and an openness to wild options—had been ringing for some time. Earlier this year, the agrarian-populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) became the largest party in the Dutch Senate after winning the provincial elections on its first try. In 2019, the radical-right conspiracy theorists of Forum for Democracy had similarly made their Senate debut as the largest party.
This impulse predates Wilders’s founding of the PVV in 2006: The right-populist Pim Fortuyn List broke through with 26 seats in 2002 after its eponymous founder was murdered by an animal rights activist. It also extends beyond voters open to Wilders’s message. On Wednesday, in addition to Wilders’s large gains, a new party (the New Social Contract) led by former Christian-Democrat Pieter Omtzigt, the second-most veteran member of the Dutch House, secured 20 seats mere months after its founding.
It is not obvious what the Dutch political class can or will plausibly do to address this discontent. It is not merely a thermostatic response to left-wing policy: Eternal prime minister Mark Rutte has mostly led fairly bland center-right governments since he entered office in 2010, while his predecessor was a Christian-Democrat.
In fact, there is a bloc of voters whose expressed wishes are so far out of line with majority opinion and with the domestic and international legal frameworks that the Netherlands has spent decades developing and promoting that they will not be satisfied by any realistic policy changes. These voters include the 50 percent of Wilders’s supporters who have been loyal to him for the past decade, and those who have stuck with the Forum for Democracy as even its own elected officials fled the party’s mix of antisemitism, anti-vaccine lunacy, racism, and love of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Like comparable voters in other countries, they are heavily male, lower-income, less likely to hold a college degree, and detached from social networks.
Disaffected voters outside of Wilders’ core supporters harbor a mix of concerns that include some where policy and governance could and should be improved—though that’s easier said than done. The nitrogen emission crisis that catapulted the BBB to its Senate victory requires difficult choices over land use—between agricultural activity, housing, infrastructure, and nature preservation—that simply need to be made instead of paralyzing the country for years.
Relatedly, housing policy in the Netherlands, as in the United States and elsewhere in the West, has been a disaster for decades. Limited construction in the face of ongoing urbanization, population growth, and ever decreasing household size has placed home ownership and even the ability to rent out of reach for far too many. Too many Dutch politicians, including mainstream ones, try to place the blame for these problems, which are of their own making, on migrants.
The Dutch system of capital income taxation is in flux after elements of it were struck down by the courts. Natural gas extraction in the northeast, suspended last month, caused earthquakes and significant damage: Many affected homeowners still await compensation. The child care benefit scandal that ended Rutte’s third government and made Omtzigt’s career ruined the lives of thousands of families, many of whom still await compensation as well.
But are these areas where a Wilders government would dramatically improve matters? Take the child care benefit scandal, the biggest political scandal in the Netherlands in recent years. The Dutch tax agency concluded it had targeted victimized families on the basis of national origin, donations to mosques, and “not looking Dutch.” It’s like putting U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez in charge of monitoring the Egyptian government’s human rights record.
On the international front, there are ways to reduce immigration at the margin: by forcing Dutch universities to offer more instruction in Dutch or by raising taxes on high-skilled immigrants. Such changes would be costly to institutions of higher learning, the Dutch knowledge economy, and industrial champions such as ASML, and I’m sure some of these same voters would complain about that in turn. The Netherlands could scale down its climate agenda somewhat, though significant aspects of it are managed at the EU level. And the country could return to its traditional position of budgetary hawkishness within the European Union after a brief excursion to Club Med—though Wilders’s platform, which calls for a lower pension age, reduced VAT, and more public health care spending, goes in the opposite direction.
But whether it’s immigration, EU membership, religious freedom, or Dutch support for Ukraine, there simply is no path forward for the dramatic policy shifts envisioned by Wilders and his ilk. There is no pro-Putin majority among Dutch MPs (or voters). The Netherlands is not going to leave the EU and reintroduce the guilder or convince NATO to expel Turkey. It is not going to abolish its representation in Ramallah because “it already has an embassy in Amman,” as the PVV stated in its election manifesto.
In fact, let’s not get ahead of ourselves: It is not at all obvious that there is a majority in the Dutch House that supports a government led by Wilders or one that his party participates in. The two indispensable parties for any majority are Omtzigt’s New Social Contract and, as has been the case for years now, the VVD.
During the campaign, Omtzigt suggested that he would not govern with Wilders; he predictably changed his tune this week. It would be somewhat ironic if partnerships with Wilders became the unifying thread of the political career of Omtzigt, a man who has long claimed to care deeply about religious freedom. Those who recall how American warriors for religious freedom responded to former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban will not be shocked.
The VVD has adopted a trickier position. Despite triggering the election and opening the door to Wilders, it has now announced that it’s tuning out. It is unwilling to join any coalition—though it would be willing to support a minority right-wing government, presumably formed by PVV, the New Social Contract, and BBB. Such a government would effectively be Rutte I in reverse, with the VVD and the PVV swapping places and the New Social Contract and BBB taking the place of the Christian-Democratic party that Omtzigt was then a part of.
Variations will surely be considered, and I imagine that Yesilgoz would happily join a coalition if she gets to be prime minister. Wilders is responsible for selecting a so-called “scout” to explore the possibilities. His first choice was forced to resign when news broke that Utrecht University, the scout’s former employer, had filed charges of fraud and bribery against him. The new beacon of hope for concerned citizens is Ronald Plasterk, a former education and home affairs minister for the Labor Party who has drifted to the right in recent years.
The alternative to a right-wing coalition—off the table while Wilders has the initiative—would be a broad centrist coalition in which the VVD and New Social Contract are joined by the GL-PvdA and either the liberal Democrats 66 party or the BBB. But even consideration of that option is unlikely to happen before 2024.
This route would not be a very satisfying outcome to many New Social Contract and VVD voters. At the same time, it would avoid not just Wilders, but also a coalition featuring two entirely new parties, including many inexperienced and unvetted PVV MPs. For the outgoing prime minister, who has set his sights on a leadership role at NATO or the European Commission, it would surely constitute a more attractive legacy. And at a time of geopolitical upheaval, it might be the responsible choice.
Though the size of Wilders’ win came as a major surprise, these two coalition options were basically already on the table based on preelection polling. Ironically, a shift to the right may well be less likely now than if Wilders had won fewer seats. As the leader of the largest party, he would traditionally become prime minister. To his potential coalition partners, that may be a bridge too far in a way that a less dominant role might not have been.
But regardless of the eventual outcome and whatever else may motivate his voters, Wilders’s victory is first and foremost a message of intense hatred toward the Netherlands’ ethnic and religious minorities as well as its immigrant population. The legitimation of Wilders’s open bigotry and the willingness of millions of Dutch voters to tell their neighbors and co-workers that they find their mere existence odious are, well, not great.