Twenty-six political parties contested the Dutch general election on 22 November 2023, out of which sixteen secured seats in the Tweede Kamer (House of Representatives)-the lower house of parliament. The right-wing PVV (Partij voor de Vrijheid; Party for Freedom), led by Geert Wilders, won 37 out of the 150 seats on offer, up from 17 seats in 2021, making it the single largest parliamentary party. It is now up to Wilders to find suitable and willing partners and then form a working coalition, with a target of 76 seats. This is likely to be a tedious process in the messy, multi-party Dutch political system, where proportional representation makes fragile coalition governments inevitable. These coalitions are often slow to form: it took 271 days to form the last ruling coalition under exiting Prime Minister Mark Rutte in 2021.
The key potential right-leaning coalition partners are the centre-right VVD (Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie; People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) (24 seats), led by Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, a Kurdish child refugee and former Minister of Justice and Security, and the pro-reform NSC (Nieuw Sociaal Contract; New Social Contract) (20 seats), led by Pieter Omtzigt. Neither of these parties has appeared overly enthusiastic to join a government under Wilders, whose election has nonetheless proved popular in Eurosceptic circles within the EU. An early setback came with the resignation on 27 November of Senator Gom van Strien, chosen by Wilders to negotiate with potential coalition partners, in the face of allegations of past fraud and bribery.
The Netherlands faces challenging times. The economy, the environment, and immigration are among the key issues of the day. The country is in the throes of recession, a cost-of-living crisis, and housing shortages, providing fertile ground for populist leaders seeking to spread the blame. Ethnic and religious tensions have come to the fore, as 5 per cent of the population of 17.5 million is Muslim and Islam is now the third largest religious denomination in the country.
The Netherlands, although nominally liberal and secular, was traditionally segregated along religious and socioeconomic dividing lines-a situation sometimes referred to as pillarization. The pillars of Dutch society began to disintegrate in the mid 1960s, and the country embraced multiculturalism from 1985 onwards, only to abandon multicultural policies in the early 2000s in favour of integration of immigrants into Dutch society by assimilation. A number of incidents in the early noughties led to growing anti-Muslim sentiments, including 9/11, the assassination of Pim Fortuyn in 2002, and the short film Submission in 2004, which depicted abuse of women under fundamentalist Islam and provoked the assassination of its director Theo van Gogh by an Islamist extremist in the same year. Wilders fed into growing anti-Muslim, and wider anti-immigrant sentiments, producing his own film Fitna, which attacked Islamist terrorism, in 2008. Many of his subsequent public statements have reinforced his anti-Muslim stance.
This November, Wilders has won on a platform of Eurosceptic, anti-immigration, anti-Islam, and climate- change denial policies. His vision of a sovereign Netherlands mandates the securing of the Dutch borders. Under his proposals, EU nationals will require work permits, asylum for refugees will be ended, the numbers of international students will be cut back, while illegal immigrants, temporary asylum permit-holders, and dual-national criminals will be deported. Wilders seeks to ban the Qur’an (Muslim holy book), mosques, Islamic schools, and headscarves in all public buildings. He would withdraw previous Dutch expressions of regret for involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Wilders also wishes to hold a binding referendum on the Netherlands’ continued membership of the EU, to end military support for Ukraine, and to expel Türkiye from NATO. He hopes to increase oil and natural gas extraction from the North Sea and to keep coal and gas power stations open, while constructing new nuclear power stations. To woo his coalition partners, Wilders has, however, begun to moderate some of his more extreme demands and it seems unlikely that he will be able to deliver on many of his manifesto promises.
Geert Wilders is readily recognisable by his greying, bouffant hair. He was born into a Catholic family in the southeastern city of Venlo in 1963, and entered politics as a member of the VVD, being elected to Utrecht city council in 1997 and to the House of Representatives the following year. Finding the party too liberal for his liking, he left the VVD in 2004 and founded the PVV two years later. Wilders has joined a growing coterie of right-wing European populist leaders who are winning at the polls, reflecting growing popular dissatisfaction with traditional political elites and heralding uncertain times. The precise composition of the next Dutch coalition government, however, remains a matter for conjecture.
Ashis Banerjee