First of all, the PVV won in purely numerical terms. Wilders managed to increase his vote to thirteen percent, giving him twenty of one hundred fifty parliamentary seats.
Meanwhile, the two government parties — the free-market conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and the center-left Labour Party (PvdA) lost significantly. [...]
To the PVV’s five seats, we should add the two seats claimed by the new Forum for Democracy — the Netherlands’ answer to the United States’ alt-right. During the campaign, party leader Thierry Baudet called for ending the “homeopathic dilution of the Dutch people” by foreigners. He has also claimed in his writings that all women secretly long to be raped.
Apart from these numerical gains, the far right managed to set the agenda for the entire campaign season. Both the VVD and the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), which ended at nineteen seats, waged a more explicitly racist and Islamophobic campaign than ever before. [...]
Thus, Wilders gained both numbers and political influence. He lost only in comparison to the even larger gains granted to him in the virtual reality the polling agencies created. This demands an important aside, for in recent years such opinion polls themselves have become a major force in politics. [...]
The rot goes deeper: the PvdA did not come in first in a single municipality, ranking fourth in Amsterdam and fifth in places like Zaanstad and Groningen, once cradles of the Dutch socialist movement. In working-class Rotterdam, still Europe’s largest harbor and a city where social democracy once was completely hegemonic, the PvdA came in seventh.
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