Al Jazeera: Brexit Britain set to wield little influence in new-look Europe

The Brexit Party gained 29 seats in the new chamber - as many as Angela Merkel's CDU/CSU, and more than Matteo Salvini's League in Italy, which got 28 seats as 34 percent of Italians who voted opted for his far-right, anti-migrant party. [...]

A number of smaller far-right parties across Europe support Salvini's bloc, however, most did not perform well in the elections. Geert Wilder's anti-Islam Freedom Party in the Netherlands, for one, lost all of its seats. [...]

"But ultimately, they don't have the same aims, so it's unclear at this point how much they are going to cooperate. Traditionally, Farage and his colleagues have rarely taken an interest in the works of the EU. They weren't really active in the committees, they didn't hold any of the important roles," she said, adding that it remains to be seen "how invested they [Farage et al] are in the European Parliament". [...]

"[However], the League is much more oriented towards playing the European game. Of course, they have positioned themselves against some of the decisions made by the EU, but unlike Mr Farage, they do not want to undermine the EU and the institution of the European Parliament per se," Frantescu told Al Jazeera. [...]

"A more fragmented EU parliament shows there is more polarisation, and I think that makes for a more healthy debate. But it will also make EU reform much more difficult," Wright added. "There are going to be lots of challenges ahead for the EU and I'm not sure where Brexit sits in that list of priorities."

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Foreign Policy: The Economic Crisis Is Over. Populism Is Forever.

The larger significance of Merkel’s fate is that the materialist assumptions of Western liberalism no longer capture the reality of Western politics and culture. It is in the nature of liberalism, a credo founded on rationalism, secularism, and utilitarian calculation, to regard material interests—i.e., your pocketbook—as real and the realm of values as ephemeral. That is why in What’s The Matter With Kansas?, the economist Thomas Frank could argue that Republicans had hoodwinked working-class Americans into voting against their true interests by seducing them with traditionalist values. That is also what Barack Obama was thinking when he said during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign that working-class voters “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

It is, of course, no coincidence that the wave of populist nationalism now breaking over the West began in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, when millions of working- and middle-class voters lost savings, jobs, and future prospects. But the wave engulfed liberal politics even where economic pillars remained intact. Poland was Eastern Europe’s economic engine—its Germany—when the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party defeated the classically liberal Civic Platform in 2015. Civic Platform Prime Minister Donald Tusk had described his platform as the maintenance of “warm water in the tap.” When I was in Warsaw the following year, Konstanty Gebert, a columnist and former Solidarity leader, said to me, “He thought that was enough, but he was wrong. People wanted history, they wanted glory, they wanted meaning. And PiS offered a meaning. Their meaning was, ‘We’ll make Poland great again.’”[...]

It is also no coincidence that hostility to immigrants and refugees runs much hotter in eastern Germany than in the wealthier and more open west. Yet during several visits to Dresden, near the country’s eastern border, I found that economics was not uppermost in the minds of either the officials of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party whom I met nor even among the marchers in the weekly rally of the anti-immigrant group Pegida. The demonstrators were not lumpen; most were small-town folk who had seen a few Muslim refugees—often very few—and concluded that their world was under siege. The nationalist spirit has begun spreading westward: In elections this month in wealthy and worldly Bavaria, the AfD won more than 10 percent of the vote and entered parliament there for the first time. The right of center fell, the left of center collapsed, and both extremes profited.

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The Conversation: ‘Far right’ groups may be diverse – but here’s what they all have in common

However, the term “far right” tends to subsume a broad range of parties and groups that differ significantly in agenda and policy – especially economic and welfare policies – as well as the extent to which they support and employ violence. This category includes both parties that have moderated their agendas, distancing themselves from fascism in order to appeal to broader electorates; and vigilante street groups and extreme parties which employ violence, such as the Greek Golden Dawn (GD), the English Defence League (EDL), Britain First and the Italian Casa Pound. [...]

The “far right” umbrella includes parties and groups that share an important commonality: they all justify a broad range of policy positions on socioeconomic issues on the basis of nationalism. The point here is not simply that they are all, to a degree, nationalist; but rather, that they use nationalism to justify their positions on all socioeconomic issues.

The term “right-wing populism”, however, is less appropriate. Populism is an even broader umbrella that often includes disparate parties and groups. To narrow down this category, we often tend to conflate populism and nationalism, identifying a party as populist, not on the basis of its populist attributes – what party doesn’t claim to speak on behalf of the people in a democracy? – but on the basis of its nationalist attributes. But despite the similarities between “populism” and “nationalism” – both emphasise conflict lines, focus on the collective, and put forward a vision of an ideal society – the two are conceptually different. While the former pits the people against the elites, the latter pits the in-group against the out-group.

And so herein lies the problem. If nationalism is always a feature of the far right, as most researchers agree, what is the added value of the term “populism”? To put it another way, what is the difference between a radical right-wing party and a populist radical right-wing party? While populism may or may not be an attribute of some far right parties, it is not their defining feature. Rather, nationalism is.

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Al Jazeera: Europe far right hails Trump, slams EU, Islam, migrants

Far right leaders promised to build a new Europe without the EU, as they rallied against Islam and praised US President Donald Trump's hardline immigration policy at a meeting in Prague over the weekend. [...]

"We do like diversity but I like the Dutch to be Dutch, the Czechs to be Czech, I like the French to be French and I like the Italians to be Italians."

Wilders, meanwhile, rejected Islam as "totalitarian ideology" and warned that the continent would be overrun by Muslims. [...]

"In the regional sense, the post-communist countries are particularly fragile and have always been, with the arrival with the now perceived danger from foreigners and Muslims," Jan Culik, a lecturer in Czech studies at the University of Glasgow, told Al Jazeera. "They have very little immunity to xenophobia and now the Czech Republic and Poland are among the worst in this regard.

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Jacobin Magazine: Populist Billionaires

The paradox at the heart of these populist right-wing movements is that while they are products of popular anger — and appear a rejection of the globalized, hyperconnected world extolled by the elite — it’s also segments of this elite that are helping power these movements.

These aren’t outliers. A study last year found that just ten wealthy donors made up more than half the donations for EU referendum campaigns, with pro-Brexit donors making up six of those ten. One of these donors was Peter Hargreaves, the founder of a financial services company, who donated £3.2 million to the Leave.EU campaign. [...]

This isn’t limited to the United Kingdom. In the Netherlands, the largest donor to Geert Wilders’ far right Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) is the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an American organization that funds various conservative and Islamophobic outlets, including Jihad Watch. The center gave the PVV €108,244 in 2015, the largest individual contribution in the Dutch political system in a single year, though it’s donated to the party over the course of a number of years, as well as paying for Wilders’s trips to the United States. [...]

All this at first seems counter-intuitive. After all, it’s generally assumed that xenophobic and anti-immigrant attitudes are the domain of the white working class, which goes to explain the success of Trump and Brexit among such voters. But data analyses like this one from Vox paint a more complicated picture. It suggests that the most active elite donors have significantly harsher anti-immigration and authoritarian views than others, including other wealthy people who aren’t political donors. 

None of this is to say that these movements and ideas are simply astroturfed. They’re not. Nor is it to say that the far right would be unsuccessful without the backing of big donors. A party founded by actual Nazis nearly won the Austrian elections despite the country’s public funding of elections, and Marine Le Pen had tremendous success despite the strict restrictions on French campaign finance laws (though she, too, comes from less than humble beginnings).

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Social Europe: Authoritarian Nationalism, Not Populism, Is Real Threat To Democracy

First, populism is not a core ideology of political parties or movements in Europe. Neither populist parties nor their voters tend to give much weight to issues of democratic reform. Dissatisfaction with politics is a marginal reason for voters in Western Europe to vote for radical right-wing parties, and dissatisfaction does not play a role at all as a motivation to electorally support left-wing populist parties. Like their voters, populist parties do not give much salience to issues of democratic reform. For radical right-wing populist parties, for instance, proposals to introduce direct forms of democracy or to reform the judiciary tend to be instrumental to anti-immigration policies and security issues. Nationalism and authoritarianism are much more important ideological sources for these parties than populism. For left-wing populist parties, it is still to be seen whether they aim to reform liberal democracies into popular democracies.

Second, not all populist parties are against liberal democracy. Some parties are merely rhetorically populist. The Dutch Socialist Party (SP), for instance, is widely regarded as a populist party. Certainly, the party often contrasts the good people to corrupt elites like bankers, but the SP is also committed to a liberal democracy. This is in contrast to Geert Wilders’ radical right-wing Party for Freedom (PVV) that is not only rhetorically populist, but also shows little commitment to liberal democracy.

Third, the pressure on liberal democracies is not restricted to populist parties. Policy proposals and legislative initiatives that are in tension with or defy fundamental freedoms are also coming from mainstream parties. Systematic comparative research is still lacking, but a case study of the Netherlands makes clear that policies that are in conflict with the rule of law are not restricted to populist parties.

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Quartz: Populist, authoritarian leaders are still on the rise across Europe

One in five Europeans (a total of 55.8 million people) voted for a populist party in 2016 and 2017, according a new study by the European Policy Information Center. The think tank analyzed electoral data in EU member states as well as Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Serbia, and Montenegro and found the vote share for authoritarian populist parties jumped from 10.6% in 1980 to 18.4% in 2017.

Most of this success has been quite recent. The average vote share of populist parties increased by only 1 percentage point from 1980 to 2000, but then jumped by 7 percentage points from 2000 to 2017.

The vote share for populist parties has overtaken support for liberalism in the last two decades. Over the same period, there’s been a decline for support for mainstream ideologies, including of conservatism and Christian democracy (down 4.7 percentage points), while support for social Democracy has decreased by 4.1 percentage points. [...]

The last decade has also seen the return of the radical left. The vote share of these parties declined between 1980 and the late 2000s, but gained ground over the last seven years. The radical left increased its average vote share to 6.3% in 2017. The examples of left-wing populists included in the report were Spain’s Podemos and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (a far-left presidential candidate), who plans to make a ruckus in the French parliament.

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Jacobin Magazine: Defeat in Victory

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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Political Critique: Elections in the Netherlands: Can Europe Be Saved?

The Netherlands, however, is still many of these (positive) things, and thus fears about a cascade of populist victories in Europe appear to be somewhat exaggerated. Both the U.K. and the U.S. feature political systems which tend towards single-party (and/or single-person) rule. Both have also spear-headed a neoliberal ‘spirit of the times’ and currently suffer the most dramatic backlash from it. The Netherlands, apart from maintaining a functioning welfare state and enjoying steady economic recovery, can contrastingly be characterized as a ‘democracy of minorities,’ featuring a system of proportional representation in a single constituency. This assures any party that wins 0.67% of the vote a seat in the Second Chamber (or Lower House). Since no single party ever manages to win a clear majority (76 out of 150 seats), coalition governments and a spirit of compromise have been the rule for more than a century.

Recent decades have witnessed a sharp decline in support for the three main governmental parties of the centre-right and centre-left: the Christian Democrats (CDA), the Conservative Liberals (VVD, the party of acting prime minister Mark Rutte), and the Labour Party. Apart from these, eleven other parties are forecast to gain seats in parliament, but none of these parties currently exceeds 12 percent in the polls. Conforming to a Europe-wide trend (excepting the German SPD), the Labour Party, now at a pitiful 8 percent, is heading towards a shattering defeat. Their coalition partner, VVD, is currently the largest party, hovering around 16 percent. The Christian Democrats already suffered their historic defeat in 2012, after participating in an ill-fated and short-lived coalition (which gave the PVV the role of conditional supporter). After having led the polls throughout 2016, Wilders’ party has steadily declined since the beginning of this year, and is now second at around 15 percent. Three other parties – the Progressive Liberals (D66), the Green Left Party (GroenLinks), and the Socialist Party (SP) – are following closely on the heels of both VVD and PVV, polling between 10 and 12 percent. [...]

This timely offer of a ‘politics of hope’ is crucial if we look at the deeper anatomy of the nationalist protest vote, which has fueled populism everywhere, including Brexit and Trumpism. The decline of traditional heavy industry has abolished many working-class jobs and undermined working-class pride, from the American Rust Belt to those of Northern France, the U.K. Midlands, Polish Silezia, the Donbass, and South Limburg (the last being a  Dutch province that still suffers phantom pains from the closing of the coalmines in the 1970s, and which constitutes Wilders’s heartland). Everywhere ‘honest work’ itself has been destroyed, while working-class, male-identified culture lives on as a ‘zombie culture.’ Economic grievances have been transformed into fears about cultural identity, social dignity, and meaning (or, rather, the lack thereof). Zombie or phantom identities such as these turn inward and become poisonous, opening themselves to the lure of gratuitous identities, as with those that are provided by nationalism, ethnicity and machismo. Many of Wilders’ core voters do not seem to care whether or not he is capable of effectively governing the country, and neither do they seem to believe in what he says. This is similar to many Trump voters, who voted out of desire to kick the elite’s ass, regardless of the consequences.

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The Atlantic: 'This Is Exactly What He Wants': How Geert Wilders Won by Losing

In fact, according to Paul Wilders, losing the bid to become prime minister may be the optimal electoral outcome for Geert, who has campaigned on a platform of leaving the European Union, tolerating “fewer Moroccans,” imposing a “head rag tax” on hijab-wearing women, and paying settled Muslims to leave the Netherlands—promises on which it would be difficult to deliver. [...]

Paul spoke to me about what his brother was like as a child, how he developed into “the Dutch Trump” (as he is sometimes known today), and what’s next for him now that the elections are over. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. [...]

Geert’s momentum may have slowed down, but those voters are still out there, just more dispersed than they were. I’m pretty sure he will try to draw those voters back and that might mean a rethink in how he expresses himself. Up till now he has behaved in a very, very extreme way. Whether or not to tone down the rhetoric is going to be a difficult decision for him. On one hand, he still won the four seats [in addition to the seats his party already had] by being extreme. On the other, the three or four seats he lost to the newer, smaller parties, he’s losing because those smaller parties have the same message but deliver it in a more toned-down way. He’ll have to formulate a strategy that will work to both keep the extremists and attract more moderate voters. [...]

Yes, he grew up when he went to Israel. He was 18, I drove him to the airport in Amsterdam. He’d wanted to go to Australia but settled on going to a kibbutz on the border with Jordan, by the Allenby Bridge, instead. He stayed there for two years. He had a hard time over there and that made a difference. In Israel he spent all his money in about a week. He lived like a king and [then] was forced to work. It was dangerous. And you could tell, after that. He came back a far more serious person, far more likable. He started looking for jobs and studying. I think the seed was planted there—the emotional and intellectual seed.

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Al Jazeera: Dutch elections: Not a populist revolt

Though the exact results are still to come in, Wilders ended up with no more than around 14 percent of the vote. Indeed, if 1 percent had gone the other way Wilders would have ended fourth rather than second.

The big story coming out of this Dutch election, then, is the further and possibly final disintegration of the two parties that have dominated Northern European politics since World War II: The Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats.

Thirty years ago the Dutch Labour Party and the Christian democrats still had more than two thirds of the vote between them. This time the Labour Party and the Christian Democrats did not even get one third of the vote taken together.

In their place have come a wide range of parties. There are now two green parties in the Netherlands, one pro-EU and one anti. There are two left-wing parties, the decimated Social Democrats and the now much bigger Socialist Party. There is a single issue party for senior citizens and two parties for strict or even fundamentalist Christians.

This election also saw the breakthrough of a populist party for immigrants, DENK. It is led by two Dutchmen of Turkish descent who use the same kind of conspiracy theories and personal attacks on opponents that served Trump so well.

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CityLab: Geert Wilders Didn't Take Over The Netherlands After All

Like Dutch politics in general, the situation is complicated and not especially sexy. The Netherlands has a pluralist system where 13 parties (yes, 13) are now represented in parliament; multi-party coalition governments have been the rule for over a century. Despite the chorus of worried thinkpieces, the number of buyers for Wilders’s PVV remains static in an extremely busy political marketplace. Indeed, the very nature of Dutch politics makes something of a mockery of the idea of “winning the popular vote”, which doesn’t in any way mean the same thing as it would in the U.S.

The overplaying of the Wilders threat cuts both ways. It was false to present his party and its extreme-right policies as poised to take over the Netherlands. It’s also simplistic to label Wilders’s restrained success as a “beautiful blow against Trumpism,” as did a recent email from Avaaz pushing this letter of congratulation to Dutch voters. The tenor of Dutch politics has still shifted rightwards and Wilders’s PVV has shaped the debate more than it electoral showing might suggest. In a bid to woo PVV voters, for example, Rutte’s VVD published a full page press advertisement this January warning migrants to “be normal or be gone”, a move picked up by the PVV as an attempt to out-Wilders Wilders himself. [...]

The Dutch elections have still broken something. That’s the belief in an unstoppable right-wing populist march through the West’s institutions, one that would start with Brexit, gain power from Trump’s election and inevitably deliver more extreme-right governments in Europe. Trump’s power may be unaffected and the slow, grim unfolding of Brexit, and its implications are no less inevitable. But maybe after Wednesday’s results, we will stop viewing European states as mere dominoes waiting to fall.

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The Guardian: The 'Jessiah': the Dutch progressive trying to turn back the populist tide

Klaver’s father has a Moroccan background, his mother is from mixed Dutch and Indonesian stock. He is unashamedly “pro-EU and pro-refugee”. And in a few short months, while the far-right Freedom party’s Geert Wilders has been complaining about “Moroccan scum”, Klaver has quadrupled his party’s standing in the polls. And he’s done it with his shirt sleeves rolled up and a smile on his face. [...]

The Green Left party in the Netherlands was formed 25 years ago by the merger of four political groups: the communists, pacifists, evangelicals and the self-styled political radicals. Unlike many green parties elsewhere in Europe that emerged from environmental activist groups, Groen Links has always had a social dimension to its politics and traditionally done well in a general election after the Dutch Labour party has been tainted by being in power. But the Greens have never before managed to connect with the highly educated segment of the electorate as Klaver appears to have done, let alone had the chance to be part of a Dutch government. [....]

Along with the collapse of the Dutch Labour vote from about 25% to as little as 8%, another ingredient of Klaver’s success is the stark contrast he offers to Wilders. Klaver says that in his dealings with the leader of the PVV, who was convicted of racist speech in December, he tries to keep things civil. But asked whether the rhetoric Wilders aimed at Moroccans had ever touched him personally, given his family roots, there is a discernible edge to the response. “No, only when... Most of the time not,” Klaver says, pausing. “Only once. I am a father of two sons. One and three years old. When the oldest was a couple of weeks old he [Wilders] yelled in this cafe ‘less, less Moroccans’. It was why he was in court.

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Politico: The populists haven’t won yet

But there is mounting evidence that Europe’s nationalist, xenophobic and populist fringe is finding it more difficult to attract voters. As campaign slogans collide with reality, many on the Continent who might once have cast a protest vote are rethinking their decisions as both countries struggle with political chaos and uncertainty. Their gripe with the political establishment may still be quite real, but their inclination to punish it through the ballot box has dampened.[...]

The far right has also lost its monopoly on fiery rhetoric and tough political agendas, most noticeably on the issue of migration, where both discourse and policy have markedly hardened. From Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s ultimatum — “Act normal or leave!” — to tightened asylum policies in Germany, the political mainstream has scrambled to placate the anxieties and disaffection that fueled voters’ shift to the right. And this pandering to nationalist impulses seems to be working — at least in the short term. [...]

Facing down the populist challenge will demand soul-searching, vigilance and savvy — both from governments and opposition benches. Most importantly, it will take all the political sobriety European citizens can muster as they enter the voting booths. The good news is that these political reflexes are kicking in. This will likely be a disappointing year for Europe’s far right.

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Bloomberg: Dutch Election: A Who's Who Guide to the Candidates

Dutch voters head to the polls on March 15, with a whopping 28 parties vying for the right to form a new government. Given the fractured political environment, it could take as many as six different groups to form a ruling coalition, making this year’s race the most complicated—and pivotal—in years.

Here are the main players, their party associations and the number of seats each currently holds in Parliament:

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BuzzFeed: The Man Who Turned Gay Rights Into “A Weapon” In A War Against Muslims

For months they had endured an increasingly strident debate about immigration ahead of elections on March 15, and they were tired of being caught in the crossfire. The race has been dominated by Geert Wilders, the bleached-blonde leader of the Party for Freedom who polls show could win the largest bloc of votes in parliament. His candidacy is being watched as the next test of the nationalist wave that drove Britain out of the EU and put Donald Trump in the White House.

But the race is also uniquely focused on gay rights, because Wilders has framed his crusade against Islam in part as a defense of national values in the country proud to have adopted the world’s first marriage equality law and has remained a leader on LGBT rights in the years since. And several more moderate politicians have echoed the message that Muslim immigrants threaten gay people.[...]

Wilders’ professed support of gay rights once put him out of step with other nationalist politicians in the West, who generally have also been social conservatives. But today Wilders seems like he was just ahead of his time, with politicians from Donald Trump to France’s Marine Le Pen following his lead and saying they are defending LGBT rights by opposing Muslim immigration. [...]

Immigrants are constantly being subjected to a “pink test,” said Dino Suhonic, founder of the queer Muslim organization Maruf and organizer of the evening’s gathering. Politicians are “using gay rights, as almost a [trait of] national identity,” Suhonic said, but only when debating the place of “asylum-seekers and the immigrants.” It’s an attitude Suhonic calls “homonationalism.” [...]

Ineke cited a 2009 study commissioned by the Department of Justice that found that 86% of people accused of violence against LGBT people in the Netherlands were of Dutch background and 14% of immigrant background, roughly equal to their representation in the population as a whole. Another analysis by researchers at the University of Amsterdam of anti-LGBT violence just within their city did find that people of Moroccan descent were overrepresented among suspected perpetrators, but also found that people from Turkish backgrounds were underrepresented and less likely to commit these crimes than people of Dutch descent. Religion was not the issue, the researchers concluded, but rather a “street culture” specific to Moroccan young men that “enforces hyper-masculine behavior.”

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Associated Press: With economy up, crime down, why are the Dutch discontent?

"It's not the economy, stupid," Professor Gerrit Voerman of the University of Groningen said, tweaking the campaign message Bill Clinton used in his successful 1992 march to the White House. Instead, Voerman said, "It's about identity." [...] 

 In the Netherlands, pollsters predict that Prime Minister Mark Rutte's People's Party for Freedom and Democracy will lose about 15 of the 40 seats it holds in the 150-seat House of Representatives. Wilders' party, which currently has 12 lawmakers in the chamber, is on track to become one of the biggest, if not the biggest, parliamentary faction, despite a recent decline in polls.

However, Wilders' hard-line anti-Islam, anti-immigration platform and rhetoric has driven away potential coalition partners among mainstream parties, meaning that he is unlikely to be able to form a government even if he wins the popular vote in this country whose elections all but guarantee coalitions.

Wilders' one-page election manifesto leads off with two "us-against-them" themes. The Party for Freedom pledges to "de-Islamize" the Netherlands by shutting all mosques, banning the Quran and halting all immigration from majority Muslim nations. It also commits to remove the Netherlands from the European Union, which it helped found 60 years ago.

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Politico: The man who invented Trumpism

Wilders admires Trump and encourages the comparison, delighted to cast his campaign as part of a global populist wave if it adds momentum ahead of the March 15 vote, in which polls indicate his Freedom Party (PVV) is neck-and-neck with Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD).

“It’s the revenge of the rust belt,” said Tim de Beer, an opinion and policy research expert at the Dutch polling firm Kantar Public. “The Netherlands was among the first to have this revolt.”

But Trump and Wilders differ in important ways. Trump’s lack of focus is completely at odds with Wilders’ singular, dogged determination to pursue his proclaimed mission: stop Islam in the Netherlands.  And where Trump is a newcomer to politics, Wilders is one of the longest-serving lawmakers in the Dutch lower house, with a formidable command of parliamentary procedures. [...]

Wilders is mostly silent about the other side of his family tree. His mother was born in what is now Indonesia. She arrived in the Netherlands as a baby after her parents fled the collapsing Dutch colony that would later become the country with the world’s largest Muslim population. [...]

Wilders severely restricts media access to the party. Attempts to contact it, or any of its lawmakers, are typically met with a wall of silence. This is combined with carefully rationed pronouncements designed to outrage and grab headlines. Wilders specializes in coming up with insulting compound words, such as straatterroristen (“street terrorists,” or foreign-looking men hanging around); haatpaleizen (“hate palaces,” or mosques); or his infamous kopvoddentaks proposal (a “head rag tax” on headscarves). [...]

Over the course of Wilders’ life under armed protection, his views have become increasingly radical, casting Islam and the West as ancient enemies locked in a civilizational war for survival. In 2005, his manifesto allowed that not all Muslims were dangerous, noted the importance of freedom of religion, and advocated that only radical mosques should be closed. Nowadays, he claims there are no moderate Muslims, just liars, or people who haven’t read the Quran.

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Katoikos: Is the European Union falling apart?

Fear itself can be dangerous. Accompanied by horror and panic, it can induce changes in behaviour and prompt people to react to events irrationally. And there are many sources of fear in Europe. The flood of immigrants and the terrorist attacks are two of them, but unemployment is another one. As a consequence, the psychological landscape of Europe has been transformed and traditional cultural behaviours have been distorted.

In fact, the immigrants’ influx in Europe has revealed a number of serious political fault lines. Initially welcomed by many, refugees were eventually considered an anathema by many governments, which claimed that they could not deal with them logistically, that the newcomers were a threat to national identities or a risk to national security. Measures to prevent immigration (link 1, link 2) went from border controls and the closing of borders to fence building, suspension of ferry links and rail travel, spot checks on cars and even state of emergency declarations with soldiers’ deployment. [...]

According to the above table, there are two countries or regions registering the emergence of parties of the far-right in their National assemblies or parliaments for the first time in 2016: Kotleba (People’s Party Our Slovakia), whose chairman is considered a neo-nazi, positioned against the euro, and against NATO; and, in Wales, UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party), a great supporter of the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum of 2016. In Romania, a catch-all party also emerged for the first time, getting the third place. [...]

The EU has not been doing enough. Decisions are taken in the grey towers of Brussels, with short briefings to the media, hardly reaching the common citizen. Bad or good, people do not know what Brussels decisions are about, tending to blame the institutions and their bureaucracy for all the wrong-doings and the malaise affecting their national states. And we see no real will and synergies to change the situation. The EU leaders are not giving answers. There is no vision, no credible proposals, no assurances.

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Business Insider: This chart shows how protest votes are shaping the political landscape in Europe

The refugee crisis that has struck Europe is the worst the continent has seen since the Second World War, and with it has come the resurgence of political parties that have not enjoyed this kind of support since 1945.

Support for far-right —and to a lesser extent far-left— parties has spiked in recent months as hundreds of thousands of refugees have come to Europe and a huge chunk of the population has once more felt their concerns were ignored or belittled by the ruling political class. [...]

The "contagion risk" from the UK to the rest of the continent is still possible too. Le Pen announced last week that if elected she would hold a referendum on France's membership of the EU. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders' far-right anti-EU Dutch Freedom Party keeps gaining in popularity as well.

The aftermath of the UK referendum in Britain has also had the opposite effect in other European countries. Seeing the chaos brought about in Britain, support for the EU has surged in a number of countries throughout the continent. [...]

Risks appear more linked to referendums on a ratification of a new EU treaty or other EU-related issues, rather than questioning the EU membership outright, as support for EU membership appears fairly rooted. Only 21% of the people surveyed by Ipsos MORI in nine EU countries wanted to leave the EU... Even where protest parties are gaining momentum, it appears unlikely that they will garner sufficient votes to muster a majority.

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