UnHerd: Meet the poster boy for Dutch populism

Wilders and Baudet do share some central positions. Both, for example, have called for a radical stop to immigration from non-Western cultures. Both believe that Islam is incompatible with Dutch values and traditions. Both decry the domination of Dutch institutions by Leftist elites. And both seek to tap into a widespread anxiety among some sectors of the Dutch population that their culture is under serious threat. [...]

The problem, in Baudet’s eyes, is not that there is an elite. The problem is that the current elite is ignorant, incompetent, immoral, and weak. It needs to be replaced. Baudet’s view of the world is decidedly Darwinian: we should trust our instincts. Life is a struggle. Strength is what counts. Those who are not ready to fight are bound to be conquered. It’s the West against the rest. [...]

His sophisticated, provocative image as a dangerous dandy who is not afraid to say what he thinks is also broadening his appeal to more educated voters. In particular, the FvD is gathering an enthusiastic following among university students, especially men, who are tickled by the idea that they would make far better national leaders than the current political class. [...]

He is outspoken, too, on environmental policy. Baudet is opposed to any efforts to counteract climate change, which he sees as a “masochistic heresy fed by guilt”, “a secularised belief in the Deluge” that will “not only mean the total collapse of our economy but is also meant to further hurt our spirit and self-confidence”.[...]

Baudet, however, has said he understands that entering a coalition will require concessions. Perhaps in anticipation of this next phase, he appears to have modified his position on the Netherlands’ relationship with the EU. For many years, he openly advocated for the country to leave. (“After #Brexit we should have #Nexit,” he tweeted in May 2016.) Yet when, on 2 April, Wilders’ party proposed a parliamentary motion for Nexit, the FvD’s two deputies voted it down. The FvD continues to be sceptical about Europe but says that the voters, not the parliament, should make decision to stay or leave, through a referendum.

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Politico: Mark Rutte’s leaden touch

As insiders fret that Rutte’s third term will not last very long, speculation has begun as to whether the prime minister’s future ultimately lies in Brussels. This is not particularly good news for Rutte. History shows that early speculation about a Dutch leader’s move to Brussels is unlikely to translate into reality. What it does do, however, is underscore the idea that his best days in national politics are over.[...]

But working with Rutte has a downside: Any party that joins forces with him gets pummelled by voters. After the center-left Labor Party suffered a historic shellacking in the 2017 election, having worked with Rutte for five years, the conventional wisdom in Dutch politics was cemented: Joining a Rutte administration is close to political suicide.[...]

Things took a turn for the worse earlier this month when Unilever announced it had decided against moving its headquarters to Rotterdam. Rutte had suffered intense blowback for a proposed tax break for companies like Royal Dutch Shell and Unilever and had defended the measure by arguing it could lure the firms into establishing permanent headquarters in the country. Rutte was forced to withdraw the proposal, and two close allies in his previous administrations, the far right Party of Freedom (PVV) and social democrats (PvdA), both supported a vote of no confidence against Rutte last week.[...]

Rutte has changed his tone about Brussels — from a fierce critic of EU bureaucracy five years ago to an avid admirer of the European project. But his new foe on the far-right, rising star Thierry Baudet, routinely attacks him for angling for a top EU job. So Rutte has been forced to repeatedly deny any such ambition for more than a year.

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Politico: O Dutch government, where art thou?

The center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) of incumbent Prime Minister Mark Rutte was the biggest party in the election, followed by the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) of Geert Wilders. [...]

The average time taken to form a governing coalition in modern Dutch history is 87.6 days, with the shortest gap being just 31 days in 1948. Still, negotiators are nowhere near the record held by neighboring Belgium, where parties needed 541 days to agree on a federal government after the 2010 election — a world record.

Discussions are ongoing between the VVD, CDA, D66 and the conservative Christian Union, with Dutch media reporting that a deal could be close. Even if they reach an agreement next week, it’s likely to take another couple of weeks before they can be sworn in. Here’s a look at what’s happened during the past 208 days.

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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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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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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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