Far right’s Geert Wilders seals shock win in Dutch election after years on political fringe

Issued on: 25/11/2023 – 17:27

5 min

“Can you imagine it? 37 seats!” Wilders exulted to his lawmakers on Thursday, a day after his far-right PVV Freedom Party won more than double the seats it secured in the last Dutch general election.

Beating all predictions, the PVV won 37 seats out of 150 on Wednesday, coming in well ahead of a Labour-Green alliance led by former EU commissioner Frans Timmermans and the conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) of outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, which slumped to 24 seats.

Now faced with the difficult task of forming a government, Wilders will have to convince reluctant rivals to join him.

But he is no political rookie. The 60-year-old has tried to woo voters with his anti-immigration and anti-EU policies for years, his fiery rhetoric and shock of peroxide blonde hair earning him the nickname “Dutch Donald Trump”. Yet unlike Trump, he has until now spent his life on the political fringe.

Anti-Islam policies

Born in the southern Dutch city of Venlo in 1963, Wilders grew up alongside his brother and two sisters in a Catholic family. His mother was half Indonesian, a fact Wilders rarely mentions. Aside from being colonised by the Netherlands for hundreds of years, the country is also home to the world’s largest Muslim population.

According to his older brother Paul, Wilders took an interest in politics in the 80s. “He was neither clearly on the left or the right at the time, nor was he xenophobic. But he was fascinated by the political game, the struggle for power and influence,” his brother told German news website Der Spiegel in a 2017 interview.

His hatred for Islam came later, around the time he became an MP for the centre-right VVD party in 1998. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks that rocked the US in 2001 and the assassination of far-right Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn a year later, a “large bloc of anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic voters” were left “looking for a champion”, and according to The Economist, Wilders was their man.

He left the VVD in 2004, the same year controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered. After the Dutch police discovered Wilders was also on the hit list of van Gogh’s killer, he was placed under police protection.

Two years later, in 2006, Wilders founded his PVV party and placed anti-Islam policies at the heart of its agenda. He notoriously likened Islam to Nazism, comparing the Koran to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”, and released a highly criticised film in 2008 called “Fitna” that raised a storm of protest across the world. The 15-minute film conflated Islam and terrorism, juxtaposing scenes of beheadings and the 9/11 attacks with quotes from the Koran. He was refused entry to the UK in 2009 while on his way to screen the film at the House of Lords. The Home Office issued the ban because his opinions were considered a “threat to community harmony and therefore public safety”. Wilders was subsequently put on trial in 2010 for inciting hatred and discrimination against Muslims.

Arguing that Dutch freedom of speech safeguarded his right to make incendiary remarks, Wilders was eventually acquitted. But a few years later in 2016, he was eventually found guilty of insulting people of Moroccan descent when he promised supporters “fewer Moroccans” in the Netherlands.

But the conviction didn’t stop Wilders from making hateful remarks. He went on to call Moroccans “scum” years later and launched a contest for caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed several times.

Life under police protection, ‘Nexit’ and a xenophobic manifesto

Because of multiple threats against his life, Wilders has been living under strict police protection for almost two decades. He is guarded 24/7 by armed police, lives in a government-provided safe house and must be escorted anytime he shows up in public.

To make up for his lack of public appearances, the “Dutch Donald Trump” (who currently has more than 1.2 million followers on X) has taken to social media to spread his populist ideas. His PVV party landed its first victory in 2010, when it scored major gains in parliament and came in third behind Rutte’s VVC and the Labour party.

Between 2010 and 2012, Wilders briefly experienced a right-wing coalition with the conservative Christian Democrats (CDA) and the VVD. It quickly fell through after he refused to back a package designed to lower the budget deficit.

In addition to his Islamophobic and xenophobic stance, Wilders is also staunchly anti-EU and opposes the euro. Years after the UK voted for Brexit, the idea of a “Nexit” (an exit of the Netherlands from the EU) became a core plank of his political platform. This didn’t stop the far-right leader from being elected a member of the European Parliament in 2014. In fact, Wilders forged a Eurosceptic alliance with France’s Marine Le Pen to push their nationalist agenda from within that body.  

Le Pen was one of the first to congratulate Wilders on his victory in Wednesday’s elections.

Although he is close to several European far-right movements, he doesn’t always align with their traditional ideologies. When it comes to social issues, Wilders supports the fight against homophobia and defends the right to abortion.

During the final weeks of his campaign for the 2023 general election, Wilders somewhat softened his anti-Islam and anti-EU stance, so much so that he gained the moniker Geert “Milders”. He vowed he would try to become a prime minister for all Dutch people and focused on issues other than immigration, such as the cost of living crisis, to broaden his electorate.

The PVV manifesto, on the other hand, does not mirror Wilders’ “Milder” façade. His party calls for a ban on “Islamic schools, Korans and mosques” and “Islamic headscarves”, a “reduction in the asylum and immigration flood to the Netherlands” and a “sovereign Netherlands … in charge of its own currency, its own borders and [which] makes its own rules”.

This article was translated from the original in French.