Wilders' Electoral Revolution Wake-up Call for West's Elites
19:07 GMT 23.11.2023 (Updated: 19:15 GMT 23.11.2023)
© AFP 2023 / ROBIN UTRECHT
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Geert Wilders and his populist right Freedom Party won a plurality of seats in the Netherlands’ House of Representatives in elections on Wednesday, with legacy media calling it “one of the biggest political upsets in Dutch politics since World War II.” But the result goes far beyond the Netherlands, says foreign policy analyst Gabor Stier.
Wilders and the Freedom Party have a lot to celebrate after Wednesday's surprise electoral victory, with the 60-year-old politician able to cast off decades of abuse from the mainstream characterizing him as a “fringe far-right radical” with no hope of ever going anywhere in the Netherlands’ tradition of buttoned down liberal politics, seesawing between center-left and center-right parties since the 1970s.
With over 99.8 percent of the votes tallied, Wilders’ Freedom Party received 23.6 percent of the vote, enough for 37 seats in the nation’s 150 Seat House of Representatives – or more than double the number they got in the 2021 election.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, the ruling party in the last coalition government, lost ten seats, coming in third behind the GroenLinks-PvdA Green-Labor alliance.
Wilders now hopes to cobble together a new ruling coalition consisting of the Freedom Party, Rutte’s party, the center-right New Social Contract Party and the populist right Farmer-Citizen Movement party, which would give the coalition a comfortable majority of at least 88 seats.
Wilders’ victory and the possibility of a coalition government with the Freedom Party at the helm have sparked panic among the establishment media across the Western world, with Wilders dubbed “the EU’s worst nightmare,” and his win compared to a “Trump moment” that “shows that Europe still has a populist problem.”
23 November 2023, 10:11 GMT
Wilders is an outspoken critic of large-scale immigration, and has long attacked what he describes as the “Islamization of the Netherlands,” has called for an EU exit referendum for the Netherlands, and been a vocal critic of Amsterdam’s aid to Ukraine.
A Freedom Party-led government is anything but a sure thing, and even if a coalition was put together, compromises would be needed with members of the more traditional right and center-right parties.
Wake-up Call for West's Elites
Nevertheless, Wilders’ win and the rise of other populist right forces in Europe sends a message to the West’s politics-as-usual establishment that in the current climate, politics is anything but usual, says Gabor Stier, a foreign policy analyst for Hungary’s Magyar Nemzet newspaper.
“Today, Europe is experiencing a systemic crisis, it definitely exists and is only getting worse. What’s happening in the Netherlands is a protest and a sign of this crisis,” Stier told Sputnik. “People want something new and for that reason vote for those forces which haven’t been played yet and who say their country is headed in the wrong direction, a dead end, and that something needs to be changed. Because the whole of the mainstream has already been tried, everyone sees that it doesn’t work and only creates problems,” the observer added.
In the Netherlands, the issue of unrestrained immigration has been a major problem for Wilders to capitalize on.
“People, for example, cannot buy apartments, cannot buy them at affordable prices, because they are given to refugees and migrants. This just gets in the way of peoples’ lives. That’s one problem,” Stier said.
The so-called battle against climate change is another, the observer said, pointing to the political unrest rocking the Netherlands for over four years now over the government’s efforts to halve the country’s population of livestock and enforce severe emissions restrictions on farmers, which many agrarians have taken as an insult and threat to their way of life.
8 November 2023, 13:01 GMT
“These are questions, challenges, to which people in the West have not liked the answers given to them by their elites, to put it mildly,” Stier said, pointing out that Western societies, the Netherlands included, “have already taken several blows over the past four years,” starting with the Covid pandemic, and followed by the crisis in Ukraine.
“In connection with and in parallel to that, economic crises have arisen, and with them the social and economic consequences of these crisis, and this is an existential challenge for many in the West. The challenge is radical, and so the response has also been radical,” the observer explained.
Stier is pessimistic about Wilders’ chances of actually forming a governing coalition, and expects the next government to remain roughly the same as it is as mainstream parties unite against the Freedom Party. “In my opinion, there is little chance that they will be able to form a government in time,” he said.
Ukraine: Europe’s Crisis Catalyst
As for Ukraine and Wilders’ opposition to continued funding for the proxy war against Russia, Stier believes "problems” in this area will begin later, “regardless of who leads Holland or the governments of other countries,” simply because “there are no reserves left in Europe – there is nothing for them to supply.”
“Social problems, war fatigue, all of this works together to influence public opinion. In my view, Western elites do not want to reduce arms supplies. It’s not easy to get out of this kind of war, they must save face. This needs to be understood. And it must also be understood that Russia cannot easily get out of the conflict either. The West can’t, and Ukraine can’t either. Because of this, the war will continue, more slowly, but the supply of weapons and financial assistance will also continues, the latter not mainly from America, but from the European Union, unfortunately. And this affects European societies,” Stier said.
Pointing to the string of right populist victories in Europe, from Hungary, Slovakia and now the Netherlands, Stier expects the next step to be Germany, where the Alternative fur Deutschland Party has made major gains recently to become more popular than any member of Chancellor Scholtz’ Traffic Light Coalition in polling.
23 November 2023, 11:52 GMT
If mainstream parties and elites want to hang on to power, they will have to understand the popular mood and respond to problems in a timely manner, the observer stressed.
But the powers that be won’t simply give up control, Stier added. “We feel in Hungary that the pressure on the government from the European Union is increasing, because this has already turned into a war between different types of thinking and different visions about where Europe should go. Globalist and liberal circles don’t simply just give up. They resist. The coming years will be important for those parties, for those forces for whom sovereignty is more important, who want Europe to consist of strong states. The trend is clear, but it will take time to begin working in full force. And then the political balance will start to change,” the observer summed up.
