Here’s Why You Should Care About the Dutch Election

It’s a good indicator of how the white nationalist movement is doing in Europe.

Whether Geert Wilders becomes the Netherlands' next prime minister or not, he's already succeeded in pulling the country's politics to the right.Maxppp/Zuma

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


The Dutch are headed to the polls Wednesday, and the election in this country of nearly 17 million people could offer a window into the strength of far-right candidates in other European elections this year. The Netherlands, France, Germany, and possibly Italy have upcoming elections in which mainstream parties are facing unusually strong challenges from nationalist candidates who urge distance from the European Union, condemn the presence of immigrants, and celebrate the victory of Donald Trump.

In the Netherlands, voters will decide whether the wild-haired and xenophobic Geert Wilders—dubbed by some as the Dutch Trump—should be their next prime minister. Wilders has advocated pulling the Netherlands out of the EU and freezing immigration. Wilders has, at times, led the polls, but has fallen in the polls of late.

“I think it’s a good indicator—because he’s been around for a while—of how well this kind of nationalist movement is doing in western Europe,” says Stan Veuger, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written about the Dutch elections and Wilders. “Second, after Brexit and Trump, people expect every election to now go for the nationalist option, and that in and of itself generates interest. And third, if [Wilders] did do really well, which the polls don’t seem to suggest, it would have important implications for the EU and the Eurozone.”

The reclusive 53-year-old has, at times, led in the polls, and Wilders’ brash rhetoric—he recently called Moroccans “scum” and called on supporters to make the Netherlands “ours again”—has earned him outsize attention in a race that he’s unlikely to win. According to a recent profile in the New York Times, he limits his public appearances due to threats made against him after his incendiary remarks. There are about 10 leading candidates among the 28 parties (and more than 1,000 candidates) on the ballot in the race Wednesday. In order to win, Wilders’ Party of Freedom would not only need to pick up more parliamentary seats than expected, it would also face the difficult task of convincing as many as five other parties to join a coalition government.

The comparisons between Wilders and Trump go beyond their policies and their hair; both have adeptly used social media and a populist style to mobilize their supporters. But as Sarah de Lange, a political science professor at the University of Amsterdam told the Times, there are differences, too. “Internationally, he’s compared to Trump,” she said. “But with Wilders every tweet is thought through, calculated. With Trump it’s emotional.”

Wilders has also gained some support among conservatives in the United States. Some have gone so far as helping to fund his election efforts, spurring criticism by those in the Netherlands who decry American interference in the political process. “It’s foreign interference in our democracy,” Ronald van Raak, a senior member of Parliament, told the Times. “We would not have thought that people from other countries would have been interested in our politics. Maybe we underestimated ourselves.”

Wilders attended the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and, on Sunday, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) tweeted this racist message in support of Wilders:

When asked about comparisons between Trump and Wilders on Monday, and what the president thought of Europe’s populist candidates, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said, “We’ll allow sovereign nations to have their elections without interference from us.” On Tuesday, when asked about King’s tweet from Sunday, Spicer said, “The president believes this is not a point of view that he shares. He believes he is the president for all Americans.”

Whatever the outcome, Wilders’ candidacy has moved politics in the normally progressive and tolerant country to the right. “Wilders is making sure he remains ‘dirty’ enough not to go into the government, but the three mainstream parties are picking up some elements of his program,” said Pieter Cleppe, head of the Brussels Office of Open Europe, a London-based think tank. Cleppe made the comments in a Q&A with the Council on Foreign Relations, noting that Wilders’ impact on Dutch policy going forward could be limited if the other parties manage to form a government without him. The Dutch establishment thinks that Wilders’ support has a ceiling, and “will just fade away over time,” Cleppe said. “At least that’s what they hope.”

That approach could backfire, though, and casting Wilders’ as an outsider might strengthen his position over time, Cleppe added.”What may happen, however, is that four or five years down the line, Wilders could be strengthened because he’s been the only opposition.”

But what if Wilders, like Trump, defies the polls and scores an upset victory? “It will likely give a boost to far-Right populist candidates in France and Germany,” writes Martyn Kreider of the EU Centre on Shared Complex Challenges at the University of Melbourne. That sort of boost—on top of the fallout from Brexit and Trump’s skepticism about the EU—would also be a win for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is widely seem as seeking to undermine EU cohesion and NATO. Western governments fear that Putin plans to meddle in these European elections the way he’s alleged to have done in the US.

“A strong, coordinated Europe is in Putin’s interest only if it is ideologically favorable to him—with cultural nativists such as [French presidential candidate] Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orban calling the shots,” Natalie Nougayrede, a columnist with the Guardian, wrote earlier this year. “If liberal democracy can resist, however, especially in France and Germany, then he will continue working to achieve a weak and fractured Europe.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate