Mainstream paved way to Wilders’ win

Excerpted with thanks from an article by Alex de Jong in Grenzeloos

The electoral rise of the extreme right [in the Dutch election of 22 November] was largely at the expense of the (centre) right. With 37 of the 150 parliamentary seats, the [far-right] PVV now has a wide lead over number two, GroenLinks/PvdA, which won 25 seats. The total number of seats for left-wing parties remained constant, while the parties that were part of the centre-right government all lost seats...

The VVD’s [main centre-right party] gamble was that the elections would result in polarization between them and the centre-left on migration... Paradoxically, the VVD’s tactics worked too well. The emphasis on an alleged “refugee crisis”... benefited the party that has prioritised closing borders and hostility towards migrants since its founding in 2006: Wilders’ PVV...

Rutte [of the VVD] chose to sideline Wilders, his main competitor on the right, by dismissing the PVV’s positions as “unrealistic” and presenting his VVD as the party that could implement right-wing policies more efficiently. This approach increasingly normalised the PVV’s positions... Instead of trying to position himself as a junior partner for the VVD, Wilders stuck to his position as the right-wing opposition to Rutte and continued to hammer home his core points. On November 22, Wilders reaped the benefits of that long-term approach...

In the past decade... the PVV has shifted its rhetoric towards a kind of “welfare state chauvinism”... For the PVV, the ultimate cause of the reduction of the welfare state is the presence of parasitic migrant communities, especially Muslims, in Dutch society and the waste of money on “left-wing hobbies” such as measures to combat climate change...

In its election manifesto, the PVV also presented “progressive” proposals such as abolishing VAT on daily necessities, reducing healthcare costs and reducing the retirement age from 67 to 65.

Such ideas... for Wilders they are only means to achieve his goal; closing the borders and attacking the rights of minorities, especially those of Muslims.

The SP [ex-Maoist, now social-democratic], meanwhile, lost four of its nine seats. The party has become fixated on combining an increasingly conservative profile on “cultural” issues (migration, but also measures against climate change) with progressive socio-economic positions... The SP’s emphasis in the election campaign on limiting labour migration reinforced the right-wing framework that migrants as such are a problem...

The situation is bleak, but contradictory. In recent weeks there has been the largest demonstration against climate change ever in Dutch history, but the winner of the elections is a party that ridicules climate change as nonsense...