The peroxide-blond crusader who could top Dutch elections

VENLO, NETHERLANDS • He warns about the perils of Muslim immigrants. A single well-lobbed tweet can ignite his nation’s political scene for days. And in a time of relative prosperity, he has succeeded in focusing dark fears about what is happening in mosques across his land.

The peroxide-blond Dutch politician Geert Wilders was executing the Trump playbook long before the U.S. president started his insurgent campaign for the White House. And in Dutch elections Wednesday, Wilders has a strong chance to come out on top.

“These elections are historic, because the Netherlands can choose on the 15th of March if we want to give our land away further or if we are going to recapture it,” Wilders said this month.

A fixture of The Hague for nearly 20 years, Wilders is a man who directs his message straight to the gut of ordinary Dutch voters but has hardly any contact with them, as assassination concerns have forced him to live on the move.

Wilders rarely grants interviews to the media, preferring to avoid tough questions by communicating through Twitter. And despite his bar-the-door attitude toward immigration, his mother was born in Indonesia and his hair dye has bleached away the dark curls that once drew racist schoolyard taunts.

In Wilders’ southeastern Dutch home town of Venlo, residents are split about whether their native son is a source of pride or shame. The future firebrand grew up here in middle-class comfort, attending public schools that drew from Venlo’s mostly white, Catholic population; roaming the compact, manicured streets; and pursuing minor rebellions, such as wearing a leather jacket in class.

Later Wilders travelled to Israel and worked on a kibbutz there, a trip he described as transformative in shaping his pro-Israel, antiMuslim views.

He has held onto his distinctive regional accent, a point of pride for locals who have long bridled at rule by the faraway Protestant elite in The Hague.

Wilders pulled ahead in opinion polling after Trump’s November victory, starting the year with 20 per cent support in the polls. His has since slumped to second place, but only after the prime minister took on rhetoric that could have come from the challenger’s mouth.

His participation in governing the Netherlands would not be unprecedented — he was a member of a ruling coalition from 2010 until 2012. And Wilders has long been financially supported by some of the most extreme anti-Islam voices in the United States — a 2015 donation to Wilders of about $125,000 from David Horowitz, an anti-Islam activist who writes for Breitbart News, was the biggest single political donation in the country that year.

Still, most observers expect that Wilders will not take part in any coalition following the election, forcing mainstream parties to form a broad and weak alliance to muster a majority in parliament. If it fails, Wilders may be the long-term beneficiary.

“Wilders is assuming that everything will be broken very soon and that when it does, the urgency to ask him to be the prime minister will be bigger than the aversion to work together with him,” said Wim Kortenoeven, a former ally who split following internal party struggles.