Geert Wilders’ win shows the far right is being normalised. Mainstream parties must act
Election results lend themselves to different stories, certainly in the Netherlands, where so many old and new parties compete for votes. Yet the 2023 election will be remembered for one reason: a far-right party topped the polls for the first time, and by a large margin. Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) is set to win 37 of the 150 seats in Dutch parliament, more than doubling its 2021 tally.
Far-right parties in Europe primarily attract voters on their core issues of immigration and multiculturalism. Most also express a populist message, criticising political elites and calling for popular sovereignty. Wilders’ PVV is no different.
In the Dutch election campaign, economic precarity also featured prominently. As before, Wilders linked economic and cultural issues, claiming that welfare should be preserved for the “native” population by halting immigration and limiting benefits for “undeserving” ethnic minorities.
This “welfare chauvinist” position is typical of far-right parties, and appeals to culturally conservative voters who desire economic protection from the state – effectively also competing on the ideological home turf of the left. Notably, while the Green-Labour alliance led by Frans Timmermans finished second, leftwing parties saw their collective vote share decline.
Most voters, however, tend to swing between ideologically like-minded parties. To explain why Wilders gained so many votes, we need to consider the competition between him and his nearest rivals. Two factors stand out.
First, at the start of the campaign the centre-right VVD leader, Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, signalled a potential coalition with Wilders’s party. This signified a break with the past. Her predecessor, Mark Rutte, had ruled out collaborating with the PVV since 2012, when
Wilders withdrew his support from, and blew up, the Rutte-led minority government.
Second, the VVD legitimised Wilders’s agenda by making immigration a key issue in its campaign. Rutte’s motivation for instigating the collapse of his last cabinet related to party-political divisions over asylum, whereby his party advocated a stricter stance. The VVD’s 2023 manifesto urged the need to “regain control” over migration. Research shows that when mainstream parties try to compete with far-right ones by moving closer to their positions, it is the far right that tends to benefit.
Wilders also ran a clever campaign. Notably, he struck a less-confrontational tone and signalled a willingness to drop some more radical demands in coalition talks. This time around, Wilders appeared more salonfähig, ready to govern.
But his manifesto showed little genuine change. The PVV did, for instance, drop its call for unconditional withdrawal from the EU, and instead proposed a binding “Nexit” referendum. But many of the more radical ideas were preserved, and new ones added.
Central to the party’s programme is a radical anti-immigration policy. The PVV declares that ‘our beautiful Netherlands
is severely deteriorated due to the ongoing asylum tsunami and mass immigration’. It claims children are “being indoctrinated with climate activism, gender insanity and a sense of shame about our country’s history” and wants to ban Islamic schools, the Qur’an, and mosques, to halt “Islamisation” of the country.
None of this has stopped Wilders becoming part of the political furniture.
As the longest-serving member of the Dutch parliament, he could present himself as a “reasonable” alternative to the Putin-supporting and blatantly conspiracist Forum for Democracy led by Thierry Baudet (which lost five of its eight seats in parliament).
Prior to the election, a children’s TV news programme about party leaders called a piece about the PVV leader: Cuddling cats with Geert Wilders.
All this signifies the normalisation of far-right politics. In 2000, when the Austrian Freedom party entered a coalition, other countries widely condemned the move and the EU imposed diplomatic sanctions. In 2023 it is common for European countries to be governed by far-right parties often in collaboration with centre-right parties. Next June’s European Parliament elections will surely see many voting for far right parties again.
Mainstream politicians have a moral obligation to uphold liberal democratic norms. While citizens’ concerns about cultural change and immigration can be legitimate, there is something fundamentally problematic about the far right’s idea of a “leading culture”.
Society is inherently diverse, comprising individuals and groups with differing values and preferences. “The voter”, a term repeatedly used by Dutch politicians to suggest that citizens are united in their beliefs, does not exist. Mainstream parties should recognise this and steer well clear of the far right’s anti-liberal frame that there is a “general will”.
The PVV claims children are being indoctrinated with climate activism, gender insanity and a sense of shame about our country’s history
some Palestinians are already weighing those options. In fact, there is no ein breira. As Israel crushes Gaza, it may say “we have no choice” but when the guns fall silent – for a time, at least – at every step there will be more such choices to make.
Should Israel revive the war, as its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has promised? Should Hamas choose the path of total destruction for its cynical power play to dominate Palestinian
politics? And perhaps the biggest question of all: should Israelis and Palestinians take the risk of changing the rules of the game, reviving a longatrophied path of political resolution to head off this hellish fate?
The risks are considerable: peace agreements involve painful concessions and setbacks, and generate violence from spoilers. History has shown that people will die during peace negotiations and even after peace is signed, like the victims of the Omagh bombing after the 1998 Good Friday agreement. And it’s worrying to consider precedent that political concessions are won through intolerable violence.
But people are dying cruelly today; it’s hard to imagine anything worse than the present. We have lived with war for ever, while a comprehensive peace agreement has never been tried.
The alternatives exist: such as an updated version of two states, ideally in a confederation arrangement, offering open borders, built-in security and economic cooperation between the
We have lived with war forever, while a comprehensive peace agreement has never been tried
two sides, sharing Jerusalem, and a more hopeful horizon. There is nothing simple about this path; the main winning argument for peace is that a policy of letting the occupation fester has failed.
“Sophie’s choice” remains terrible. But it is still better than einbreira – the lie that there is no choice.
• Dahlia Scheindlin is a Tel Avivbased political analyst and pollster
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be
says Tate.
Another painting on show is titled With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo, which sold at Sotheby’s last year for £1.2m, a record for a Boty piece and a price tag that is testament to how the art world now perceives her work.
The exhibition aims to tell Boty’s story through her paintings, collages and stained glass works, and also through photographs, film footage, letters and posters. “She’s a very important political feminist artist but she was also really embedded in the swinging 60s in lots of different ways beyond painting,” says Gazelli’s George Barker, one of the curators of the show.
It’s true that Boty packed an awful lot into her short life. She was one of the first people in Britain to spend time with Bob Dylan when he came to the country in the winter of 1962, on the invitation of Boty’s then lover, film impresario Peter Saville. She acted alongside Michael Caine in the 1966 film Alfie, and was a presenter on radio show The Public Ear. She even interviewed the Beatles.
Although she was hugely popular on the social scene, people also feared her because “she challenged the stereotypes of the time”, Tate says.
Boty went on to marry the political activist and then literary agent, Clive Goodwin, in June 1963 (one of the few men, she said, who appreciated her as “a person with a mind”), and became pregnant in 1965. It was on a routine prenatal appointment that Boty found out she had cancer.
Doctors offered her an abortion so that she could receive potentially lifesaving radiotherapy, but Boty refused. A few months after her daughter was born, in July 1966, Boty died.
There is tragedy running through Boty’s story – her husband subsequently died from a brain hemorrhage in a prison cell in America where he was being held on suspicion of drunkenness. Her daughter, Boty Goodwin, died too, from a drug overdose at a party celebrating the end of her art degree. Aged 29, she lived only one year longer than her mother.
Tate hopes visitors to the exhibition will focus less on the tragedy and more on how Boty enriched pop art by bringing together both celebration and critique in a way no one had before.
“This is the moment where she can be heard and really contribute to culture in a way that she couldn’t in the 60s – she was just too much,” says Tate.
• Pauline Boty: A Portrait is at Gazelli Art House, London, 1 December to 24 February
This is the moment where she can really contribute to culture in a way she couldn’t in the 60s – she was just too much
Dr Sue Tate
flames in the heart of Ireland’s capital.
“It’s sad it’s come to this,” said one man, a soft-spoken spectator in his 20s, not a rioter. “But the situation has got out of control.”
He was referring not to the riot consuming central Dublin on Thursday night but to immigration, and a perception that foreigners – and especially asylum seekers – were driving a crime wave and worsening a housing crisis.
“Their religion has no respect for women’s rights,” he added. “The men are dominant.”
The police charged and the spectator fled, unable to elaborate about any affinity with Dutch voters who last week backed Geert Wilders’s anti-Islamic Freedom party, or with other election results across Europe, but there was little need.
Amid the fumes and shouts and sirens blazed an uncomfortable truth. The Ireland that for so long had seemed to buck Europe’s anti-immigrant trend and offer a “thousand welcomes” to the foreigners who reshaped its economy, society and demography – the Ireland that seemed immune to xenophobia and demagoguery and backlash – was not so different after all.
Immigrants started coming in numbers here in the 1990s, to the point that today a fifth of Ireland’s 5 million population was born elsewhere – a seismic transformation that appeared to unfold seamlessly, and with negligible public debate and little political impact.
While anti-immigrant sentiment swelled in France, Italy, Hungary and other countries, and gave Brexit its impetus, Ireland seemed impervious. Immigration barely featured in elections or parliamentary debate or in mainstream media. The rise of Sinn Féin, a progressive leftwing party, did not upset this consensus.
Theories abounded about Ireland’s exceptionalism. Perhaps centuries of emigration and colonialism made the Irish empathetic with arrivals seeking a new life. Maybe it was the booming economy’s hunger for labour, albeit punctuated by a crash and austerity. Maybe the Irish were just naturally welcoming and relaxed. More Poles, Brits, Indians, Romanians, Brazilians? Ah sure it’s grand.
Events on Thursday lit a bonfire under such pieties. At about 1.30pm, a man stabbed three children and a female carer outside a primary school in Parnell Square in central Dublin, seriously injuring two of the victims. It was a shocking attack, and within hours all hell had broken loose.
Social media commentators outed the alleged assailant as a foreigner – in fact he is a naturalised Irish citizen, reportedly from Algeria – and summoned a violent protest.
“They can’t control us all,” said a voice message from an account called Kill All Immigrants. “Let’s have little groups splintering off, doing what we got to do. Seven o’clock, be in town. Everyone bally up, tool up. And any fucking gypo, foreigner, anyone, just kill them,” said the voice. “Let’s get this on the news, let’s show the fucking media that we’re not a pushover. That no more foreigners are allowed into this poxy country.”
The bloodcurdling threats were bluster. Some rioters chanted “get them out” and other slogans, but there were no reported attacks on foreigners. Instead, about 500 people rampaged through central Dublin, targeting property and police. By the end of it, a tram and two buses had been torched, 11 police vehicles damaged, 13 shops looted, 48 people arrested and dozens of officers reportedly injured.
Immigrant groups expressed concern about their security. The Muslim Sisters of Éire, which runs a soup kitchen in Dublin, suspended its service. The Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland said that no matter what an individual did, no nationality should be tarred: “No human being is responsible for the actions of another, even if it is their twin.”
On Friday, Leo Varadkar, the taoiseach, invoked an Ireland of tolerance. “Being Irish means more than saluting the tricolour, beating your chest, and pointing to where you were born,” he said. “It means living up to the ideals represented by our flag, it means being true to our own history, it means acting with compassion for others. Today I call on us all to remember who we really are.”
The riot has scorched the notion of some progressive Celtic nirvana in the Atlantic. Not because of its scale: the mob included opportunists more interested in carting off trainers and vodka, or recording dramatic footage, than intimidating the foreign bystanders who watched, agog. Factors unrelated to immigration, such as the growing boldness of youth gangs since Covid lockdowns, also fuelled the chaos.
Nor did the violence have public support. It has been widely condemned. And many have highlighted the fact that it was a Brazilian Deliveroo rider named Caio Benicio who helped to stop the attacker outside the school.
A GoFundMe campaign to “buy Caio Benicio a pint” has drawn more than €330,000. “Welcome to Ireland Caio! Thank you for making it home,” said one donor. “What you did was brilliant, stepping in without a thought for yourself, go raibh maith agat,” said another, using the Irish for “thank you”. “A foreign hero,” said another.
Yet the lightning bolt that struck Dublin has not come from a clear blue sky. Concern about immigration and asylum seekers has been clouding villages, towns and cities across Ireland for several years. In 2019, a hotel in County Leitrim that was in line to host asylum seekers was set on fire – twice. Suspected arsonists have targeted other refugee centres. Raucous protests have blocked roads and, in September, even parliament, briefly trapping legislators inside.
Peaceful protests against planned or actual accommodation centres happen almost weekly, often led by middle-class residents seeking court orders. Days before the riot, hundreds of people in Rosslare gathered to oppose plans to turn a second hotel in the County Wexford village into refugee accommodation. Legislators now openly vent such concerns in parliament.
Some protests focus on resources. The number of refugees housed by the state jumped from 7,500 in 2021 to 73,000 in 2022 amid a housing shortage and the cost of living crisis.
However, rightwing activists have also fomented moral panic about a country overrun with “non-native” predators such as Jozef Puska, a Slovakian man convicted this month of murdering a teacher, Ashling Murphy, in 2022. Placards bear slogans such as “Ireland is full”, “Ireland for the Irish”, and “Irish lives matter”.
Drew Harris, the Garda commissioner, or police chief, said far-right radicalisation would continue to disrupt Irish society: “We have to make the assumption that we’ll see further such protests.” The force has hastily borrowed two water cannon from the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
Boris Johnson, writing in the Daily Mail, said even the “most achingly liberal of countries” were now chafing at open EU borders. “Look at what is happening in Dublin, where that lovely and happy city seems to have been engulfed by race riots.”
Hermann Kelly, the founder of the fringe Irish Freedom party, condemned the violence but said an underclass felt disconnected and ignored: “They are just angry and they don’t see a mechanism where they can exert change.”
Kelly, who works in the European parliament for conservative Romanian MEP Cristian Terheş, said he planned to run three candidates in next year’s MEP elections.
It remains to be seen whether the far right gains an electoral foothold in Ireland. From Slovakia and Spain to Germany, Poland and Italy, populist and hard-right parties have triumphed in some EU member nations and faltered in others.
Voters may have to hold their breath for months to see if Wilders becomes prime minister due to the protracted coalition-formation process in the Netherlands. But the French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, said the election victory for the Dutch antiEU and anti-Islam candidate had been a consequence of “all the fears that are emerging in Europe” over immigration and the economy.
All over Europe, there are signs that anti-migration policies are appealing to some voters. The far-right AfD party in Germany has declared itself a “major all-Germany party” after success in regional elections in the powerhouse state of Hesse in October. In Spain, the far-right party Vox entered local government in several regions in June.
Giorgia Meloni swept to power in Italy last year on the back of antiimmigration policies. Despite the distaste many in the EU feel, she is now one of the single most powerful leader at EU summits when it comes to the new migration laws member states are trying to get over the line after seven years of disagreement.
She is feted by leaders including the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, who accompanied her twice on a migration policy trip to Tunisia. Even Emmanuel Macron joined the club last month after joining a meeting between Rishi Sunak and Meloni on migration.
“The danger is, if Meloni can become central to European politics and [voters] see World War III hasn’t started just because a populist leader is in power, they might say ‘why not?’ in France and give Marine Le Pen a shot,” said one diplomat in Brussels. The diplomat predicted migration would remain top of the agenda, paving a lurch to the right in Europe’s parliamentary elections.
Clinging to the conceit that Ireland is different was no longer tenable, wrote Pat Leahy, the Irish Times’ political editor: “Whether you think these concerns are legitimate or not, they are real, and they are now part of our politics.” A government figure sent Leahy a wry text: “So we’re officially a mainstream European country now.”