Populist playbook falls flat in the Netherlands
Most Dutch people don’t really want Wilders to win, including some of those who say they’ll vote for him
eert Wilders, the anti-Islam front-runner in the Dutch general election campaign, owes a large debt — ideologically, strategically and tactically — to US Republican leaders, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. But the ways in which he is different from them, and the ways in which the Netherlands is different from the US, make it unlikely that he’ll win power in the March 15 elections.
In a country which doesn’t have much of a political campaigning tradition, Wilders looks more like Trump than any other Dutch politician. “Wilders has the same tactics as Trump,” says Erik van Bruggen, the head of BKB, an Amsterdam firm that organises advocacy campaigns and runs a campaigning school for aspiring politicians.
“This campaign is all about him. He campaigns via Twitter, he refuses to participate in debates or give critical interviews, he pushes his message directly to the voters, creating the impression that he tells it like it is, without trying to talk smooth or soft.”
Wilders’ audible Limburg accent is the stylistic equivalent of Trump’s quirky colloquialisms. Like Trump, Wilders is impervious to accusations: A recent conviction for inciting racial hatred only boosted his public approval ratings. Comparisons between the Dutch nationalist and Trump are so frequent that headlined a profile of Wilders ‘The Man Who Invented Trumpism’.
But the American roots of the Wilders phenomenon go deeper. In a country that has embraced socialist policies, Wilders has always looked to US conservatives for an alternative path to voters’ hearts. Koen Vossen, a lecturer in political science at the Radboud University Nijmegen, traced this trajectory in a recent book,
,a rare attempt at an objective dissection of Wilders’ views and tactics.
US neoconservatism and the War on Terror were the major inspirations for the Wilders Group’s first political platform. Later, however, he dropped the economic neoliberalism because it was unpopular in the Netherlands. His current economic programme promises increased benefits to native-born Dutch, funded by the elimination of aid to immigrants. But Wilders appears reluctant to talk about his economic programme in much detail. “It’s outside his comfort zone,” Vossen told me in an interview. “If this election were about the economy, Wilders wouldn’t be doing so well. But unfortunately for the governing coalition, it has done a decent job of the economy, so the election is about the atmosphere in the Dutch society.”
That atmosphere is created by increasing tension between native-born Dutch and immigrants, but also, in large part, by external events — terrorist attacks in France and Belgium, the prominence of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), the Trump movement in the US. The way Wilders exploits these events comes straight from US Republican playbooks — those used by the Tea Party long before Trump.
It has all worked up to a point. Recently, however, the PVV’s popularity has been slipping — and it’s expected to do worse in the election than in current polls, just like in 2012. If in the US and the UK, many were too shy to tell pollsters they preferred a populist agenda, in the Netherlands many say they’ll vote for Wilders to push mainstream politicians in a more nativist direction. Most Dutch people — including some of those who say they’ll vote for him — don’t really want him to win. “The Dutch have very definite notions about their prime minister,” van Bruggen says. “They want solid, trusted leadership, they want experience.”
Seen as unreliable
The Dutch could, perhaps, vote for an outsider — they nearly handed power to Pim Fortuyn, the public intellectual who was assassinated in 2002 right before an election he could have won. Wilders, however, doesn’t fit the bill. He is one of the country’s longestserving legislators, a political professional who has proved incapable of working in one of the Netherlands’ almost inevitable governing coalitions. In 2010, the minority government led by the VVD and the Christian Democrats made a deal with the PVV to ensure its support — but Wilders failed to keep his end of the bargain. That’s why today, no major party is willing to work with him. “He’s not seen as reliable,” Vossen says.
Unlike Trump, Wilders draws no energy from big rallies. He has always been fonder of analytical and parliamentary work, but the heavy security surrounding him since the van Gogh assassination also makes it nearly impossible to go on the campaign trail. This year, Wilders barely managed to hold one campaign event, a walkabout in a Rotterdam suburb.
On Thursday, he announced he was suspending his campaign because an intelligence officer assigned to his protection may have been passing information about his whereabouts to a Dutch-Moroccan criminal gang.
This ever-present danger adds to his romantic appeal, but not necessarily to his trustworthiness in the eyes of pragmatic Dutch voters. The Trump-style campaign Wilders has pursued may actually be working against him today: The media are full of reports of Trump-induced chaos in American government and policy. Wilders, who has loudly supported Trump, is getting associated with his messy first weeks.
Wilders’ big moment may not come this year — he’s unlikely to govern even if the PVV comes first, and if it comes second, the establishment will breathe a huge sigh of relief — but that doesn’t mean it won’t come at all. A major terrorist attack on Dutch soil or even another 9/11 elsewhere, or an attack on Wilders’ own life may change everything. But a dependence on external events is weak ground from which to attack one of the most entrenched political establishments in Europe. Leonid Bershidsky is a columnist for Bloomberg View.