Dutch PM candidate calls Islam a threat
Right-wing Party for Freedom leads in polls for March election
@khjelmgaard USA TODAY THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS This country’s version of Donald Trump — but with more extreme anti-immigration and anti-Islam views — counts on voters to give his right-wing party a chance next month to implement its controversial vision.
“Dutch values are based on Christianity, on Judaism, on humanism. Islam and freedom are not compatible,” populist politician Geert Wilders, 53, told USA TODAY. “You see it in almost every country where it dominates. There is a total lack of freedom, civil society, rule of law, middle class. Journalists, gays, apostates — they are all in trouble in those places. And we import it.”
Wilders wants to close all mosques; ban the Quran, the Muslim holy book; and seal the nation’s borders to asylum-seekers and immigrants from Islamic countries to prevent the spread of Islam.
President Trump wants a temporary halt in immigration from seven majority-Muslim nations but has said his goal is to prevent terrorists from entering the USA.
Many Dutch voters find Wilders’ views repugnant, and he was convicted in December of inciting discrimination through hate speech. Yet his Party for Freedom is projected by polls to come in first in the national election March 15, a closely watched test of populism’s growing spread in Europe after Trump’s upset victory and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.
Under the Netherlands’ multiparty system, coming in first doesn’t guarantee Wilders will wield power. He would have to form a governing coalition with other parties, most of which have ruled out doing that. Plus, his lead is narrowing as incumbent Prime Minister Mark Rutte has wooed the Dutch nationalist vote by shifting rightward.
Wilders predicts a populist wave against free-flowing immigration and rules set by the EU will keep washing over Europe, whether he prevails or not.
“Even if I lose this election, the genie will not go back in the bottle again,” he said. “People are fed up with the combination of mass immigration, Islamization and austerity measures that require us to cut pensions and support for health care and the elderly while giving (debt bailout) money to Greece and the eurozone.
“People are not satisfied. They feel misrepresented,” he said. “The process of a ‘patriotic spring’ won’t be stopped.”
Wilders called Islam an ideology that poses an existential threat to core European values.
“The problem is that we are tolerant to everybody. We need to stop being tolerant to the people who are intolerant to us,” Wilders said.
Wilders’ harsh views on Islam have placed him on al-Qaeda, Taliban and Islamic State assassination lists for more than a decade. He wears a bulletproof vest, has an elaborate security detail and moves with his wife between safe houses. “The freedom that I personally lost I want the Dutch people to regain,” he said.
European populist politicians who share Wilders’ enmity for the 28-nation EU are critical of his anti-Islam rhetoric.
“I believe in religious tolerance, and I don’t think that going to war with Islam is the right approach,” said Nigel Farage, the former leader of a British antiimmigration party that helped engineer the Brexit.