A Dutch quandary shows growing problem for Europe

Raises questions on how to work with far right

AMSTERDAM — Just months ago, Geert Wilders was an anathema to most Dutch political parties.

A disruptive and divisive force on the far right for two decades, Wilders has said he wants to end immigration from Muslim countries, tax headscarves, and ban the Quran. He has called Moroccan immigrants “scum.” His Party for Freedom has supported leaving the European

Union.

But then Wilders won national elections convincingly in November. Nearly one-quarter of Dutch voters chose his party, which won 37 of 150 seats in the House of Representatives, a huge margin by the standards of a fractious party system that rests on consensus and coalition building.

Since then, Wilders has become an unavoidable political force. “He is the biggest,” said Janka Stoker, a professor of leadership and organizational change at the University of Groningen, of Wilders. “They simply can’t ignore him.”

That quandary has made the Netherlands a test case for Europe

as it grapples with the question of what to do with far-right forces that have advanced so far into the mainstream that they can hardly be considered on the fringe anymore.

Italy already has a hard-right leader, and the Swedish government depends on a party with neo-Nazi roots. The far right now represents significant parts of the opposition in France and Germany, forcing the question of how much longer it can be shunned.

In the Netherlands, some mainstream parties have answered by holding their noses and marching forward into the negotiating room to find a way to work with Wilders.

Coalition talks to form a new government, which have a history of taking weeks or months, broke down in February, not over anything specific Wilders said or did to further offend the political establishment, but over budget numbers.

It was a tellingly mundane obstacle that betrayed the political acceptance of Wilders by the other parties.

“His normalization has gone very fast,” said Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist at the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia.

“Most mainstream media and politicians have treated the coalition negotiations with

Wilders as normal,” Mudde said, “which seems also the view of a majority of Dutch people.”

The parties on the left have said categorically that they still reject Wilders. But the question of how to govern with him is not for them; it is for parties across the rest of the political spectrum.

Wilders has been negotiating with the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, a centerright party that governed for the past 13 years; the Farmer Citizen Movement, a populist pro-farmer party; and New Social Contract, a new centrist party. Together, these four parties have 88 seats in the House of Representatives, a comfortable majority.

But the discomfort of Wilders’ negotiating partners is evident, even if they do not express it publicly.

The concerns swirling around Wilders remain such that early on in the talks, the four parties around the table took the unusual step of signing a document committing them to uphold the Dutch Constitution, something that had long been taken for granted.

The pledge, as well as the need to cobble together support from multiple parties, is expected to limit Wilders’ ability to drastically change any pillars of the Dutch government or to push through unconstitutional laws.