By Eric Hendriks  ·  Monday, November 27, 2023 Telos

The PVV, the anti-Islam party of parliamentary veteran and avid Israel supporter Geert Wilders, overran the Dutch general election. Wilders’s mega victory, which the polls had not predicted, sent Dutch polite society into turmoil. Still, it has a certain logic, at least in retrospect. The last six weeks of the Dutch election season overlapped with the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and attendant Muslim and leftist protests in Europe and the Netherlands. The public focus on Islamist violence and Islamic culture war issues played into Wilders’s hands.

The fact that Wilders finished first in the election does not mean that he will automatically become prime minister. A government needs a majority or near majority in parliament, so the PVV must form a coalition with other parties. The established and centrist parties have excluded Wilders’s PVV from executive power for seventeen years and may continue to do so despite his electoral success. However, this time, these parties will probably not be able to form a coalition without the PVV. Instead, they are incentivized to go through the motions for months on end, pretending to want to create a new government while blaming each other for its non-formation, after which new elections eventually will have to be called.

But how is it that the PVV could become so much more disruptive to the system during this election cycle? Hamas’s terror and the war in Gaza have brought back some of the old post-9/11 mood, but at a time when most other parties and politicians have long since left that headspace. Wilders’s PVV never left it and is best understood by Americans as a post-9/11 party emerging from the heyday of the War on Terror. The party was founded in 2006 by Wilders, who, in 2004, had split from the right-wing liberal VVD in the Dutch Lower House, accusing the VVD of going too soft on Muslim fundamentalism. Central to the Dutch context was the 2004 jihad-fueled murder of film director Theo van Gogh, a great-grandson of art dealer Theo van Gogh, the brother of painter Vincent van Gogh. The party opposes mass immigration from the Islamic world, wants to minimize or fully annul cultural Islamization, and usually does well electorally when jihadist terrorism is in the news.

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