Why is support for the populist right surging in Europe?

Now Holland

Still, Wilders’ victory in the Netherlands was a shock. No voter surveys predicted it. Now he’s trying to form a governing coalition with political parties that, for more than a decade, had all rejected including him in any government—not least for his extensive history of incendiary rhetoric: He’s notably said he hates Islam and considers the Prophet Muhammad to be the devil. Yet his strident nationalism and animosity toward immigrants have long resonated among a segment of the Dutch electorate; Wilders is the longest-tenured member of the Dutch Parliament, which he first joined in 1998. But his party had never won as much as the roughly 23.5 percent it got in November—more than double its total from just two years ago. So what does Wilders’ success say about voters’ feelings in the Netherlands—and in Europe more broadly?

Matthias Matthijs is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an associate professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. Matthijs says the Netherlands’ election results are both the result of tactical missteps by the country’s longtime ruling party and an example of rising support for the populist right across the continent—mostly among rural voters, as the political divide between them and their urban counterparts continues to expand.

As Matthijs sees it, rural Europeans’ sympathy for the populist right has two major sources: anxiety about immigrants, whose numbers have climbed to levels unseen since before the pandemic; and antipathy toward prevailing climate policies, which threaten the livelihoods of many farmers. And so, with populist-right parties standing to gain a significant number of seats in next year’s European Parliament elections, Matthijs says, Wilders’ election belongs to a pattern that could mean big changes on the continent—beginning with immigration and the transition to renewable energy.

He succeeded on account of a few strategic mistakes by the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the center-right party that’d won every election since 2010. It’s important to understand, Wilders and Mark Rutte—the VVD leader who’d been prime minister since 2010—have a long history together. In the 1990s and early 2000s, they were the young, up-and-coming reformers of the liberal VVD party. Wilders wanted to make it a center-right conservative party, stressing traditional values and free-market economics. Rutte wanted to make it a free-market economics party with progressive values—approving gay marriage, for instance.

Wilders didn’t like the direction of the VVD, so he formed his own party, the Party of Freedom (PVV), which was founded on traditional values but has flipped from right-wing, free-market economics to a left-wing, communitarian program that embraces the welfare state: We need to protect our Dutch people. We need to make sure our people have unemployment benefits.

Rutte let the government fall this summer over immigration—he wanted more restrictive policies than his coalition partners did. His successor as party leader, Dilan Yeşilgöz, made immigration the main issue of the election campaign, and she took a hard line. But that helped Wilders. She started calling for the hardline immigration policies that Wilders first demanded—and many voters preferred the original to the copy.

Another major shift happened a week before the election, during a debate when Yeşilgöz said she was open to working with Wilders to form a government—a reversal of the party’s stance since 2012.

This shift enabled many people—disgruntled VVD voters, other right-wing voters, and people who only occasionally vote when they feel like their vote matters—to turn out and cast votes for Wilders. A lot of people who were fed up with the issue of immigration and with other issues, such as housing, felt this time that a vote for Wilders wasn’t wasted.

Bluhm: How did Wilders campaign this time?

Matthijs: He became a lot more temperate in his rhetoric immediately after that debate. The media reported extensively that he’d become milder; they started calling him “Geert Milders.”

Even after the election, he’s remained moderate. He said his party was for all Dutch people, whether Christian, Muslim, or non-believers. That’s a major shift for a guy who said Islam wasn’t compatible with Dutch society and that he’d close all the mosques in the country.

“To become the prime minister of the Netherlands, Wilders is going to have to compromise on some of his policies. This means the best-known items in his program will have to go—whether closing mosques, a referendum to leave the European Union, or his unconstitutional proposals for dealing with immigration. But a lot of his voters would feel betrayed if he compromised on these pledges, so I’m deeply skeptical that he’ll be able to form a government. And if he does form one, I’d be deeply skeptical that he could do the things he wants to.”

“What worries me and many others is the cruelty. Democracies work well when politicians keep the fabric of society together—they structure the state and the economy so people who show initiative are rewarded, while the disadvantaged are compensated. This was based on the idea that all of us are citizens and of equal value. But if politicians single out certain groups as inferior, it can give some people a kind of green light to be cruel to those groups. We saw an example of this as soon as the weekend after Wilders won. A group of 20 people put on blackface to reclaim a traditional Dutch Christmas character—in recent years, the country had largely changed the character’s skin color to blue—and surrounded a VVD politician and said, We’re back.”

“On policy, it’s clear that the lofty, progressive goals of the European Union on climate change and the relatively open attitudes toward migrants will be gone after these elections. The climate transition will slow down, and the EU will provide more compensation to those harmed by the transition. It’ll spend much more money on protecting its borders, and it’ll have a less generous asylum policy.”