By Monica Showalter
After decades of wokedom, self-satisfied establishmentarians in European capitals found themselve ‘shocked’ that populist/conservative Geert Wilders ran away with a big victory in the Netherlands.
Sour grapes is more like it. But to get even more specific, it was a wake-up call.
According to the Associated Press:
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders said Thursday that he is ready to join the next Dutch coalition government after he surged to a huge election victory that marked a stunning lurch to the far right for a nation once famed as a beacon of tolerance.
The result is sending shockwaves through Europe, where extremist nationalist ideology is putting pressure on democracies that now face the possibility of having to deal with the first far-right prime minister of the Netherlands.
“It is going to happen that the PVV is in the next Cabinet,” Wilders said, using the Dutch abbreviation for his Party for Freedom.
With nearly all votes counted, Wilders’ party was forecast to win 37 seats in the 150-seat lower house of parliament, more than double the 17 the party secured in the last election.
Cripes, look at the language in that AP piece.
I am ‘shocked’ it got past a credible editor.
“Once famed as a beacon of tolerance”?
“Stunning lurch to the far right”?
Let’s just say we know how Mike and Raf voted if they are Dutch. What crazed, insulting language that bears no resemblance to the subject of their article.
I’ve met Geert myself in Los Angeles, and far from being intolerant as he had been painted, he’s as tolerant and pleasant as they come from a nation that has a splendid culture of tolerance and love for freedom. I expected a wild man but what was the first thing I concluded? That he’s very, very, very Dutch. He’s Dutch like we expect the Dutch to be — tolerant, reasonable, practical, down to earth, amiable.
I’ve spent time in the Netherlands, and as a college student, worked for the Dutch government, so got to know quite a few Dutch people, whom I like and respect very much.
Sounds like the sort of person who should be leading the Netherlands, actually. His stances on out-of-control migration from incompatible and hostile cultures, crime, inflation, and the green agenda resonated with Dutch voters. I’m glad as heck that he stands a strong chance of becoming their prime minister.
The Dutch have a parliamentary system, so they sort themselves out into ruling coalitions and pick a prime minister from there.
According to the BBC, the 37 parliamentary seats Wilders picked up surprised even him by the high count. That means:
Geert Wilders’ party is set to become by far the biggest party in the Dutch parliament after Wednesday’s election
Wilder’s party has the black column.
BBC adds:
Geert Wilders may be the leader of the Netherlands’ largest parliamentary party, but he does not have nearly enough seats to form a government alone. Weeks of political horse-trading lie ahead.
Mr Wilders has admitted he will need to compromise on some of his policies to find political bed-fellows. And at this moment in time, it is not certain that Geert Wilders will be his country’s next prime minister.
Well, one hopes they are deluding themselves. There seems to be a wave building, though the BBC notes that not all conservative parties have won in recent elections, noting the reversal in Poland and the weak performance in Spain. But there also are big gains in France, Germany, and others, based on the same kinds of issues plaguing those countries — inflation, crime, greenie madness and unchecked migration — that Wilders delivered the resonant message on.
In the meantime, news reports note that complacent European Union polite society is acting as if their collective hair has been set on fire, but that’s not exactly what I have seen in reports. Most of these reports focus on the glee of other populist/conservative parties, of the kind who get demonized in the press as the Second Coming of Trump. Yet the academic types quoted insist that Wilders won’t be able to or have the guts to do what he says he will.
According to this AP report:
“He can never rule on his own, and I cannot imagine any kind of coalition majority that would choose a confrontation with Europe,” said professor Hendrik Vos of Ghent University, an expert on EU politics. “The Netherlands just has too much at stake in the EU market. It is unthinkable. And you have already seen him tone down some of his rhetoric,” Vos said.
Whine, whine, whine.
And this, from The Guardian:
Alexander Clarkson, a lecturer in German and European studies at King’s College London, said this morning: “Left and right as broader camps each have a substantial presence and will still do so.
“What is constantly shifting is which strand of the right – from far right to far right populists to conservatives to Christian democrats to rightish neo-liberals – is dominant at any one time.”.
He said Geert Wilders, like Jörg Haider in Austria, “has built his success on condemning coalition horsetrading that imposed policy compromise at the expense of ideological purism on every other Dutch party”.
He added:
“I suspect the trajectory of Wilders in power would be that of Haider as a populist entirely focused on gaining power yet struggles to use it effectively once it is in his hands rather than that of a canny strategist like Giorgia Meloni.
A characteristic that Far Right populists like Haider, Farage and Wilders share is a desperate hankering after respect from the political establishment they spend their careers condemning.”
Let’s see about that.
Voters don’t vote for people like Wilders unless something really bad has happened to shake them up and shock them into voting for something or someone different.
That’s where the wake-up call comes in.
There was the uncontrolled migration from some of the world’s least-fit-for-freedom societies. There is the crime brought on by illegal migration that comes of it.
There is out-of-control inflation and lousy economies brought on by lockdowns and money-printing for social spending. There is also costly war, which Wilders wants to pull back on.
There is the green agenda which almost certainly is being underreported. Expropriating and destroying the world’s most productive farmland in the name of global warming in the Netherlands, a junk theory if there ever was one, is insanity. Surely that brought him some votes.
The Dutch voters are likely to demand results from Wilder now that they have put their faith in him and made the leap. Wilders will be under immense pressure to give them what he promised them.
Let’s hope he has the political capital and will to follow through and then triggers a chain reaction from voters across the continent.
His new response to all the claims of ‘shock’ is reasonably defiant and in their faces:
That will give the euro elites something to be shocked about.
As for everyone else, particularly the Dutch voters, this could be the most beautiful thing that ever happened to Europe.
