Following last week’s election which revealed broad swaths of the electorate in the Netherlands have abandoned the globalist Left and Center for the sovereigntist Right, the rhetoric of far-left extremists, who have physically attacked conservative Dutch politicians in recent days, has become increasingly bellicose.
While Geert Wilders and his anti-establishment Party for Freedom (PVV) aim to form a right-of-center coalition government after having secured by far the most votes of any party, some on the extreme left are urging action to make the Netherlands “ungovernable” if the PVV is able to form a cabinet, while others are calling for violence, the Dutch news outlet Nieuw Rechts reports.
“Just wait, we won’t accept the win and will take action … Kind of ‘van der Graaf’ action,” wrote Asha-Promes-Eeckhout on X, in a not-so-thinly veiled murder threat, and what very much appears to be a reference to Volkert van der Graaf, a left-wing extremist who assassinated the Dutch populist leader Pim Fortuyn in 2002.
“Time to shoot down all PVV members,” another X user, whose account has since been deleted, wrote casually.
Wilders has been under constant police protection since 2004, mainly due to Islamist threats. Now, it appears he’ll have to worry about physical threats from the extreme Left as well.
Another far-left extremist, this time an anarchist blogger who writes under the name Peter Storm, urged his fellow political travelers to launch a “street movement” to make the Netherlands “ungovernable” in the case that Wilder and his PVV manage to stitch together what he calls an “extreme right-wing cabinet.”
Storm writes:
The aim of such a movement is to cause so much unrest that the participation of fascists in government becomes so controversial that other parties abandon it … Causing so much unrest that the real rulers of the Netherlands—not the politicians, but the CEOs of large companies, and the top civil servants who actually control the state administration—start to worry about the country’s ability to govern, and thus the smooth functioning of the capitalist order.
The message of such a street movement to the establishment, and to the politicians who are forming a cabinet? If you form, help, or allow a fascist cabinet to form, we will make the country ungovernable and your economy unworkable.
Other leftist activists who showed up at street protests in Amsterdam and Utrecht, one organized by Antifa, on the day after the election, reportedly called Wilders a “fascist” and “racist,” and held placards that referred to him as a “terrorist.”
Reactions to Wilder’s victory from some political parties, like the Turkish party DENK, have been equally hysterical. Abellah Dami, the press officer for the party, likened the PVV’s victory to the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.
The intensifying militant rhetoric of the Dutch Left against Wilders and his PVV comes alongside a spate of attacks in recent days and months against right-wing leaders both in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe.
Days before the election, the leader of the conservative, anti-globalist Forum for Democracy (FvD), Thierry Baudet, was taken to the hospital after an extremist hit him in the face multiple times with a glass beer bottle. The attack against Baudet was the second of its kind in a month. In October, a man wielding a folded umbrella ambushed Baudet, hitting him in the face, as he walked into an auditorium in Ghent to deliver a lecture.
In the past months, attacks even more violent than those committed against Baudet have been carried out against conservative, anti-establishment politicians in Germany and Spain.
Earlier this month, Alejandro Vidal-Quadras, one of the founders of Spain’s national-conservative VOX party was shot in the face in broad daylight in the streets of Madrid. In October, the AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla was hospitalized after being injected with an unknown substance at a campaign event in Ingolstadt.
Months earlier, in August, Andreas Jurca, the chairman of the AfD in the Bavarian district of Augsburg and candidate for the state legislature, was beaten to a pulp by a gang of migrant males who recognized him.