Electoral change in the Netherlands is a message
The shock victory of Geert Wilders's PVV has provoked horror in the commentariat, but too many have simply decided the electorate is wrong and without agency
In February, after the then-home secretary Suella Braverman had been taken to task for referring to migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats as “invaders”, I put down some thoughts about the use of language by politicians, especially in the debate on immigration and race. I argued that, since our elected representatives deal as much in words as in actions, they cannot use those words carelessly. They have a duty to understand not only what can be implied but also what can be inferred. And in my conclusion, I reached, as I so often do, for the words of Stephen Fry, one of the best architects of language in my lifetime and quite capable of standing toe-to-toe with P.G. Wodehouse or Martin Amis, each a dazzling and diligent craftsman. This was what I said:
“As the freewheelingly brilliant Professor Donald Trefusis chides a colleague in Stephen Fry’s breath-taking and outrageously clever debut novel The Liar:
The English language is an arsenal of weapons. If you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded, you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time.
That is, I think, a good attitude to take. Our politicians enjoy a particular power when it comes to communicating with the public, and that privilege brings the responsibility to be self-aware and informed. And if politicians are careful with their language, as they are currently not, then they must also respect their opponents’ right to be heard, and to express complicated and nuanced argument. If they can do this, if they can follow the guidance of the better angels of their nature, the rewards are huge: better, fairer, more humane policy, and the opportunity to promote its merits to an electorate which has some liberal and generous instincts within it.”
I confess that, as this year draws to a dark conclusion, some of the optimism I felt in February feels rather distant now. But the point stands. Now I want to pick up the idea I expressed briefly, that politicians and commentators “must also respect their opponents’ right to be heard”. That is something that must be emphasised in the current climate, bedevilled as we are by the spectre of “cancellation” and being “no-platformed”. My view is fairly maximal: I think the writ of free speech runs a long way, certainly far beyond the border of someone simply being offended. As I find myself saying often now, there is not, nor should there be, a right not to be offended. In an earnest exchange of ideas, if the tone remains polite and generous but someone is “offended” by another’s reasonable belief, my short answer is that I really don’t care.
Of course there are limits, and finding those limits, pushing them as far as we can to limit people as little as possible, is hard work. A notion of those limits is often expressed as “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre”, meaning an instance of speech having direct and harmful effect and therefore falling outwith the ambit of free speech. It is a slightly jumbled borrowing from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, a justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932 famed for his pithy, epigrammatic judgements on civil liberties and constitutional democracy. In 1919, he drafted the unanimous opinion in Schenck v. United States, which determined that Charles Schenck, a peace activist, was not protected from prosecution under the free speech provisions of the First Amendment for distributing flyers urging men to obstruct the draft into the military.
The idea of shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre being beyond the limits of free speech is, unadorned, absurd. What if the theatre is in fact on fire? Holmes is generally msiquoted. What he said was this: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” That reveals the true meaning. Essentially, free speech runs up against a barrier when its effects are self-evidently harmful, such as if falsely shouting fire in a crowded theatre. That principle is sound, though interpreting and applying it is not always straightforward. But it is important, and we will come back to it.
This past week has seen a general election in the Netherlands, and a shock result as the populist, right-wing Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid, PVV) led by Geert Wilders topped the poll, collecting a quarter of the vote and winning 37 seats in a House of Representatives of 150. I wrote about the election in the i Paper, and won’t repeat my thoughts here, suffice to note that a coalition will need to be constructed to reach the threshold of 76 seats which would represent a majority of one. But what I want to look at here is the way in which the media has greeted the surprising victory of the PVV.
Wilders is an experienced politician, 60 years old and a member of the House of Representatives since 1998. He founded the PVV in 2006, having previously been a member of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie, VVD) but splitting with the party over Turkey’s candidacy for membership of the European Union. Wilders‘s views do not sit easily in a framework which British politics understands. He was raised as a Roman Catholic in Limburg, the most southerly of the Netherlands’ 12 provinces, and his mother was born in the Dutch East Indies of mixed Dutch and Indonesian ancestry. He left the Catholic Church when he came of age, and on some social issues he is liberal, generally supportive of LGBT rights and firm in tackling threats to them, and committed to gender equality.
However, he holds extremely controversial and provocative views on Islam—which he says he “hates”—and on immigration. He believes that many of the central tenets of Islam are incompatible with liberal Dutch values, he has referred to Mohammed as “the devil” and he seeks to ban the sale of the Qur’an as an inflammatory and extremist book which he has compared to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Furthermore, he has previously demanded an end to all Muslim immigration and a scheme to pay settled immigrants to leave. In 2007, he spoke in terms which would be beyond the bounds of the mainstream in the UK.
Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches!
These views, perhaps bolstered by his distinctive bouffant hair, once peroxide blond, now silver, have led to comparisons with Donald Trump. In 2016, before Trump became president, Wilders applauded the then-candidate’s sceptical stance on the effects of Muslim immigration to the US. As so many on his part of the political landscape tend to, he frames his opposition to Muslim immigration on pragmatic and practical terms: “It’s not about left and right, it’s about common people and their issues”.
Is Wilders a straightforward far-right populist? There are certainly elements of his ideological world which are currently impossible to imagine a mainstream lawmaker in the UK holding, or at last professing publicly Yet he cites Margaret Thatcher as his political icon and has intermittently distanced himself from Marine le Pen of the French National Rally and the late Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party of Austria. He supports the Netherlands leaving the European Union, is highly critical of the existing political institutions and rails against cultural relativism. While he acknowledges the reality of climate change, he has argued that the Netherlands cannot address the challenge on its own.
In terms of rhetoric, Wilders has certainly presented himself to other parties as pragmatic since the election. Although he has proclaimed “The PVV can no longer be ignored; we will govern”, he is “of course” willing to compromise and wants to be a “prime minister for all Dutch people”. He has suggested that he will set aside for the time being his policy of banning the sale of the Qur’an, and has stressed that he wants to govern “within the law and the constitution”.
I’m not trying to settle here whether Wilders is “far-right”. To begin with, that would need an objective and agreed definition, which I don’t think we have. Absent that, it becomes a political discussion with much less likelihood of a settled answer. I do think it’s lazy and misleading to regard Wilders as a Dutch-inflected Trump; if nothing else, he’s been at this a lot longer. Wilders is the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives, elected in 1998, and has been living under protective security for nearly 20 years. He has certainly benefited from a milieu that Trump helped to create, of dissatisfaction with the status quo and a willingness to vote for politicians and parties who would previously have seemed beyond the Pale. But his ideological platform is internally coherent, unlike Trump’s ragbag of feelings.
More importantly, in terms of a Trump comparison, Wilders’s recent pledge about abiding by the law and the constitution is a vital commitment. He is famiiar with the criminal justice system: a trial in 2010-11 for insulting religious and ethnic groups and inciting hatred and discrimination saw the first panel of judges replaced because of suspected bias, the Public Prosecution Service compelled to bring the case to trial by the Court of Appeal despite recommending that Wilders be acquitted, and consequently a not guilty verdict returned. Presiding judge Marcel van Oosten noted that his remarks had been “gross and denigrating”, but, while on the edge of legal acceptability, did not represent a breach of the law.
In 2016, Wilders was brought to trial again, this time for inciting “discrimination and hatred” towards Moroccans. The prosecution sought a fine of €5,000, but, though he was convicted in December, no penalty was imposed on him. In September 2020, the Court of Appeals overturned the conviction on the grounds that Wilders’s comments about Moroccan immigrants were designed for party advantage rather than to encourage discrimination, noting that he had “already paid a high price for years for expressing his opinion”. If he has now grasped that working within the law is his only remotely plausible way forward, that is to be welcomed.
Despite all of this knotty detail and nuance, many news outlets in this country and elsewhere have treated the success of the PVV as an objective calamity and, almost, an act of God, imposed on a helpless electorate. There is a recurring assumption that this is a bad matter and part of a worrying wider trend of populism across Europe and the Americas. Ian Dunt in his Substack analysis reached for the imagery of the Cold War when he noted that “from Argentina to the Netherlands, countries are toppling like dominoes”. He described how “it felt like the balance of political power was tilting once again in the direction of chaos and authoritarianism”. With astonishing dismissiveness, he painted this scene:
Around the world, country after country is making the choice: let’s play roulette. Let’s just spin the wheel and see how this completely insane right-wing dipshit does… [Wilders] [ha]s now won the most seats at the Dutch election, opening the way for coalition talks if anyone will work with him. And now we see that dark-stained process which has defined far-right history: the accommodation of conservatives with that which they should reject.
What is striking is not that Dunt, who describes himself as a “Liberal extremist”, should dislike Wilders’s electoral triumph and disagree with his policies; it is that he presents this as straightforward truth. “Conservatives” have sinned in accommodating the PVV. What of the voters? There is no attempt to understand why a quarter of the Dutch electorate chose the PVV. He is clear on what liberals must do. They have to:
See the flashing warning signs and commit to acting upon them: no cooperation with populism, no accepting its framing, no elections on the policy battlegrounds, no tolerance of its advance.
But instead of voters as autonomous individuals, he can identify only am abstract movement, “populism”. The implication, or at least my inference, is that the 2,442,318 voters who made the PVV their first choice simply cannot have made that decision rationally or willingly. They must be malign, in which case they are to be fought with every ounce of strength, or else they are like sheep, blindly following crude influences shaped by the dastardly right.
Meanwhile, Jenni Reid of CNBC described Wilders and his alleged fellow-travellers as leaders “who are pushing their countries’ politics further to the right”. Note again the passive voice and the abstract noun: Dutch “politics” are “being pushed” to the right. The idea that voters are making judgements and favouring the right with greater support and trust is simply absent, because it makes no sense. “The people” can’t have wanted this to happen, and they must therefore be victims. Even the BBC described Wilders taking “advantage of widespread dissatisfaction with the previous government, which collapsed in a disagreement over asylum rules”.
This two-pronged attack of asserting the objective catastrophe of the PVV’s support and robbing the electorate of any agency creates an unambiguous narrative but it is a starkly partisan one. Worse, it is patronising, and serves only to reinforce the disaffection of many voters from the political establishment. We note how you have voted, it tells the electorate, but you cannot have meant that, and therefore you must have been coerced. However, it promises, correct-thinking people understand what must be done to restore the balance.
I simply cannot think of a more inflammatory and counter-productive reaction to the results of the Dutch election. Even if we reduce the intention of the electorate to a helpless, inchoate cry of despair at the status quo, there is no attempt to look beyond the headline figures, no meaningful analysis of the aspects of politics which have caused voters to turn towards the PVV, and certainly no commitment to significant change. It is just a louder, more strident assertion of “business as usual”.
We are in very dangerous territory, but the hand-wringers and domino theorists are making it worse. As I argued in City AM, politicians and commentators must pause for breath, look at the areas where voter sentiment has shifted and try to identify potential avenues for change. And part of that process, for progressives, may entail accepting that the electorate, consciously and soberly, no longer agrees with them, and wants a new approach. To reach for the pearls and clutch as tightly as possible, while exuding disapproval and distaste, would be the most eloquent and emphatic expression that they simply don’t get it. If they—if we—do that, then we have ourselves to blame what follows, and have forfeited any right to be heard credibly and with patience in debates about the fundamental ways in which our polities work.
Our politics isnt working. Inflation and gvt apathy, incompetence, corruption and inability has killed it off. Energy up 200% with more to come. What has gvt done? Zip. Insurance up by 25% at least. What has gvt done? Zip. Price food up by at least 10/20%, what has gvt done? Zip. Council tax ever upwards. Indirect taxation ever upwards. Healthcare is abysmal. Utterly awful. Policing is a joke. Nothing works. Everything is broken. No party holds any solutions. And the chattering classes cushioned from the worst of this, wonder why the rest have had enough.
Why is it shocking?
Its democracy.
People vote for whom they want.
Its not for me or you to judge others.
Nor is it for me or you to essentially infer whom they should vote for.