Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The clear victory of the far right led by Geert Wilders in parliamentary elections in the Netherlands this week was a Dutch political earthquake. It will send tremors across Europe. Never before has an extreme right party passed 20 per cent of a Dutch assembly vote. Wilders won 23.6 per cent and doubled his party’s seat tally in a late surge that seemed to stun him as much as the country.
His success will embolden other anti-immigration, Eurosceptic populists who are hoping for big gains in European parliamentary elections in June. Only a month ago, it was liberal pro-Europeans who had the wind in their sails after Poland’s opposition parties deprived the nationalist Law and Justice-led government of its majority. Even if Wilders’ demand for a referendum on leaving the EU seems a distant prospect, The Hague may go back to being an obstacle to EU budget increases, further common borrowing and enlargement.
The Dutch election once again underscores the potency of immigration as a campaign issue when Europe is struggling to cope with huge numbers of irregular migrants and asylum seekers, on top of refugees from Ukraine. And it raises difficult questions for mainstream parties particularly on the centre-right who fear being outflanked by populists. How far should they go to try to address legitimate voter concerns that immigration is “out of control”, given the constraints of EU and international law, without somehow legitimising or normalising the radical and usually simplistic solutions of the populists?
Wilders’ victory is all the more shocking because unlike Italy’s Giorgia Meloni or, to a lesser degree, the French far-right under Marine Le Pen, he has not really moderated his extremist positions in his two decades in parliament. He may have struck a milder tone towards the end of the election campaign and expressed a willingness to work with others in government but he has never abandoned his discriminatory policies towards the Islamic faith, such as banning mosques.
Fortunately, the need to form coalitions to exercise power in the Dutch system should act as a constraint. Given his unconstitutional anti-Islam stance, no mainstream party should agree to serve under Wilders as premier. But excluding his winning Freedom party from power altogether would risk looking undemocratic. As in other EU countries where parties are grappling with the dilemma of sharing power with the far right, forcing the populists to share responsibility for taking decisions and making trade-offs has some attractions.I
n any case, the route to power for Wilders looks complicated. He has no chance of assembling a majority coalition after Dilan Yeşilgöz, leader of the third-placed liberal-right VVD, said she would only back a government from the outside and only a centre-right one, which might preclude Wilders leading it. Yeşilgöz and her party are partly responsible for Wilders’ triumph. The VVD brought down the outgoing coalition over an immigration dispute, centred its campaign on toughening rules on migrants, and its leader opened the door to a possible coalition with Wilders. Doing so blurred the lines with the far right and made it easier for VVD voters to jump to the hard-hitting version.
Reducing cash benefits for asylum seekers and speeding up processing and removals, as Chancellor Olaf Scholz has proposed in Germany, may prove effective, certainly more so than Wilders’ unworkable plans to pull out of UN conventions and rewrite EU treaties to give the Dutch an opt-out from asylum policy. But mainstream parties have to find credible ways to respond to voter concerns over immigration, and the squeeze it can put on public services and housing, or they risk leaving the field open to extremists.