Quick takes on the Netherlands’ general election this week portrayed a loss for radical right forerunner Geert Wilders and his brand of politics.
His party is set to lose 11 seats and fail in the ambition he declared when he collapsed the government this summer: to return with a bigger mandate and become prime minister.
However, Wilders’s party has come within a hair of winning the most votes and may have the same number of seats as its nearest challenger.
Most importantly, the overall vote share won by radical right parties has remained stable, at just under a third of the electorate.
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Wilders already won his greatest success: the transformation of Dutch politics over the two decades he has spent setting the news agenda.
Immigration dominates Dutch politics. Wilders now competes with various like-minded rivals, and even liberal parties have adopted many of his assumptions.
Rob Jetten – expected to become the next prime minister – achieved the best ever result for his liberal, pro-European Union D66 party, putting it neck-and-neck with Wilders’s Freedom Party.
D66 is expected to take the lead in a first round of talks to form a coalition government, a process which usually takes months.
Jetten argued during the campaign that the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention should be revised to reflect modern realities.
[ Dutch centrist D66 party confirmed as election winner, say reportsOpens in new window ]
This is a remarkable shift in the politics of the country that considers itself the home of international law. The impetus to put the right to seek safe harbour into law was inspired by the experience of places like the Netherlands, where the Jewish population trapped by the Nazi invasion in 1940 was nearly entirely wiped out.
It was also an election pledge of the right-wing JA21, which increased its seats from one to nine. Forum for Democracy (FVD), a radical right party from which JA21 split, won seven seats, gaining back most of the ground they lost last election.
The FVD advocates the deportation of “migrants and their children and grandchildren” who don’t fit into Dutch society.
“Simply halting the influx isn’t enough,” their election platform reads.
Who is to be considered integrated and how that might be measured isn’t clear.
Ahmed Marcouch was 10 when he arrived in Amsterdam from Morocco to join his father, who had been invited to help the postwar Dutch labour shortage as a “guest worker”.
Marcouch became a police officer, Labour member of parliament, and now mayor of Arnhem. Election night found him manning the DJ decks at a get-out-the-vote party in his city that invited young people to combine clubbing with casting a vote at the on-site polling station.
His appointment as mayor was picketed by demonstrators who claimed he would impose Shariah law. Wilders joined the protests, standing in front of a banner that read “No Arnhemmistan”, and releasing a statement saying Marcouch was “more suited to be the mayor of Rabat than Arnhem”.
Wilders continues to rage tweet about Marcouch, sometimes sharing a festive photograph of him in traditional dress for the mockery and hatred of his 1.6 million followers on X (Marcouch usually wears a suit).
Each election, millions of Dutch-born citizens of foreign descent see politicians competing over who can talk toughest about them and their families, and see their neighbours repeatedly vote the far-right into parliament.
“Even if you are third generation, fourth generation, you’re dismissed as a foreigner because you’re a Muslim or you have a Moroccan background. The children feel this,” Marcouch says.
“I was a carpenter, I worked in a factory, I was a police officer, I’ve been mayor for nine years now. The message is: you can do all that, and we still think you don’t belong.”
For some on the far-right, policies are no more than a thin veil over bigotry. No amount of integration will ever be enough.
