Geert Wilders shocks even some of his supporters with a new low in anti-immigrant bile
By M.S.
GEERT WILDERS' party barely even took part in Wednesday’s municipal elections but, as usual, the far-right populist managed to make himself the centre of attention. In a post-election speech in The Hague, one of just two municipalities (out of 403) where his Party for Freedom ran candidates, Mr Wilders took his anti-immigrant rhetoric to a new low. “In this city and in the Netherlands, do you want more or fewer Moroccans?” he asked the crowd. “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!” the crowd roared back. “Then we’ll arrange that,” he finished. The crowd laughed, as though the ethnic threat were some sort of comedy routine. But with friends and foes rushing to distance themselves (one of his most valued MPs has just announced his resignation from the party), he may have gone a step too far this time.
The Party for Freedom, though weak at the municipal level, has been leading in the national polls for months, and may well end up first in elections to the European Parliament in May. Mr Wilders has built his party on a mixture of anti-immigrant and anti-European rhetoric, calling for banning the Koran and denouncing the Moroccan community for its high crime rates. But only in the past week has he begun explicitly saying that the Netherlands needs “fewer Moroccans”. For many Dutch people, the new rhetoric is a step too far. Mark Rutte, the prime minister from the centre-right Liberal party whose previous minority government was propped up by the PVV, said the speech “left a filthy taste in my mouth”.
Leaders of other parties, from the Christian Union to the liberal-democrat D66 party and the far-left Socialists, were equally damning. Even the Dutch press, which has long hesitated to call Mr Wilders’ rhetoric racist or the Party for Freedom “extreme-right”, found the latest provocation too much. Mr Wilders told journalists afterwards that he had only meant to refer to “criminal Moroccans”, but few took the excuse seriously. Even at the studiously neutral financial-news broadcaster RTL, an editor felt obliged to tell Mr Wilders in an open letter he should be ashamed of himself.
In the Moroccan-Dutch community, the immediate response was a campaign of tweets showing locally-born citizens of Moroccan background defiantly holding their Dutch passports, under the hashtag #BornHere. The Association of Moroccan Netherlanders said it would press hate-speech charges. Many others, including the main Dutch-Jewish organisation also condemned the remarks and within a day over 51,000 people liked a Facebook page called “I will press charges against Geert Wilders”, with well over 100 actually doing so. But Mr Wilders was acquitted of similar hate-speech charges in 2011, and most Dutch agree the trial only served him as free publicity.
The broader results of the municipal elections provided several clues as to how the European campaign is likely to go. The governing centrist coalition of Mr Rutte’s Liberals and the Labour party was pummelled. Labour took the heaviest hits, dropping to 9% of the seats nationwide from 16% in 2010; the Liberals fell from 16% to 13%. Left-wing voters have been angered by the budget-cutting compromises Labour has struck with the Liberals, while many Liberal voters dumped their party over tax hikes.
The most historic shift took place in Amsterdam, where Labour, which has run the city since 1946, lost to the liberal democrats of D66, the big winner of the day, whose leader Alexander Pechtold is Mr Wilders’ fiercest opponent. The Amsterdam campaign centred on real-estate issues, but there was a deep ideological turn too. Labour, with its traditional working-class constituency, supports the city’s century-old system of publicly subsidised non-profit housing corporations, which have developed decade-long waiting lists. D66, with a more entrepreneurial and urban-professional base, wants to privatise and liberalise the property market. D66’s win epitomises Amsterdam’s slow transformation from “red fortress” to yuppie playground.
More interesting, Labour has traditionally owned Amsterdam’s large ethnic Turkish and Moroccan vote, but in this election many switched to D66 and other parties. In Rotterdam, Labour shrank from 14 council seats to eight; two of those seats went to NIDA, a new Islamic party. Remarkably, large numbers of ethnic Turks and Moroccans voted for Leefbaar Rotterdam, a law-and-order party founded by Pim Fortuyn, the far-right politician who paved the way for Mr Wilders by launching the Dutch anti-immigrant movement, before being assassinated in 2002. Such results suggest the political barriers that have divided Dutch whites and non-whites may be gradually disintegrating, even as Mr Wilders tries to nail them back into place.
