Geert Wilders is the big winner of the 2023 elections and who knows, the country’s new prime minister. Wilders is the nestor of national politics, the road to this victory was long. Wilders’ career in five crucial moments.
1997 – Wilders as VVD member
It is almost impossible for young people to imagine, because many only know Geert Wilders as leader of the PVV. But he once started his political career with the VVD, which he has now dethroned as the largest party. He first served as a municipal councilor in Utrecht on behalf of the Liberals and from 1998 also as a Member of the House of Representatives. During that period, he was, among other things, a mentor to the young Mark Rutte, who had to be shown the ropes in The Hague.
However, Wilders increasingly had arguments with the party leadership. First because he was too low on the electoral list in 2002, in his opinion. Then about his position that Turkey – which should never become a member of the European Union. This eventually led to a split in 2004 and he founded his own party: the Party for Freedom.
2006 – Own party and polarization
The first time the PVV participated in the elections in 2006, the party immediately won nine seats. In the years that followed, Wilders distinguished himself mainly by his hard attacks on Islam. For example, he advocates a head rag tax: a tax on headscarves.
He also makes a critical film about the Koran, Fitna, which causes a lot of commotion abroad because it ends with the sound of a page being torn from the holy book. Wilders was charged with discrimination, but was acquitted after a lengthy trial.
2010 – The tolerance adventure with the PVV
In 2010, Wilders’ PVV also achieved a mega victory and rose to 24 seats in the House of Representatives. The PVV will take responsibility for the first time, in a tolerance coalition with VVD and CDA. The three parties agree on all kinds of plans together, but the PVV does not provide any ministers.
VVD leader Mark Rutte becomes prime minister and praises this cooperation that ‘the Dutch right will lick its fingers at’. And the PVV appears prepared to make serious concessions: raising the state pension age was taboo in the campaign, but during the negotiations it is suddenly open to discussion for Wilders.
Yet the coalition soon foundered: when the parties negotiated billions in cuts in the Catshuis, Wilders pulled the plug on the collaboration in 2012. He does not want to support cuts to the state pension. Rutte is so angry that he tells Wilders to ‘destroy his party down to the last seat’. It will be the beginning of a period in which the PVV will be sidelined for a longer period of time – and radicalized – in parliament and outside it.
On the evening of the results of the municipal elections on March 19, 2014, the PVV leader asks in a café in The Hague whether his supporters want more or fewer Moroccans. The audience chants ‘less, less, less’, to which Wilders says: ‘then we will arrange that’. Reports are filed against the PVV leader, and the Public Prosecution Service prosecutes him.
After a lengthy legal process, Wilders was eventually convicted of group insult by the Court in The Hague in 2020.
The political consequences are also major: other parties were already reluctant to cooperate with the PVV, but after these statements many factions formed a cordon sanitary around the PVV. Virtually no party wants to be in a coalition with Wilders, and last week D66 called it ‘the hate preacher from the right’.
In the years that followed, the PVV remained a major opposition party in parliament, but it did not manage to join the government. This happens occasionally in provinces. In parliamentary debates, Wilders lashes out at others, speaking of a ‘fake parliament’ and ‘fake judges’, the PVV leader compared D66 leader Sigrid Kaag to a witch.
2023 – The ‘new’ Wilders’
Election year 2023 marks a new phase for the PVV. In the spring, Wilders’ party recorded a historically poor score in the Provincial Council elections (barely 6 percent), but in the following months the PVV leader seemed to moderate his tone. The VVD also breaks with the years-long PVV blockade and no longer calls cooperation with Wilders taboo.
Wilders maintains his anti-Islam views, which remain part of the election manifesto. But he does file off a few sharp edges from the program, and more importantly: Wilders says he is prepared to put a number of offensive ideas (mosque ban, Koran ban) on hold if he can participate in a new cabinet. All he wants is for a new government to work on reducing the immigration influx.
It leads to a mega victory, from 17 to 35 seats. Wilders immediately took a conciliatory stance during the results evening. He promises to ‘act reasonably’. “I appeal to all parties: the campaign is now over, we must look for agreements and work together. Every party must get over its shadow. With our agenda of hope.”
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House of Representatives elections 2023
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