Which politician plays the blindness of the far right for Putin?

You can still attach great importance to national sovereignty – but the political relations in The Hague are, substantively and electorally, almost always a by-product of large international waves.

And there is much to say that the Russian attack on Ukraine is disrupting the world order to such an extent that it is followed by another wave.

So the question is why The Hague has so far mainly treated the domestic politics of the war as an economic theme. Purchasing power, inflation, recession, etc.

Matters of significance – especially if, like this week, you can accuse the finance minister in the campaign of staying away from a debate that everyone knows can never bring clarity.

Yet a much larger theme lurks: which political movements and media saw Putin’s aggression coming, and which did not? Ergo: who can claim the moral right?

It is not without meaning. After the fall of the Wall in 1989, the decline of the Soviet Union, the left of the Netherlands went along with the liberal belief in progress of market thinking and globalization. The progressive hegemony in the debate since the 1960s was definitively taken over by the VVD and CDA.

After 9/11 in 2001, the response of Muslim extremists to Western dominance, progressive parties, especially after Pim Fortuyn’s success in 2002, saw in their internal polls that anti-migration views and Muslim fear had become determining electoral factors.

This has remained the case, with major consequences: the National Voter Survey (NKO) on the 2021 elections showed that a stable radical right bloc has since emerged alongside the VVD and CDA that will not just disappear. Where the LPF and Leefbaar Nederland won 28 seats in 2002, PVV, FVD and JA21 also came out on top last year.

But the question is how the bloc’s years of Putin friendliness will turn out now that the same Putin is putting European peace at risk, and is accused of even shelling a nuclear power plant and bombing a children’s hospital.

Immediately after major international events, as you have seen in recent weeks, politicians from The Hague like to act as analysts. Everyone GBJ Hiltermann.

This was also the case after the attacks on the Twin Towers. Former VVD leader Hans Dijkstal said: “History takes a completely different turn today.” And CDA leader Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, later NATO boss: “The world will not be the same anymore.”

But politics is not just analysis, it is also steering: whoever can define a major event with moral preponderance gives the debate a decisive turn. The best illustration, a week after the murder of Pim Fortuyn, gave then LPF chairman Peter Langendam in 2002: “The bullet came from the left.”

Because although Volkert van der G. was an animal activist, he defined a weakness that has continued to haunt the left: Fortuyn had been murdered by someone with a progressive worldview that the LPF leader was fighting against, including multiculturalism.

Left-wing Muslim huggers and tea drinkers subsequently became a favorite mockery of the radical right. And gradually bend left. The Amsterdam PvdA alderman Rob Oudkerk introduced ‘cunt Moroccans’ (2002), the later PvdA leader Diederik Samsom said that they had ‘an ethnic monopoly on nuisance’ (2011).

Generalizations and false accusations about migrants thus became perfectly normal: Geert Wilders called for ‘fewer Moroccans’ in 2014 (and was prosecuted and convicted for it). Baudet justified his incorrect train tweet from 2020, in which he confused white conductors with nuisance Moroccans: it was wrong, but, he said, it could have been true.

In this climate, Putin set an example for the radical right, especially since he had mercilessly wreaked havoc among Muslims in Chechnya in 1999. Not just at Baudet. Radical Islam is the fascism of our time wrote ex-Russia correspondent Wierd Duk in 2016. “Russia is not our enemy.”

An ecosystem was created in which Putin de good guy was, or else as bad as Western politicians. When Rutte raised human rights with Putin in 2013, this was, according to GeenStijl, “sniffing”. Then NRC In 2016, when the initiators of the Ukraine referendum, the EU Citizens’ Committee, asked about Putin, they thought he was just as bad as the president of the European Commission: both “lust for power”. On social media, later on corona demonstrations, the cliché became that the EU would be “as great a dictatorship” as Russia.

The Putin kindness caused blindness. BBC interviewer John Sweeney revealed in 2017 the cognitive dissonance at Wilders by asking about the largest terrorist attack that hit the Dutch. The PVV leader was so full of Muslim terrorism that he forgot MH17 from 2014, after which Swee-ney told him that “Putin is in fact the prime suspect”. A year later, after the French Le Pen and the Italian Salvini also approached, Wilders officially made friends in Moscow. “Russia is on our side,” he told in 2017 EW.

Meanwhile, Russia-critical politicians had to endure more domestically. After the then D66 leader Pechtold said in 2018 that he had yet to encounter “the first Russian” who “corrects his mistake”, thought Leon de Winter that Pechtold “incites hatred”, so that he foresaw “persecution because of group insult”. An ethnic Russian from Donetsk, living in Breda, was the first to report the crime. A dismissal followed. Later, the same Russian also appeared to advise the man who made the ‘NOS Fake news’ sticker campaign great in 2020.

And when Sjoerdsma (D66) was refused by Russia as a member of a parliamentary delegation in 2020, De Daily Standaard (DDS) agreed with Russia. A “dirty game” was played to provoke Russia, DDS said.

Now the reality has completely changed. Putin, the friend of the radical right, the renowned Muslim fighter, the autocrat, turns out to be a man of war without foundation; of struggle without civilization. The friend of the radical right turns out to be ‘a danger to our way of life’.

And the four parties in the radical right-wing wing, PVV, FVD, Groep Van Haga and JA21, remain to a greater or lesser extent at a distance from the confrontational attitude of the House and cabinet. The PVV is skeptical about sanctions, Van Haga is concerned about discrimination against Russians in the Netherlands – that work.

Previous reflexes remain alive. A man from GeenStijl wrote this week: „I hate Kaag more than Putin and it’s not even close† Wilders also repeated an old trick: Kaag is just as bad as Putin. “Says to fight Putin but copies his undemocratic behavior.”

And with skyrocketing energy prices and an impending recession, the radical right can still bend the war debate in its favor; Wilders, with the support of the SP, is smart enough for that.

But one survey of I&O also showed this week that Putin-friendliness in the country is minimal, support for the NATO approach is high (also among JA21 voters), and that confidence in the EU is growing. Not NATO appears to be brain dead, but those who have cheered Putin over the past ten years.

Ergo: the radical right has not only made a serious mistake with its Putin friendliness, it is also vulnerable.

If an opponent now comes up with a one-liner along the lines of ‘The bullet came from the left’ from 2002, this movement could be endangered for the first time in twenty years – because its moral mistake was too great to ever justify again.