Yesterday Geert Wilders went out of his way again. He claimed that Frans Timmermans had called for him to be murdered. Timmermans said in a speech that ‘we will do nothing to prevent Wilders from coming to power in this country’. Wilders heard a death threat in it. Even for Wilders that was quite idiotic. Wilders announced that he would press charges and called on his supporters to do so. Twitter shows that he has succeeded in turning his supporters even further against Timmermans. His brother Paul, a staunch opponent of Wilders’ PVV, stands up for his brother. Their mother died yesterday and that may make Geert somewhat unbalanced, Paul Wilders tweets.
Cut my brother #Wilders some slack. Yesterday our mother died in the presence of all the children. He and I embrace – brothers remain brothers, despite the obvious differences in views. I suspect this played a role in his tweet #PVV
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Geert Wilders’ tweet after Timmermans’ criticism did not come out of nowhere. According to him, Geert is not used to contradiction: “He governs his empire like an emperor. Anyone who seriously contradicts him is done for. Family or not.”
“No one in our family sees him often. And after my outpouring on Twitter last year in which I apologized for my brother, there is a deafening silence regarding him.” Before that, the brothers still had contact, although it was minor. “We mainly communicated with apps and text messages. That boy is just very busy, we only saw each other on birthdays.”
So yesterday the family was united around Mother Wilders’ deathbed.
Paul has previously apologized for the radical things his brother claims or tweets. For example, he apologized when Geert had made unpleasant reports about Angela Merkel. The reason is the bloody photo of Angela Merkel which the PVV leader tweeted after a bloody attack in Berlin.
“You can go far, but with this tweet he crossed a line. It was the final straw,” says Paul Wilders in the first interview he has given to the media in years. He continues: “I wanted to share my own outrage with my tweet. To set a limit. In doing so, I also responded to what many other people thought.”
Like his brother, Paul has also been threatened in the past, he told RTL. “The threats mainly come from two groups: immigrants who associate me with my brother because of my surname. And there are the PVV adherents. One group says that I am an extension of Geert, the other an opponent.”