Opinion | Wilders’ revenge, the voters’ revenge

When Mark Rutte unexpectedly pulled the plug on his unhappy cabinet this summer, he made three cardinal mistakes. Firstly, he assumed that virtually no one, except the VVD, was ready for new elections – CDA and D66 were electorally on the ropes, the big winner of the Provincial Council elections, Caroline van der Plas’ BBB, hardly had a party structure. and Pieter Omtzigt – haha, who can create a party in such a short time? Certainly not the “emotional” Omtzigt.

The second assumption was that the VVD would succeed in attracting the right-wing electorate’s hottest issue – asylum and immigration – by dropping the cabinet over family members.

Third mistake: for one day, Rutte thought he could continue.

Rutte saved himself a defeat by triumphantly throwing in the towel before a motion of no confidence was passed. In doing so he prevented a sad end to his premiership.

Settlement

But the settlement still came on Wednesday. Not by the left, where Frans Timmermans, the flown-in savior at GroenLinks-PvdA, presented himself too much as an arrived statesman from a distance to get the voters moving en masse. They were the old ones Angstgegner van Rutte on the right, Pieter Omtzigt and Geert Wilders, who caused the fall of the VVD.

In addition, the party made it easy for them with Dilan Yesilgöz as its new leader. Firstly, she opened the door wide to Wilders. A strategic blunder, caused by the hubris of a party that takes power for granted. Moreover, Yesilgöz kept unintentionally rubbing a stain. Her scholastic mantra about the aversion to “watery compromises” mainly hit back at her own party. By the VVD suddenly as a PVV light to present, she kissed Geert Wilders awake again.

He used this with astonishing agility. Following the example of other European radical right parties, such as Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France, he changed his tune. The total rejection of the political order (“fake parliament”) made way for an apparently constructive attitude – you could do business with him. He let go of Islam as an obsession, everything was suddenly open to discussion, he joined the media that he had denounced for years – and declared that the Russians should be “chopped to the ground” (without supporting Ukraine militarily, of course).

The refrain has been the same for two decades: one feels unrecognized and threatened in one’s small, orderly world

Pointing out that “Geert Milders” is more a handy magic trick than a real metamorphosis (read the relentlessly radical right-wing plan of the PVV) no longer made sense. In the final phase of the election campaign, when the initial emphasis on ‘content’ caused by the success of Omtzigt gave way to a game of Stratego, the PVV entered an upward spiral. The heavy impact of the crisis in the Middle East on Dutch society will also have had an effect. Omtzigt’s hesitations gradually aroused more irritation than admiration, and many angry voters wanted this – René van der Gijp recognized this Today Inside better than many serious observers – kicking ass just because he could. The PVV suddenly became the magnet on the right, putting an end to the populist fragmentation on the right flank that had long been so comfortable for the VVD. FVD, JA21, BVNL and part of BBB have been emptied.

The reckoning with the Rutte era is complete. Wilders’ revenge is the revenge of a large part of the electorate, whose dissatisfaction and anger has repeatedly shown itself in different guises in recent years. It was about Islam, it was about nitrogen, it was about asylum seekers, it was about upside-down flags and farmers – but the refrain has been the same for two decades: people feel unrecognized and threatened in their small, orderly world, and feel betrayed by an administrative elite that would not stand up for their interests, but for those of migrants and asylum seekers.

Threat to democracy

But that persistent dissatisfaction has two faces. In the final report of the Advisory Committee on Strengthening Resilience of the Democratic Legal Order, which was presented by chairman Ahmed Marcouch at the beginning of November, you will encounter them both. On the one hand, the citizen who has actually become the victim of a negligent government – look at the Benefits Affair, look at Groningen. The committee: “There are residents who are systematically disadvantaged by the way in which the democratic legal order currently functions. So seriously disadvantaged that the fundamental social rights stated in the Constitution (such as the right to housing, social security, health care and education) are not fulfilled.”

The second threat to our democratic order, the committee states, is “affective polarization”. That is indiscriminately stoking discontent as Trump does in the United States, continuing to stoke the fires of anger. “Anti-institutional extremism, in which malicious intentions are attributed to the elite,” says the report, “is a threat to the democratic legal order.”

Let’s make no bones about it, the latter is always the mode of operation van Wilders, year after year, with decreasing results. During this campaign, his rhetoric suddenly shifted to the territory of Pieter Omtzigt, so that voters who previously found him too hard, too inflexible and ineffective, found him yet another savior in him at the last minute.

When news of his monster victory became known, Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán were among the first to congratulate him. The voter in Brunssum (where the PVV received 42.4 percent of the votes) will not care. The parties that are now invited by Wilders to rule over the right, Pieter Omtzigt in the first place, know that they are playing with fire.