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Wilders Watch

Wednesday 03 March 2010

The Hague is proud of its status as the ‘legal capital of the world’, it being the location for many well-known institutions such as the International Criminal Court, the Yugoslavia Tribunal, and the Peace Palace among others. So why is Geert Wilders likely to be so popular there? asks local resident Jovan Pronk on theHollandBureau.nl.

As the Netherlands goes to the polls for local elections, March 3rd, all eyes will be on results in Almere and The Hague. These are the only urban municipalities where the far-right Freedom Party (PVV) of Geert Wilders has fielded candidates.

With opinion polls suggesting the Freedom Party may end as the largest in parliament after national elections next June, the outcome of these two local elections may offer some insight into the future political state of the Netherlands.

The reasons why the Freedom Party are only standing in these two municipalities are in themselves worth highlighting. The Freedom Party is difficult to define. It is not a ‘party’ in the conventional sense of the term. You can donate to it, but cannot join it, nor influence its policy forming. It has no internal democracy. Its sole purpose is to serve as a platform for the ambitions of Geert Wilders and his brand of anti-Islamic populist nationalism; accurately described in a recent New York Times editorial as ‘hate spewing’ and ‘xenophobic ’.

Living at an undisclosed location, under 24 hour police protection, Geert Wilders has won the battle for the political space opened up by the late Pim Fortuyn in 2002. Attempting to define this political space remains the subject of considerable debate.

A recent report into ethnic, religious and political polarisation coined the term “New Radical Right’ to describe Wilders’ movement. By any conventional political genealogy it cannot be placed on the neo-fascist ‘extreme-right’. Wilders is no anti-Semite for example.

Indeed, he can make a serious claim to be one of the most ardent Zionists in the Dutch legislature; he once lived on a Kibbutz, admires Israel immensely and visits it regularly. His party backs the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory; his inflammatory rhetoric is more Avigdor Lieberman than David Ben-Gurion.

Wilders’s Zionism, however genuine, is also useful in distancing himself from accusations of right-wing political extremism. Nonetheless, the Dutch anti-Fascist research bureau Kafka revealed that many of his sympathisers who demonstrated during his recent court appearance in Amsterdam have backgrounds in unreconstructed neo-fascist parties.

Wilders controls his movement with an iron fist, micro-managing its dealings and orchestrating an extremely controlled approach to the media. Consequently, he astutely decided it would be political suicide were any candidates for local government to have neo-fascist associations, and it is this lack of suitable individuals that caused him to stand in only two local municipalities, with his eye firmly on the upcoming national elections.

In this Wilders has learned the lessons of the unholy shambles the late Pim Fortuyn’s movement descended into, when crooks, cranks and opportunists ran amok during the party’s time in government in late 2002.

Here in The Hague the Freedom Party has captured much local and international attention. The two mainstream centre-right parties, the Christian Democrats and the Conservative-Liberal VVD (for which Wilders was once a member of parliament) are now running policy programmes leaning to the right, with hard authoritarian language and proposed cuts in public spending for welfare, culture and social services.

The choice of The Hague and Almere reflects the Freedom Party’s success in recent European elections in these municipalities. In The Hague, by Dutch standards a socially polarised and fragmented city, two unreconstructed neo-fascist parties scored more than 13% in local elections in 1994. Many local citizens, not least amongst the large Islamic minority, are holding their collective breath.

Watch this space.

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