Geert Wilders has a love-hate relationship with the press, the Volkskrant writes. The PVV leader is like the prettiest girl in the class, scathing one minute, coy the next. Or it is all a clever ploy?

‘Wilders hardly ever gives interviews, his party refuses to engage in discussion but dominates the political debate from the barricaded wing of the parliament building via Twitter. Journalists are ‘cowards’, and ‘sewer rats’ and PVV MP Dion Graus even suggested a ‘press police’ to curb the ‘leftist press’, the paper writes.
Ignore or expose?
‘The PVV has become an impregnable fortress for the press’, the paper quotes Nel Ruigrok, researcher for the Dutch News Monitor. Meanwhile, Wilders launches one controversial idea after another leaving a bevy of frustrated journalists knocking on his door in vain.
Many journalists have a hard time coping with Wilders. Ignore or expose? ‘We help spread Wilders’ propaganda’, a columnist for De Pers complains.
Prettiest girl
Geert Wilders’ media strategy is both criticized and admired, the paper writes. Political commentator Max van Weezel thinks Wilders is behaving ‘like the prettiest girl in the class. He is playing hard to get. He is being pursued by hundreds of journalists going ‘Mr Wilders, just one question, Mr Wilders? It’s quite brilliant really. Most MPs are having a hard time finding a rolling camera.’
The paper describes Wilders’ preferred method. He makes a controversial comment such as ‘A blind horse can see that the Greeks should leave the euro’ and then sits back. It’s all that’s needed to start the ball rolling. The press takes it up and asks other politicians to comment and Wilders is news yet again.
According to RTL’s Frits Wester – who is one of the few journalists to have interviewed him – Wilders is a past master at making everybody talk about him while keeping quiet himself. Sometimes he doesn’t even have to say anything at all: when the queen visited a mosque wearing a scarf D66’s Alexander Pechtold tweeted: The queen in a mosque? The Netherlands is anxiously awaiting a reaction from geertwilders@pvv.. is he awake yet?’
Peeved
Henri Beunders, media studies professor at Erasmus University thinks journalists are peeved because Wilders doesn’t seem to need them and prefers to communicate directly with his voters. Journalists shouldn’t get upset, he says. Every once in a while a politician enters the scene who has a different way of doing things and profits by it for a couple of years.
While Wilders is very selective about who he communicates with, his MPs are even more tight lipped, the paper writes. Max van Weezel says the last batch of PVV MPs seem to be avoiding the press and when they do talk they are nervous and restrict themselves to their own brief. Any questions on how long the party will support the cabinet or where it gets its money from are invariably referred to the party leader’, Van Weezel says.
Myth
When the press started digging into the past of some of the PVV MPs, Wilders temporarily banned them from press centre Nieuwspoort where politicians and journalists meet informally. Wester thinks most PVV MPs are approachable, however and calls Wilders’ hostile attitude to the press a ‘myth’. ‘Wilders is playing up to people when he says that Clairy Polak should be a newsreader in North Korea and that the VARA is populated by people with ‘sick minds’. Or that Pauw and Witteman are ‘prejudiced leftist punks’. PVV voters like their party to show very little faith in the media’, he says.
Commentators have observed a change in Wilders’ behaviour to the press lately. The growing support for the SP, which, the paper writes, ‘is fishing in the same electoral pond’, is forcing Wilders to go public and actually explain his policies. Frits Wester’s RTL was the first to profit from the fall out of the Maurice de Hond poll results. Wilders immediately conceded an interview to the television station and a week later he did so again. ‘We’ll see him on Pauw and Witteman yet’, predicts Beumers.