Has the Dutch far-Right peaked? Geert Wilders faces a reckoning

“Is the Netherlands going to be more than one big asylum center?” asks Geert Wilders. “Do we want Dutch people to feel even more like strangers in their own cities, villages and neighborhoods? Or shall we put the Dutch first once again?” Heavily miked — to drown out shouts of “fascist!” and “you don’t give a pyromaniac a match” from an old man standing in the crowd — Dutch far-Right politician Geert Wilders is addressing his loyal followers in Volendam.

But while Wilders can comfortably fill a small venue with traditional working-class voters, young men in black, MPs and party stalwarts in this stronghold and fishing village north of Amsterdam, the question is whether he will do the same at a national level. This veteran of Dutch politics is leading in one of the polls, and is neck and neck with two other parties in another, with a snap election today. After a shock win in 2023 elections, his far-Right Party for Freedom (PVV) party failed to pass its promised asylum laws, collapsed the coalition and has slumped from its current 37 seats to between 23 and 29 in the final polls.

Yet many continue to support the one-man party’s narrative about how asylum seekers — 12% of immigration last year and less than the European average — are responsible for the country’s housing woes, integration questions, and price inflation.

The Netherlands does experience real pressures: starting with demography. Like many Western European countries, it is dependent on immigration for its future prosperity. A state commission last year recommended “moderate growth” to 2050 — from 18 million currently to 19 or 20 million. It has an aging population and Europe’s shortest working week. In this rich land, a larger group of labor migrants and highly-skilled “expats” are essential to staff farming, distribution and meat processing jobs, as well as more high-tech industries.

As for the low-paid migrants who come in larger numbers from Eastern Europe, they typically face the worst housing and exploitation. Left-wing parties like Frans Timmermans’ GreenLeft-Labour argue that cracking down on poor conditions and minimum wages is a better way of getting a “grip” on migration in Europe’s second-most densely populated country. Wilders, by contrast, proposes a “total asylum stop”, the army at the borders and stronger measures to eject people who are refused asylum or commit a crime — without discussing labor migration at all.

Faced with a housing crisis — caused by a decade of stimulating property speculation, a rising number of single-person households, and a lack of building to keep up with population growth — views have polarized around immigration. Wilders blames the asylum seekers, who get priority for 7% of new social homes if they get a residency permit; Dutch media and progressive Amsterdam politicians criticize “rich” expat workers, who buy 1.5% of houses nationally.

Today’s election, therefore, is a turning point: will a centrist coalition (excluding Wilders) form an effective government in the 150-seat parliament, build affordable housing, solve an environmental crisis around excess nitrogen compounds and address affordability? Or will dissatisfaction only grow among disaffected voters, especially since the main parties have now erected a cordon sanitaire against the controversial, anti-Islam Wilders?

Certainly, Wilders manages to inspire a level of loyalty rarely seen in other parties, in this fragmented political culture.“Being a freedom party voter becomes a social identity, it becomes who you are,” says Bert Bakker, who studies political communication at the University of Amsterdam. “And just as supporters of Ajax [football club] remain loyal to the team even though it’s going through terrible periods of management, regardless of government, a core of the Freedom Party supporters will stay loyal.”

The fact that Wilders has not succeeded in government; that many of his ministers were accused of incompetence; and indeed that he walked away within 11 months, does not, Bakker says, matter to them. “We live in a very fragmented country,” he continues. “There’s just a strong group of voters who feel the country is moving in the wrong direction. And that a lot of that is tied to [beliefs about] migration and/or corrupt elites — that’s the populist part of it.”

People at the event on Saturday tell me Wilders truly hears their concerns. “He is going to save our country — I hope so,” says Astrid Arnold Harmsen, a special-needs assistant who hands Wilders a hand-written letter. “There’s a lot going wrong here. It’s impossible to get social housing, children can’t get a home, immigration is too high and we do too much for foreign [countries] instead of for ourselves.”

Do they have a point? While the Netherlands scores well on income equality — probably due to high income tax — wealth is spread far more unevenly. The richest 10% hold more than half of the assets, and a decade of housing-market stimulus has doubled prices: Europe’s second highest increase in the price-income ratio. Homeowners, 57% of households, still receive €11.2 billion in mortgage interest relief, while 17,000 more people are paper millionaires as property values soar.

The extent to which such problems are the fault of immigration, however, is open to debate. The UN special rapporteur on the right to housing last year said that foreigners were not responsible for the country’s general housing crisis. Steije Hofhuis, a postdoctoral researcher on migration at the Berlin Social Science Center, points out that settled asylum seekers take up just 12% of new social housing stock — if you don’t count people who have moved from one social home to another — while it has not been acceptable to talk about the “broken” asylum system, or neighborhood cultural issues in recent years.

No less important, while the Netherlands still has a comparatively high stock of social housing, the “free” private rental market is small and expensive. With a shortage of some 400,000 homes, that’s hardly surprising. This has downstream effects too, with surveys indicating a social divide between those with academic and vocational educations, even as the latter are not well represented in councils and parliament.

Wilders, in Hofhuis’ view, has no interest in solving these issues. “I’m afraid it’s a somewhat cynical model of Wilders,” he says, “and I do find it genuinely interesting why so many people are so eager to vote for him when it is so clear he’s not interested in solving any problem.” “I think the level of anger is just huge and he, of course, has a vocabulary that appeals to that and worsens it.”

Wilders’ offensive style does not preclude him from winning votes, even though he has a conviction for insulting Dutch Moroccans and proposes anti-constitutional laws and policies on Islam.

What might prove more damaging for Wilders, rather, is something as banal as the weather. “If the turnout of the voters is high, it’s likely that the PVV will profit from that,” explains Bart Koenen, senior researcher at the Verian polling research center. “There are a lot of PVV voters who, in reality, when it’s bad weather on Wednesday, look outside and say: ‘Oh no, I’m not going to vote.’ [Wilders is] very aware of the fact that he has to mobilize a lot of people who haven’t got that much confidence in democracy.”

The Netherlands’ longest-serving MP faces other challenges too. The Christian Democratic Appeal leader Henri Bontenbal has had a dramatic rise in the polls, with a message of competence and common decency. Young and dynamic D66 liberal democrat leader Rob Jetten looks to be enjoying a last-minute boost with a “yes, we can” (Het kan wél) campaign that also takes on issues around immigration, proposing to limit sectors with a high demand for low-paid labor, while giving refugees, who have a good chance of winning asylum, the opportunity to have language lessons and work from day one. Together with the PVV and GreenLeft-Labour, they are vying closely for first and second place.

At a campaign event in Amsterdam on Sunday, D66 supporter Henri de Haan says the Netherlands could represent a new dawn for European centrism, after the failures of the far-Right in government. “You see nationalism in France, Belgium, Germany, England,” he suggests. “Parties that play on these feelings. I think that in the Netherlands we are a bit ahead because we have seen that an extreme Right, divisive party, [the] PVV has exploited those feelings to win votes, they were the largest, they were in government and they have achieved precisely nothing.”

But in the meantime, says Koenen, it has become “more socially acceptable” to be far-Right. A recent anti-immigration demonstration in The Hague is a case in point: despite descending into violence, many protesters failed to cover their faces.

All the while, Koenen suggests that politicians across the European Union will be looking closely at the Dutch results. “It’s the first,” he says, referring to the fact that the Dutch, ahead of other European countries, will go to the polls to judge the success of the far-Right at the heart of power. “I think that there will be a change, that people will choose the middle parties, the center parties. But it doesn’t lead to less voting for the PVV.”

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