On the day of Donald Trump’s election, I happened to be in Amsterdam. That night, while people in the U.S. were still going to the polls, I found myself sitting in front of a room full of nervous-looking Europeans at Paradiso, which is normally a music venue, taking part in a public panel discussion about what was happening across the ocean. One of the other panelists was Ruth Oldenziel, a Dutch professor at Eindhoven University and a highly regarded America watcher. Although I am American, I have no doubt that Oldenziel knows more about the inner workings of the U.S. political system than I do, so it was with some relief that I heard her declaim, regarding Hillary Clinton and the building fear of a Trump upset, “Don’t worry—she’s got this.”
Now that we are on the eve of a Dutch election that many see as a test of whether European nations will follow the U.S. in handing power to nationalistic demagogues, I thought it only fitting to check back with Oldenziel. This time she was circumspect. “We are all worried,” she said.
The issue at hand is the possibility of Geert Wilders winning the Dutch national election, on March 15th. Wilders is sometimes called the Dutch Donald Trump. His anti-Muslim stridency is explicit and extreme. (He wants to ban the Koran and close mosques.) He tweets with abandon. His rhetoric—“left wing elitist losers,” “Moroccan scum”—is positively Trumpian. He even matches Trump in having a wacky hairdo and a wife of Eastern European origin.
But Wilders differs from Trump in important ways. He is more focussed, more ideological, and, though he would be loath to agree, an insider, having been in politics since 1997. Wilders used to be a backbencher of the V.V.D., the Dutch liberal party (which is currently in power). His political heroes include Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Sensing irritation in the electorate with the way his country’s leaders had embraced the E.U. and opened its borders, he shifted hard to the right, breaking away from the V.V.D., in 2004, and forming his own party, the Freedom Party. He has attracted millions of followers with his radically anti-Islam message and his open antipathy toward the E.U. and the ruling élite in Europe.
Because he is more ideological than Trump, Wilders could in a way represent something more dangerous. Where Trump could go down in history as a one-off, an erratic showman who rose by pulling a few ideas from the anti-establishment populists, Wilders might more truly represent a rising global menace.
People in Dutch media and political circles have for a long while now simultaneously taken Wilders seriously and treated him like a crazy uncle. While they realize that he represents a huge unhappiness with the system, they do not think he could become Prime Minister. But after Trump’s victory, Oldenziel told me, the “usual smugness” the Dutch chattering classes have toward American forms of lunacy (gun policy, for example) is gone. People seem to realize that it could happen there as well. Wilders’s party is neck and neck with the V.V.D. in the latest polls. And, if Wilders wins, that presumably would add momentum to the campaigns of anti-immigrant far-right movements around Europe. But will he win?
Two points. One is that, while he had been leading in the polls, his support has slipped lately. This is perhaps due in part to the kind of campaign he has run. In the past few weeks he has dropped almost completely out of sight, not, apparently, because of the death threats he is regularly subjected to but as a protest of the process. He communicates mostly via Twitter. Besides the fact that this strategy costs him the face-to-face interactions that voters seem to appreciate, the cuteness of it may be starting to grate. Then, too, his dip in the polls could be Trump-related, as in, “Wait a second, you mean that’s what it would be like here?”
The second and more significant point is that, even if he were to win more votes than the other candidates, it’s unlikely that Wilders would become Prime Minister. The Dutch system has about a dozen political parties. Almost never does one party win an outright majority. (The last time was in 1891.) To govern, a party with a plurality of votes must pull others into a coalition, and ever since Wilders’s rise the other major parties have publicly declared that they would never form a government with him. Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who is seeking reëlection, said last month that there was a “zero per cent” chance that his V.V.D. party would link up with Wilders. Should Wilders win a plurality of votes but be unable to find other parties willing to govern with him, there would likely be a long period, perhaps months, in which specially appointed “informateurs” and “scouts” would try to cajole party leaders toward a coalition. If the other parties continue to honor their pledge to ice out Wilders, he would remain on the sidelines.
I have a feeling that is just fine with Wilders. It’s hard to imagine him thriving in the role of Prime Minister. Like Trump, Wilders is ego-driven. He knows that a Dutch Prime Minister has to tend daily to the minutiae of keeping his coalition together, parsing and debating pension reform, tax changes, deficit reduction, health care, Dutch sovereignty versus the E.U., military spending. Unlike the U.S., the Netherlands is a country built on consensus and collectivism. Its leader can’t make policy by issuing executive orders or simply roll over the opposition but, rather, must slog through the muck of competing ideas with people as diverse as the heads of the Socialists, the Social Democrats, the Christian Union Party, which builds its platform around the teachings of Jesus, and the Party for the Animals.
Ruth Oldenziel told me her optimistic scenario is that the Green-Left Party, which has shown some strength as the more traditional parties waffle over how to deal with Wilders, ends up with enough of the vote to give it a voice in a new government, which could translate, she said, into “the beginning of the countermovement.”
If Wilders comes in first or second, but in either case doesn’t become the next Prime Minister or even part of the governing coalition, he still ends up a winner. In that outcome, he would receive an even bigger megaphone for stirring up anti-establishment and anti-Muslim forces, and could claim injustice at not being given a seat at the table. For him that kind of win might ultimately prove to be smarter than Trump’s. You can do a crazy-uncle routine all day from the sidelines, but doing it from a position of actual leadership, as we are seeing play out before our eyes, gets old very fast.