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There are three basic ways of being a nationalist leader. One is maximalism: you break all constraints and govern as you like. That’s where Donald Trump is headed. Few European systems allow scope for Trumpian maximalism, but Viktor Orbán in Hungary has got close. The second way is compromise: you moderate in government, like Giorgia Meloni in Italy. She works with other parties, follows sensible economic policies, acts like a good European and quietly increases legal immigration.
We’re about to see the third route in the country where I grew up, the Netherlands, which holds elections on Wednesday. The far-right leader Geert Wilders is returning to his default role: setting the country’s political agenda from opposition. His PVV party is leaving government having failed to compromise. Polls predict it will remain the biggest party, winning a fifth of the vote, but Wilders will let the shrunken mainstream parties try to cobble together a coalition. He’ll return to dominating the debate. By shouting at the Dutch system, Wilders moves it rightwards. His fellow shouters, Nigel Farage and France’s far right, will watch but with ambitions to graduate: they are working out whether to be a Trump or Meloni.
Wilders, already sporting his blond Mozartian mane, founded the PVV in 2006. He has long proposed banning the Koran and still lives under police protection after death threats. He always seemed happiest in opposition. A controversialist in a dull political culture, he got so much publicity that his issues topped the national agenda. Most rival parties seemed to accept his assumption that the biggest threat to a country below sea level comes from would-be refugees (44,054 last year), rather than from, say, climate change. “Wilders isn’t in the game of solving problems. His game is making problems, and putting them on the agenda,” says Catherine de Vries, a Dutch political scientist at Milan’s Bocconi University.
In the 2023 elections, Wilders made his first bid to join government. Recasting himself as a compromiser, he offered to put his Islamophobia “on ice”. The PVV became the largest party in the most rightwing Dutch government in history. But in June it pulled out. Wilders had encountered the constraints that bind most European far-right parties in government: coalition partners, European and national laws, and in many cases the national debts that stop them from achieving populist utopia.
Much as Wilders rails against laws, Dutch governments still respect them. His asylum minister, Marjolein Faber, had a cunning plan: request a Dutch exemption from the EU’s asylum rules. When Brussels predictably said no at once, Faber was stumped. The government accomplished almost nothing. The far-right AfD in Germany, another legalistic coalition country, would face similar constraints if it ever ruled.
Wilders can’t compromise, notes de Vries. He’s isolated by life experience and personality, whereas Meloni is a sociable careerist. But he continues to shape debate. He’s the most discussed Dutch politician on TV. Asylum is a central election issue. Political violence reinforces his influence. Last month, far-right demonstrators in The Hague, some making Nazi salutes, attacked the offices of the liberal D66 party. The justice minister of the centre-right VVD party initially refused to identify them as “neo-Nazi”, even though the salutes felt like a clue.
The VVD is terrified of upsetting rightwing voters. That strategy has failed: the VVD and other rightist parties who governed with the PVV, following its agenda, have tumbled in polls. It turns out that when everyone competes on the far right’s turf of immigration, the far right wins. Too late, the VVD now rules out governing with Wilders again and is pivoting to economic issues.
How might the French and British populist right govern? Both would face constraints from markets, which are reluctant to lend to these indebted states. But otherwise, French presidents and British prime ministers with parliamentary majorities have more unchecked power than any Dutch politician. France, unlike the Netherlands, might be big enough to push the EU to change its rules on asylum and human rights. If Jordan Bardella becomes French president in 2027, he might follow sensible economic policies while going more Trumpian on immigration.
So, too, Farage from 2029, perhaps in coalition with the increasingly Faragist Tories. He shares Trump’s contempt for institutions. He’d be unbound by European law. He might make the leap that Wilders couldn’t, from agenda-setter to Trumpian maximalist.
Email Simon at simon.kuper@ft.com
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