One of Geert Wilders’s favourite tactics is the self-perpetuating falsehood. It works like this. First the Freedom Party (PVV) leader makes a baseless claim supported by a catchy buzzword. An example is the notion that the asylum system is full of young male “testosterone bombs” whose motive for fleeing to the Netherlands is not the threat of war or persecution, but the chance to prey on young white Dutch women.
Next he casts around for any scrap of evidence, such as a report in the Telegraaf about a 33-year-old asylum seeker suspected of attacking a 17-year-old girl in Kampen. In this case the man was eventually convicted of raping, robbing and attempting to drown his victim, and sentenced to 12 years in jail. Any population of young men will, unfortunately, contain a proportion of rapists, but there is no indication here of a crime wave: 85 of the 83,000 people living in asylum accommodation in 2022 were suspected of committing a sexual offence.
Having gathered sufficient kindling, Wilders stokes the fire by asking questions in parliament and proposing headline-grabbing (and legally unfeasible) policies – in this case, handing out pepper spray against “Islamist testosterone bombs”. And as if by magic, a loose collection of anecdotes is transformed into a pressing political issue that the out-of-touch elite are damning themselves by ignoring.
In the same way, since the election campaign Wilders has repeatedly claimed that a coalition of right-wing parties is the only acceptable government, because it’s what “the people” voted for. This bogus argument has been parroted by Dilan Yesilgöz, leader of the Liberal party (VVD) and minor right-wing parties such as JA21, who even had it framed and mounted in a pointless act of parliamentary window-dressing. The purpose is to freeze out a potential alternative coalition led by Frans Timmermans’s left-wing alliance (GroenLinks-PvdA) on the grounds that it would be a betrayal of the electorate.
Yet it’s a charade. Voters don’t elect cabinets in the proportional Dutch system: they choose political parties and give them the responsibility of putting together a government. Any coalition with 50% of the seats in parliament has, by definition, the support of a majority of voters. The decision on which parties to include and which to exclude is made entirely by political leaders in a secretive, largely unaccountable process. A centrist cabinet of GL-PvdA, VVD, NSC and D66 is only impossible for as long as the parties on the right propagate the myth that it is somehow electorally illegitimate.
It is a myth that has been promoted in recent weeks by Wilders as his chances of securing the support of the VVD, Pieter Omtzigt’s NSC and the farmers’ party BBB dwindle by the day. His change of tone in recent weeks betrays a growing anxiety about losing the initiative. Just after Christmas he raised the prospect of new elections unless the other three parties fell in with his demands to cut immigration and taxes while protecting public spending. But since the first round of talks has collapsed, Wilders has shifted his focus to the danger of “letting in Timmermans”. As NSC has plunged in the polls, Omtzigt has become the scapegoat for the PVV leader’s own failings. Omtzigt’s caution has been cast as indecisiveness, his consistent objections portrayed as muddled and opportunistic. But the largest party after an election takes the lead in cabinet formation, so if the baton passes to Timmermans, it will be because Wilders has squandered his advantage.
The fact he is moving into campaign mode and pre-emptively deflecting the blame suggests the negotiations are not going to his liking. So, too, do the increasingly shrill attacks on Timmermans, which look like a scorched-earth strategy to stop the idea of a centrist administration gaining traction. When the GL-PvdA leader argued in a recent speech that the PVV’s admiration for Vladimir Putin and hostility to the European Union were a threat to national security, Wilders retorted that Timmermans would have “blood on his hands” if unspecified, unhinged activists made an attempt on his life. Playing the victim card shows both the strength and the weakness of Wilders’s position. He has no real defence to the charge that his party’s policies undermine the international reputation of the Netherlands. But he can be sure of a receptive audience in the Telegraaf if he insinuates that left-wing plotters, stung into action by his political nemesis, are aiming to put a bullet in his head. (In that context, it seems fair to point out that Frans Timmermans has never inspired anybody to take a semi-automatic rifle to a Norwegian island and gun down 69 people in cold blood.) Wilders’s hopes rest on poisoning the well of public discourse so deeply that if fresh elections are called, voters will forget, in the toxic haze of the campaign, why they were necessary in the first place.
WordsForPress 
