Wilders’s Party for Freedom has been on a long ascent, fuelled by poverty and the fear of competition from migration.
His Party for Freedom won 37 seats in the country’s 150-seat legislature, the largest single bloc, well ahead of outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s conservative People’s Party (24 seats) and the left-wing Labour-Green coalition (25 seats).
Wilders has historically been against immigration and is sceptical of European Union influence over national decision-making.
“We will make sure that the Netherlands will be for the Dutch people again. We will restrict the asylum tsunami and migration. People will have more money in their wallet again,” he said at a recent campaign rally.
“The Party for Freedom scored points in both the Dutch and the European Parliament elections in the past but never managed to win any of them. … Its recent landslide victory is a watershed,” George Tzogopoulos, a lecturer at the European Institute in Nice, told media.
What does Wilders stand for?
Anti-Islam and anti-EU rhetoric are historically the main elements in Wilders’s agenda. This proved too marginal for Dutch public opinion when he became the spokesperson for the People’s Party in 2002, and he was dismissed from the post.
Anti-Muslim sentiment rose in the country after filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed in 2004. His film Submission depicted Islam as a religion that encouraged violence against women. The attacker, Mohammed Bouyeri, was a second-generation Dutch Moroccan. The Guardian newspaper called the incident “the murder that shattered Holland’s liberal dream”.
Wilders formed a new party that year, and renamed it the Party for Freedom (VVD) in 2006. He has since argued the Netherlands should revoke the permits of Syrians and ban the Koran.
“His party platform has argued that migration has weakened the Netherlands,” Angeliki Dimitriadi, who heads the migration programme at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, told media.
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