How “Israel” Won the Dutch Elections

The PVV, the anti-Islam party of parliamentary veteran and avid Israel supporter Geert Wilders, overran the Dutch general election. Wilders’s mega victory, which the polls had not predicted, sent Dutch polite society into turmoil. Still, it has a certain logic, at least in retrospect. The last six weeks of the Dutch election season overlapped with the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and attendant Muslim and leftist protests in Europe and the Netherlands. The public focus on Islamist violence and Islamic culture war issues played into Wilders’s hands.

The fact that Wilders finished first in the election does not mean that he will automatically become prime minister. A government needs a majority or near majority in parliament, so the PVV must form a coalition with other parties. The established and centrist parties have excluded Wilders’s PVV from executive power for seventeen years and may continue to do so despite his electoral success. However, this time, these parties will probably not be able to form a coalition without the PVV. Instead, they are incentivized to go through the motions for months on end, pretending to want to create a new government while blaming each other for its non-formation, after which new elections eventually will have to be called.

But how is it that the PVV could become so much more disruptive to the system during this election cycle? Hamas’s terror and the war in Gaza have brought back some of the old post-9/11 mood, but at a time when most other parties and politicians have long since left that headspace. Wilders’s PVV never left it and is best understood by Americans as a post-9/11 party emerging from the heyday of the War on Terror. The party was founded in 2006 by Wilders, who, in 2004, had split from the right-wing liberal VVD in the Dutch Lower House, accusing the VVD of going too soft on Muslim fundamentalism. Central to the Dutch context was the 2004 jihad-fueled murder of film director Theo van Gogh, a great-grandson of art dealer Theo van Gogh, the brother of painter Vincent van Gogh. The party opposes mass immigration from the Islamic world, wants to minimize or fully annul cultural Islamization, and usually does well electorally when jihadist terrorism is in the news.

Yet the PVV had never before become the largest party, and it was not until the first exit polls on the evening of Election Day, November 22, that it became clear that a landslide had occurred. The PVV had polled on par with three centrist parties until Election Day. However, shocking the political and journalistic establishment, it captured 37 seats out of 150, a quarter of the Dutch lower house. It eclipses GL/PvdA, an alliance between Labor and the Greens, led by Frans Timmermans, the former European Commissioner and architect of the EU’s Green New Deal. His center-left alliance came in a distant second with 25 seats. The right-wing liberal VVD of outgoing prime minister Mark Rutte, now led by Dilan Yeşilgöz, won 24 seats. NSC (New Social Contract), a split-off from the Christian Democratic CDA, gained 20 seats, primarily based on the popularity of its front man, the able parliamentarian Pieter Omtzigt. The other 22 parties that competed in the election remained small or disappeared from the map.

Since its founding in 2006, the PVV has had a reputation for populist demagoguery, which put off the well-educated and made collaborations with other parties difficult. In every election cycle, there were fears on newspaper editorial boards and at universities that the PVV would win first place—but that never happened, and cultural elites’ fear of the PVV at one point seemed ever more self-important and exaggerated. Although the party ended among the major parties in every general election, it had seemed to have run out of steam, lacking significant policy successes, which was partly due to the mediocrity of its top echelon and partly because the party was for its entire existence, excluded from executive power by the established centrist parties. Meanwhile, Islamic terrorism and the Huntingtonian civilizational strife with Islam gradually lost their grip on the public imagination, receiving less attention over the years. Even a deadly Islamist terror attack on a streetcar in Utrecht in 2019 disappeared from the Dutch news after a few days.

But then the old post-9/11 mood, which had seemed moribund, resurfaced as a backlash—a backlash against anti-Israeli media coverage and activism and the attendant anti-Semitism streaming through the West. Like elsewhere, supposed expressions of pro-Palestinian empathy were frequently hijacked by anti-Semites, Islamists, and Hamas apologists. Postcolonial academics at the University of Amsterdam and Ghent University issued public statements excusing Hamas’s anti-Semitic terror attack of October 7, while Jewish events and commemorations, including the Kristallnacht commemoration of November 9, had to be canceled for security reasons. Protesters with black jihadist flags and green Hamas headbands marched through Dutch streets, chanting anti-Semitic slogans. Photos of masked flag-bearers circulated via social media, instilling fear and pushing voters toward Wilders. To many ordinary people, the country seemed unable to defend itself against Islamist and anti-Western interference and blackmail because of the country’s sizable Muslim immigrant communities. Philosopher and essayist Sjoerd van Hoorn observed: “The violent atmosphere of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the slipstream of the war in Gaza has baffled many people. Almost as perplexing is the apparent unwillingness of public authority to act against it and protect people who express their Jewish identity.”

Suddenly, it seems, many Dutch voters remembered their opposition to mass migration from Muslim countries, a topic owned by Geert Wilder. Two weeks before the vote, former labor parliamentarian Jacques Monasch had divined that the elections were centrally “about the preservation of the Netherlands and our civilization, about the takeover of the streets by Islamists and anti-Semites.” Still, many others understood this electoral logic only in retrospect, if at all. Naturally, there is great consternation over the election outcome, especially among journalists and public intellectuals. Historian and public intellectual Kaan Özgök, who describes himself as a “politically orphaned leftist,” mocks those “whiners,” tweeting the morning after the election: “What were those prominent whiners thinking? That all those Islamonazist street parties after October 7 would go electorally unpunished?”

The mainstream media did their utmost to lay down a very different frame. For weeks, Dutch people were buried under an endless stream of news articles suggesting Israel would deliberately kill innocent civilians in Gaza, especially, it seemed, in hospitals. Anyone who has been gullibly reading the mainstream Dutch press for the past two months will have thought that the Israeli army has it out for doctors and patients and is, essentially, waging war against unarmed hospitals, like a Don Quixote fighting windmills, but with human rights violations. So the interpretations Dutch journalists disseminated were, in terms of content, undoubtedly unfavorable to Wilders’s PVV, but they worked to the latter’s advantage via agenda-setting. The coverage shifted attention to Islam and terrorism, and those are topics on which Wilders tends to do well electorally. Mainstream Dutch journalists, on the whole, tried to direct the Dutch audience away from his political interpretations, but the journalistic media, as is typical, were more effective in guiding people’s attention than they were at convincing people to believe X, Y, or Z about what their attention had been directed toward.

By turning to Wilders, the Dutch electorate may seem to be turning inward; for years, progressives’ cliched criticism of Wilders has been that he represents a parochial attempt to close the Netherlands off from the outside world. Nothing is further from the truth. Through Wilders, Dutch politics actually connects to deep inter-civilizational divisions in world geopolitics. Wilders, one of the Netherlands’ most internationally minded politicians, has been a leader in a global anti-Islam alliance reaching from the United States to India. Israel is especially significant to him. A seventeen-year-old Wilders, though non-Jewish, once worked in the West Bank at a moshav farm, a Jewish cooperative agricultural community. As a politician, he maintained a hawkishly pro-Israeli stance. In the party office where he cheered his election victory on November 22, a menorah stands beside a Dutch flag. On social media, some joked that “Israel has won the Dutch elections.” Yet there might be something to that—if, and to the extent that, there is truth to Sam Harris’s eerie hyperbole that, “We are all living in Israel. It’s just that some of us haven’t realized it yet.”

Dr. Eric Hendriks is a Dutch sociologist and Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute (BLA).