The unexpectedly meaty win for controversial, hard-right politician Geert Wilders in Wednesday’s general election in the Netherlands set international headlines on fire.
Right-wing nationalists across Europe rushed to congratulate the populist politician, sometimes dubbed the Dutch Trump - partly for his dyed, bouffant-like hairdo, and partly for his famously firebrand rhetoric.
Geert Wilders’ publicly expressed views - including linking Muslim immigration with terrorism and calling for a ban on mosques and the Quran - are so provocative that he has been under tight police protection since 2004.
Wilders was convicted of inciting discrimination, although later acquitted, and he was refused entry to the UK back in 2009.
But Europe’s far right believes their views have now become more mainstream.
That’s indeed also the case in the Netherlands. The use of gross oversimplification for complex problems, but it gets you votes. Too many people fall for it.
But his rhetoric is crazy. It’s filled with racism and hatred and meanwhile he wants to stop funding Ukraine, slash all cultural subsidies, stop climate policies and leave the EU. Idiot.
Also, what a lot of people seem to be missing is that this only works because of rampant hypocrisy among traditional parties. They promise time and again to make life better, to make work pay, to do this and that but they always fail because they’re neoliberals - whether they are lying or just fundamentally wrong doesn’t really matter.
This then allows far right wingers to swoop in and use a lot of the same underlying logic the traditional parties use, but without the hypocrisy. They just need to swap the hypocrisy out for hate towards minority groups.
This is a lot easier than the alternative left wing parties offer, which is fundamentally not aligned with the traditional parties in the West.