Populist right takes Holland
The Dutch elections have wider political significance.
Right-wing populist Geert Wilders won a “historic victory” for his Freedom party in last week’s Dutch elections, says Senay Boztas in The Spectator. The “shock” result saw his PVV party top the poll, with a quarter of the vote, more than doubling its representation in Parliament. Wilders declared that the antiimmigration PVV can now “no longer be ignored” and is set to govern. There had been widespread mistrust of the government following a series of scandals under former prime minister Mark Rutte, and anger over immigration, both of which prepared the ground for Wilders’ anti-establishment message.
Tremors across Europe
Wilders may be celebrating, but the election itself really just marks “the end of the beginning”, says Jon Henley in The Guardian. With the PVV still well short of a majority, we can expect “endless horse-trading” as it tries to build a viable coalition to govern. The mainstream right-wing parties who had previously ruled out working with the PVV now say that “the result must be respected”, but “whole swathes” of Wilders’ manifesto are unacceptable to potential coalition partners, or “simply illegal”. Promises include a referendum on leaving the EU and an end to the free movement of EU workers. Wilders has said he is prepared to put his anti-Islam programme “on ice”, but experts say he will “need to go much further” than that.
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Similar forces are at work in the US as huge numbers of asylum seekers cross the southern border, which might well tip “the political balance… to the populist right” there too, says William Galston in The Wall Street Journal. The perceived failure of Joe Biden’s administration to respond to this effectively has created “new fiscal and social pressures across the country” and has divided even his own party. With Republicans “more trusted than Democrats to deal with border security by margins of 20 percentage points or more”, Biden needs to change course if he is to have a chance of being re-elected.
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