The BBC reports,
The Dutch government has collapsed after Geert Wilders withdrew his far-right party from the governing coalition following a row over migration.
In the European context, “far-right” merely means that the political party opposes mass immigration. The collapse of the Dutch coalition government is yet another in an endless stream of examples of the phenomena that voters prefer conservative government but can’t ever seem to get it.
So, the Netherlands is headed for their third general election in the past four years.
To understand the context of today’s Dutch politics, we need to go back 25 years. In my personal experience, the Dutch as a people are tolerant to a fault, including on the subject of immigration.
For decades, the population of the Netherlands had been 95 percent Dutch and 5 percent “other,” nearly all of which were legacies of the former Dutch colonial empire.
By 2000, the share of the Dutch in the nation’s population had slipped to 91 percent, with the nation now 3 percent Muslim (the plurality of the nation, at the time, being nonreligious).
Enter a man named Pim Fortuyn. Up to this point (age 53), he had been an academic and media figure but got into politics on the single issue of opposing mass immigration. Fortuyn was openly gay and preferred the Netherlands just the way it was. He could see the future and didn’t like it.
Fortuyn entered politics in late 2001. He ran as the head of a new party in the Rotterdam municipal election of March 2002, He was elected to the city council as head of the leading party, which represented a massive shift to the right. He managed to form a conservative-majority government in the Netherlands’ second-largest city.
Fortuyn formed his own party (unimaginatively named Pim Fortuyn List) to run in the general election for national parliament to be held May 15, 2002. Although brand new, public opinion polls immediately indicated that it was one of the most popular in the Netherlands.
On May 6, 2002, Fortuyn was murdered in a parking lot outside of a radio station where he had just sat for an interview. Fortuyn was shot five times in the back at point-blank range.
His murderer was a 32-year-old left-wing environmentalist who wished to prevent Fortuyn from becoming Prime Minister. This being the Netherlands, the killer spent only 12 years in prison.
The national election was held nine days later. Fortuyn’s party, without a leader, finished second overall and subsequently joined a short-lived, right-leaning majority government.
Without their charismatic leader, Pim Fortuyn List quickly faded into obscurity. Another national election was held in 2003, and the party fell from 2nd to 5th place. It won zero seats in the 2006 election and disbanded.
Fortuyn’s legacy lives on in the person of Geert Wilders, now aged 61. As a young politician, Wilders belonged the conventional center-right party named the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (initials, VVD in Dutch). He served in the national House of Representatives under VVD.
In 2004, Wilders formed his own party, now named, confusingly, the Party for Freedom (PVV). In 2006, the party entered Parliament with 9 seats. In 2010, Wilder’s PVV finished in 3rd place and supported a right-leaning coalition government,
PVV’s popularity waxed and waned over the years, but achieved its big breakthrough in 2023, winning the most seats of any party, but short of a majority.
By this time, the demographics of the Netherlands had shifted exactly as Fortuyn had predicted. The Dutch share of the population had fallen from 91 percent to 72 percent, and the Muslim share had doubled from 3 percent to 6 percent. (“No religion” constitutes the majority of the population.)
After the 2023 election, Parliament defied convention and named a technocrat, Dick Schoof, as Prime Minister, rather than Wilders, the head of the largest party. Schoof has led a right-leaning coalition government, including PVV.
Schoof’s government never followed through on promises made to reform immigration laws, leading to today’s collapse.
A new election date has not been set.
