As the Netherlands gets close to electing a conservative prime minister for the first time in decades, a crucial ally has backed down, threatening his chances.
The Netherlands, along with the rest of Europe, is suffering a demographic crisis. Fewer Dutch citizens give birth, more are aging, and immigrants flood the country in their place. In 2023, about 123,000 Dutch births were barely surpassed by 124,000 Dutch deaths. The immigration rate that same year, however, was over twice as large. The small nation is only growing in population due to mass foreign immigration that has significantly increased in recent years.
The Dutch people grow ever more upset as hostile Muslim immigrants disintegrate their culture and violate their laws. Enter conservative politician Geert Wilders. He has been fighting and warning against the leftist policies destroying the Netherlands for nearly two decades, ever since he formed his Party for Freedom, or PVV, in 2004. Wilders has struggled since then to climb the ladder to popularity due to the constant dominance of the major liberal parties that have controlled the parliament.
However, as the Dutch people grow upset with their leftist government’s unwillingness to do anything about the immigrant crisis in recent years, the PVV has been swiftly catapulted to stardom. In 2021, the party scored third place with 10.1% of the seats in the parliament and stole first place in 2023 with 23.6%. As of Saturday, according to Politico’s aggregate poll, 32% of Dutch voters would support the PVV.
Even with this outstanding lead and the rapidly growing support over the other 14 parties, Wilders still needs to get 76 of the 150 parliamentary seats to rally behind him to become the new prime minister. He was largely hoping to form a coalition government with the centrist New Social Contract, or NSC, the fourth-place party with 12.9% seats.
Wilders’ hopes were threatened on Tuesday when the NSC party leader Pieter Omtzigt abruptly dropped out at a coalition meeting over vague and irrelevant concerns about “public finance.” Given that Wilders’s primary concerns, as well as the hottest topics in Dutch politics, have to do with the effects of mass immigration and European Union membership on Dutch cultural identity, public finance is quite the red herring.
If Wilders cannot pull together enough support in time, then the Netherlands will have to go back to the voting booths for new seats. While the PVV has a good chance of acquiring even more seats than it did last year, there is a chance that the leftist parties will try to form their own coalition to take the prime minister position first.
The Labor Party and GroenLinks and the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, in second and third place with 15.7% and 15.2% of seats, respectively, are likely to take advantage of Wilders’s vulnerability and band together to put their own candidate forward.
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That candidate is likely to be former EU climate chief Frans Timmermans, the man who spearheaded Europe’s Green Agenda to make it “climate-neutral” by 2050 and forcefully “reduce emissions by at least 55%” by 2030 at the expense of the continent’s populace. In 2015, he said that “a society that is exclusively composed of people from one culture” is “a past that never existed.”
European farmers, and especially Dutch farmers who produce the second-largest amount of agricultural products in the world, have expressed their complete abhorrence for Timmermans’s policies since last year by besieging whole cities just to be heard by the EU. If someone like him is elected as prime minister of the Netherlands in its current political climate, the nation’s future cannot feasibly be a very peaceful one.
Parker Miller is a 2024 Washington Examiner winter fellow.