Wilders gives Dutch politics a roller-coaster ride

The final debate of the parliamentary season continued deep into the night in the Dutch Lower House on Thursday, ending a roller coaster year for The Hague. When MPs return from their summer recess it will be election time. But for the next several weeks they can relax and try to forget some of the ugliest politics the Netherlands has seen in a long time.
Most of the drama began, and ended, with the role of Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party, the PVV.
‘Never before have I been stabbed in the back so many times,’ Wilders said after two MPs loudly left the party this week. The MPs, Marcial Hernandez and Wim Kortenoeven, blamed Wilders’ autocratic leadership style. Their move overshadowed Geert Wilders’ presentation of the new PVV manifesto for the elections this coming September.
Accident prone
It was the latest in a series of crises in Dutch politics this year, all of which were centred on the PVV, the party that in September 2010 agreed to lend parliamentary support to the minority coalition of Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s conservative VVD and the Christian Democrats.
First the PVV caused a stir by opening a website for complaints about Eastern European migrants in the Netherlands. That drew criticism from the European Union and the business community, who said the party was promoting discrimination and damaging trade ties.
Mutiny
The PVV seemed to come through the controversy unscathed until prominent MP Hero Brinkman left the party, blaming the anti-migrant website, negative rhetoric about Islam and Wilders top-down leadership. Brinkman’s departure sparked off a series of lower-level mutinies by PVV politicians at provincial level.
Meanwhile, Wilders was behind closed doors with the coalition partners, trying to agree on 14 billion euros of additional spending cuts. But just as an agreement seemed within reach after seven difficult weeks, the PVV leader pulled out, causing the talks to collapse. Wilders tried to spin the story, making himself look like the hero of the little man threatened by austerity measures.
On the backfoot
But then Finance Minister Kees Jan de Jager, a Christian Democrat, pulled off a shocker. He nudged a colourful combination of leftwing, rightwing and moderate parties into a historic budget agreement that restored fiscal discipline. With new elections coming up in September, the PVV was on the defensive.
With a new election manifesto, Wilders wanted to recapture the initiative. Not Islam, but Europe was to be the boogeyman his voters should be angry at. That would get them out to the polls, he must have thought. But instead of a triumphant Wilders, it was a disgruntled pair of MPs who dominated the evening news this week.
Ever since, there has been a rapid succession of negative media coverage about the PVV. One MP reportedly proposed lowering the temperature in prison cells to make life less pleasant for inmates. A provincial representative of the PVV was found dead in the woods – a suspected suicide after his wife was arrested for large-scale fraud. And to put the icing on the cake, another former PVV representative was exposed for actively posting on an extreme rightwing website for several years.
Party faithful
The political season is over and you could say the PVV went out with a bang. They’re probably not as big a factor as they were two years ago when they put Mark Rutte in the saddle. But it’s too early to write them off. The latest polls predict the party’s voters will remain overwhelmingly faithful to Geert Wilders.