When the new Prime Minister Dick Schoof and his cabinet stand next to King Willem-Alexander on the steps of Noordeinde Palace next week, Dutch politics will experience three firsts: for the first time there will be a government with Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party; for the first time there will be a cabinet without the top candidates of the coalition parties; for the first time since 1945 there will be a non-party head of government.
And that’s how it happened. Geert Wilders clearly won the parliamentary election last November. Three parties were prepared to implement the voters’ mandate for a bourgeois-right conservative policy and to form a coalition with Wilders: the right-wing liberals of the outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, the Christian Social NSC and the Farmers’ Citizens’ Movement. However, this was on the condition that Wilders did not become Prime Minister. In the past, he has positioned himself too radically to be an integrative Prime Minister for all Dutch people.
To make it easier for him to give up the office, the top candidates of the three other coalition parties also declared that they would not join the new cabinet. In the search for a non-partisan prime minister, they agreed on the respected top civil servant Dick Schoof, a member of the Social Democrats until 2020 and most recently head of the Dutch secret service.
The central theme of the government’s program is “the strictest asylum policy of all time,” as Wilders says. In addition, the previous government’s ambitious environmental plans to reduce CO₂ will be ended, livestock farmers will no longer be threatened with closures, the speed limit on motorways will be 130 instead of 100, and there will be cuts in state-funded television.
Is the new “Schoof Cabinet” by Wilders’ grace now a “breaking of taboos”, as some media in Germany wrote? No. It is the late consequence of the tectonic shifts in the political landscape of the Netherlands that were triggered when the sociology professor and publicist Pim Fortuyn entered politics in 2001.
He had become known nationwide because, in his books and columns, he was the first to dare to break with the Dutch culture of consensus and to openly address those problems that worried many citizens but which were either denied or downplayed by an elite in The Hague concerned with political correctness: parallel societies, crime, neglect of public spaces, the defenseless state.
Pim Fortuyn called Islam “a backward culture” that was incompatible with modern values. There is an interview on YouTube from 2001 that director Theo van Gogh conducted with Fortuyn. In it, they also talk about the threat posed by radical opponents. “I’m not a fearful person,” says Fortuyn, smiling and smoking his cigar. And van Gogh jokes: “I’ll live to be 87 – unless I go to Islamist heaven first.”
Three years later, both were dead. Pim Fortuyn was shot dead in 2002 after a television appearance in Hilversum by an environmental activist who saw the polarizing politician as “a threat to coexistence.” Theo van Gogh was slaughtered with a knife in 2004 by a supposedly well-integrated Dutchman of Moroccan origin – as “punishment” for the Islam-critical film “Submission,” which the director had released with the Somali Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
These murders plunged the Netherlands into an identity crisis, the consequences of which continue to this day. How could something like this have happened in their peaceful, tolerant model democracy? Where did this hatred come from? Had people been too lenient with the enemies of the open society?
Pim Fortuyn, a homosexual dandy and intellectual, had taken his hometown of Rotterdam by storm, but did not live to see his party’s greatest triumph: Shortly after the assassination attempt, it became the second strongest faction in the 2002 parliamentary elections and briefly co-governed the country. But the now headless party soon fell apart in disputes.
But Fortuyn’s reputation was still so great two years after his death that he received the most votes in the television show “The Greatest Dutchman” together with William of Orange. Unlike many commentators, the citizens recognized that Pim Fortuyn did not want to abolish Dutch liberalism, he wanted to defend it. What’s more, he embodied it.
His murder changed the political landscape. Although the Christian Democratic Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende managed to hold together four governments in changing coalitions, the dominant topic was the rise of the Islam critic Geert Wilders, who adopted and radicalized parts of Fortuyn’s agenda. In 2005, the once pro-European Dutch rejected a new EU treaty. Within a few years, an entire generation of top politicians disappeared.
In 2010, Mark Rutte became the first right-wing liberal to become Prime Minister. He won the election with, among other things, a tough stance on crime and immigration. “Immigrants with few opportunities” could no longer be taken in. With the Christian Democrats decimated, a minority government was formed for the first time since the Second World War, tolerated by Geert Wilders. Parts of Fortuyn’s program had become government policy.
The fact that Wilders ended his toleration just two years later because of a government austerity package was not to his advantage. In the elections over the next ten years, his Freedom Party stagnated at around ten percent. Until the parliamentary election in November last year, where he won 23 percent with a more moderate course and the slogan “Dutch people first again” and became by far the strongest force. Since then, his poll ratings have even continued to rise.
There is no getting around Wilders, even if he won’t be standing next to the king in front of Noordeinde Palace next week.
