One of the biggest mistakes I made as a journalist was underestimating Geert Wilders, now leader (and only formal member) of the most voted party in the Netherlands, with the possibility of becoming the first far-right prime minister the country has ever had.
I interviewed Wilders in 2005 for my book, Murder in Amsterdam, about the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist. At that time, the Party for Freedom (PVV), which Wilders founded in 2006, did not yet exist. But I was interested in hearing the ideas of an avowed critic of Islam and immigrants of Muslim origin.
Frankly, I thought he was a bore with no political future and decided not to mention him in my book. Like most, I was struck by his extravagant hairstyle. Why would a mature man, a member of Parliament, want to dye his beautiful dark hair platinum blonde? But in reality it seems that on this issue he has been a kind of precursor. The subsequent triumphs of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson demonstrated the importance of visual differentiation, of having a lunatic image reinforced by a strange hairstyle (Perhaps Hitler’s little mustache or even Napoleon’s bangs were pre-announcements).
But Wilders’ hair allows for another interpretation. In 2009, a Dutch anthropologist and Indonesia expert, Lizzy van Leeuwen, argued that Wilders may have been anxious to hide his Eurasian roots. His maternal grandmother was part Indonesian. His grandparents had had to abandon the Dutch colonies in the East Indies, persecuted for their financial mismanagement.
Of course, using any of this against Wilders would be unfair. The racial issue may have nothing to do with it. But among Eurasians in the aforementioned former Dutch colonies there is a history of far-right anti-Muslim sentiment, which may help put Wilders’ political positions in context.
The Eurasians (or Indians, as they were called) never enjoyed full acceptance from the Indonesians or their Dutch colonial masters. Outsiders were born. It was common for the most educated to yearn to integrate, to become insiders. The result was, many times, aversion to Islam, the majority religion of the Dutch East Indies, and extreme Dutch nationalism.
Many members of the colony’s Dutch Nazi party during the 1930s were of Eurasian descent. As Van Leeuwen points out, the party allowed Indians to be “more Dutch than the Dutch.”
Wilders may not be a fascist, but his obsession with sovereignty, national belonging, and cultural and religious purity has a long relationship with outsiders. Ultranationalists often come from the periphery: Napoleon (Corsica), Stalin (Georgia), Hitler (Austria). Those who long to integrate often become implacable enemies of those who are further from the center than themselves. Wilders is not a rarity, not even in the Netherlands. In 1980, Henry Brookman founded a far-right Dutch Center Party to oppose immigration, particularly Muslim immigration. Brookman was also of Eurasian descent, as was another right-wing politician, Rita Verdonk, who founded the Proud Netherlands party in 2007.
Another politician with whom it may be useful to compare Wilders is the former British home secretary, Suella Braverman. As the daughter of immigrants (doubly outsiders, first as Indians in Africa and then as Afro-Indians in the UK), her animus against immigrants and refugees invading the UK may seem disconcerting. But also in her case, it is possible that her longing to belong has something to do with her political stances.
Braverman’s entry into the British establishment and his rise within the Conservative Party are evidence of the United Kingdom’s greater openness to outsiders. What is not so laudable is that her uncompromising right-wing ideas on immigration have become a normal component of conservative politics, or that white-skinned Tories have had no qualms about using an ambitious daughter of immigrants to promote a xenophobic agenda. (at least, until his inflammatory rhetoric became too embarrassing).
Until relatively recently, ultra-nationalist parties and politicians were marginalized by traditional conservative parties, or dismissed, as happened in 1968 to Enoch Powell, the British politician who predicted that if non-white immigration was not stopped, there would be ” rivers of blood.” They were treated as political outsiders, regardless of their family background.
But that was precisely where, for increasingly disaffected voters, his appeal lay. Brexiteers and Trump took advantage of it in 2016, and Wilders takes advantage of it now.
However, none of this would happen without the cynicism that traditional conservative parties have exhibited in recent decades. Fearful of losing voters to the extreme right, they began to pay homage to their prejudices against “lazy” foreigners, the Muslim threat to “Judeo-Christian values,” the woke culture of big cities, or “people without roots.” But it was mostly rhetoric: conservative parties continued to serve the interests of the rich and big business. This only fueled the rage of those who felt treated as outsiders and longed for an outsider to blow up the old order.
In the past, Dutch conservative parties, for example the Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), have faced this problem by refusing to govern with extremists like Wilders. The VVD also stood in defense of internationalism, the European Union, military support for Ukraine and the fight against climate change. Wilders is opposed to all that.
What changed is that the VVD, hoping to protect its right flank, took a tougher stance on immigration and hinted that it might be possible to govern with angry outsiders after all (a stance they have reversed for the moment, but for how long?). Now that the door was open, and immigration became an electoral issue, Wilders achieved a landslide victory.
The irony in this sad story is that Dilan Ye?ilgöz, the VVD leader who allowed this to happen, was born in Ankara to a Turkish mother and a Kurdish father. She belongs to exactly the class of Dutch citizens that Wilders vowed to eradicate.
Translation: Esteban Flamini Copyright: Project Syndicate,
Ian Buruma es autor de The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II (Penguin Press, 2023).
