The deep distrust towards Geert Wilders, unexpected winner of the legislative elections in November in the Netherlands, has led this week to the collapse of negotiations to form a government coalition led by the leader of the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) , which won 37 of the 150 seats in the Dutch Parliament.
The abrupt withdrawal from the talks by Pieter Omtzigt, leader of the new center-right party NSC, led the informant, Ronald Plasterk, to throw in the towel. The distance between this formation and Wilders on issues related to the rule of law and public finances is “too wide”, alleged Plasterk, outraged that Omtzigt informed him of his decision through a simple WhatsApp message and not prevent the rest of the parties involved in the contacts beforehand.
The current leader of the Liberals (VVD), Dilan Yesilgoz, had already said that he does not want to participate in a coalition led by Wilders, but declares himself open to giving him parliamentary support. Thus, without Omtzigt – whose platform, NSC, New Social Contract, with a program based on the idea of ??institutional regeneration and the brake on immigration, won 20 seats – the far-right leader cannot manage even for rule in minority. As of now, he only has one potential government partner left, the BBB, the farmers’ party.
Wilders, however, remains well placed to become the next prime minister, although to achieve this he may have to resort to such unusual formulas as the formation of an extra-parliamentary government, a kind of technical executive , in the Italian way, in which there could be ministers with no direct relation to the political parties that support it. Exploring the possibilities of such an agreement is part of the mandate given by the Dutch Parliament to the new rapporteur, Kim Putters, to pave the way for the formation of a government. You have four weeks to deliver results.
Unlike what happens in neighboring Belgium, where at the federal level there is a health cordon that prevents parties from counting on the extreme right to form coalitions, in the Netherlands the legitimacy of possible pacts with Wilders, a definite politician, is not questioned for his rejection of Islam, immigration and Europe. Another thing is that they want to bear the political cost of making him prime minister, especially the Liberals, who in 2010 formed a minority government with their parliamentary support and the experiment collapsed after two years.
Many of Wilders’ electoral proposals raise serious questions of unconstitutionality and the public statements he has made so far at the behest of his potential government partners to show his will for moderation have not been strong enough. Although he has withdrawn three legislative proposals, presented in 2018, which proposed “banning Islamic expressions”, closing mosques and banning the niqab, it did not appear that he had to try any of them and the gesture did not cause major political movements.
But Wilders may have seen the wolf’s ear. This week, as his dream four-party coalition crumbled and his chances of becoming prime minister receded, Wilders referred for the first time to Islam as “a religion”, not as a “totalitarian ideology “. The gesture has been interpreted as a concession considering that the issue is part of the DNA of his party. And yesterday, after news of the death of Russian oppositionist Aleksei Navalny, Wilders called the Kremlin a “barbaric regime”, when he has never stopped cultivating ties with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, not even after the plane MH17 was shot down.
The previous Dutch executive took almost a year to develop and no one expected that this time, after the elections of November 22, it would be a simple process. The new informant, Putters, a former Labor senator proposed at the behest of Wilders, will speak again with the three parties that have so far negotiated with him the government formula that could convince them and will tempt all the formations with a parliamentary presence to identify possible points of encounter
With a traditional government agreement, political usage in the Netherlands, as in Germany, is to agree on the fate of every last euro that is intended to be spent in the four years that the coalition should theoretically last. With a less strict arrangement, on the other hand, the parties can feel freer to agree on a program of common priorities. In reality, there are hardly any precedents for such formulas and some were short-lived. “For my part, all options are on the table,” Wilders said in Parliament on Wednesday. “We must not resort to new elections, we must share our responsibilities”, he added. This is, as of now, the only theoretical alternative being talked about, rather than handing over the initiative to the progressives, and it is unlikely to change the political board much: the popularity of the far-right has only grown since of November
