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For years, it seems, we’ve talked about the erosion of the “cordon sanitaire” in Western politics. Far-right parties have been making steady inroads into parliaments across Europe. Some factions descended from explicitly neofascist movements. Others embraced a set of extremist views once considered beyond the pale on a continent still largely defined by a 20th-century liberal-democratic consensus, born out of the traumas of World War II. Even as the far right’s vote shares and ranks of elected lawmakers grew, more mainstream parties vowed to never form alliances with them or enable their entry into government.
But in the 21st century, Europe’s far right is firmly ensconced in the mainstream, and reflects political attitudes no longer harbored simply by a fringe minority. The Dutch parliamentary election last week offered the clearest eence yet of the new status quo.
In a shock result, the far-right Freedom Party led by longtime firebrand politico Geert Wilders claimed 37 of the Dutch legislature’s 150 seats, more than doubling its footprint after 2021 elections. Wilders’s faction, known by the Dutch acronym PVV, now is the largest party in parliament and theoretically in position to dictate the fate of the country’s next government. A complicated period of wrangling will follow involving the alphabet soup of parties that comprise the country’s fragmented political landscape, as it’s unclear Wilders can actually cobble together a coalition that would let him take power.
After the vote, Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, the leader of the center-right party of outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, ruled out joining any bloc led by Wilders, but did not foreclose the possibility of supporting a minority government from the sidelines. Frans Timmermans, the former E.U. climate chief now at the head of a center-left Labor-Green alliance that came in second, thinks his faction will end up in the opposition. The last Dutch government took 299 days to form and it’s likely the next one will take longer.
Dutch election shows far right rising and reshaping Europe
The broader signal of the vote is clearer. To Wilders’s far-right and ultranationalist allies elsewhere, the PVV’s success is a confirmation of their centrality. “A new Europe is possible,” declared Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister and, like Wilders, a vocal opponent of immigration.
Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Rally, has spent a generation alongside Wilders battling her way into Europe’s political mainstream and has a significant chance to be France’s next president. She also shares Wilders’s antipathy to the workings of the European Union. The Dutch voters “demonstrate that more and more countries within the European Union are contesting the way it works,” Le Pen said.
“Everywhere in Europe we see the same right-wing wind blowing,” Tom Van Grieken, a Belgian hard-right populist, said after Wilders’s victory. “The advance that has been underway for a while is clearly continuing in the Netherlands. We share our patriotism and want to put our people first again. Nothing can match that motivation.”
The Dutch result comes alongside other political wins for the far right on the continent. “Far-right parties have taken power in Italy, extended their rule in Hungary, earned a coalition role in Finland, become de facto government partners in Sweden, entered Parliament in Greece and made striking gains in regional elections in Austria and Germany,” my colleagues charted, pointing also to recent election results in Slovakia and the entrenched, if not victorious, position of far-right factions in Spain and Poland.
The advance of the far right “has been a trend for a long time, but it seems to be gathering steam,” Catherine Fieschi, a political analyst and fellow at the Robert Schuman Center of the European University Institute in Florence, told The Washington Post.
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That simply may be because voters believe in their appeal more than in the past. “Polling during the campaign showed that Dutch voters were most concerned with health care, integrity in government and economic security,” noted the Economist. “But antipathy towards immigrants was also high on the list. Many Dutch blame immigrants for exacerbating a housing shortage. Almost no parties challenged the consensus.”
“On issues the far right sees as most important in Europe — immigration, crime committed by immigrants, the multicultural society, the western debate on gender, more traditional views on families — many other parties have now adapted to their rhetoric,” Ann-Cathrine Jungar, a political scientist at Sweden’s Södertörn University, told my colleagues. “Far-right parties and their agendas have entered the mainstream. They are the new normal.”
The ability of the far right to break into the castle has always been contingent on the center-right establishment lowering the drawbridge. Rutte, currently the longest-serving Western European head of government, spent more than a decade marginalizing Wilders while also trying to curry favor with Wilders’s supporters. Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, Rutte’s successor, effectively opened the door further this election cycle when she indicated she would be willing to forge a coalition with them — imagining far-right support would help make her prime minister.
Instead, voters animated against migration felt emboldened to pick “the original, not a copy,” as Sarah de Lange, politics professor at the University of Amsterdam, explained to the Financial Times.
“Wilders is perhaps the cleanest example of how mainstream center-right parties can empower the far right,” Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who tracks European politics, told me. “[Yeşilgöz-Zegerius] thought that would make voters who want a more right-wing government rally around her; instead it made Wilders a newly acceptable option for many of those voters, and Wilders jumped on the opportunity by downplaying — but certainly not abandoning — some of his most heinous views.”
Those heinous views include calls to curb Muslim immigration — for which Wilders was once convicted of insulting a racial group — and ban mosques and the Quran. Whatever the extremism of his ideology, the Dutch political ecosystem did little to challenge or undermine it. “After almost 25 years of catering to far-right voters, allegedly to defeat far-right parties, a far-right party is by far the biggest party in parliament,” noted Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde.
And yet, Wilders may not be able to make much of his current gains, given the complexity of building a government with centrist support, or the distinct possibility that a ruling coalition with him at the helm is still a non-starter for many would-be allies. Winning 37 out of 150 seats is a striking result, but not a definitive mandate.
Compare that, as Dave Keating, an American commentator on European affairs, observed, to the United States, “where the far-right bloc within the GOP has roughly the same proportion of seats but is able to oust the speaker and shut down the government. And they very well may take the presidency in a year.”
