The deep distrust towards Geert Wilders, unexpected winner of the November legislative elections 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 is he 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 NSC party, led the insider, 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 mere WhatsApp message and did not first warn the rest of the parties. involved in the contacts.
The current leader of the liberals (VVD), Dilan Yesilgoz, had already said that she does not want to participate in a coalition led by Wilders although she declares herself 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 curbing immigration, won 20 seats – the far-right leader cannot even manage to govern in minority. Today, he only has one potential government 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 sort of technical executive, à la Italian, in which there could be ministers with no direct relationship with the political parties that support him. Exploring the possibilities of such an agreement is part of the mandate that the Dutch Parliament has given to the new informant, Kim Putters, to pave the way for the formation of a government. You have four weeks to offer results.
Unlike what happens in neighboring Belgium, where at the federal level there is a cordon sanitaire that prevents parties from relying on the extreme right to form coalitions, in the Netherlands the legitimacy of possible pacts with Wilders is not questioned, a politician defined by his rejection of Islam, immigration and Europe. Another thing is that they want to assume 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 in two years.
Many of Wilders' electoral proposals raise serious questions of unconstitutionality and the public statements he has made to date at the request of his potential government partners to show his desire for moderation have not been forceful enough. Although he has withdrawn three legislative proposals, presented in 2018, that proposed “banning Islamic expressions”, closing mosques and banning the niqab, none of them had any signs of being tested and the gesture did not provoke major political movements.
But Wilders may have seen the wolf's ears. This week, as his dream four-party system crumbled and his chances of being prime minister receded, Wilders referred for the first time to Islam as “a religion,” not a “totalitarian ideology.” The gesture has been interpreted as a concession given that the issue is part of the DNA of his party. And yesterday, after learning of the death of the Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, Wilders described the Kremlin as a “barbaric regime”, when he has never stopped cultivating ties with Vladimir Putin's Russia, not even after the downing of the MH17 plane.
The previous Dutch executive took almost a year to come together and no one expected that after the November 22 elections this would be a simple process. The new informant, Putters, a former Labor senator nominated at the request of Wilders, is going to speak again with the three parties that have so far negotiated with him about what government formula they could support and will test all the formations with a parliamentary presence to identify possible meeting points.
With a traditional government agreement, the political use in the Netherlands, as in Germany, is to agree on the destination 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 may feel freer to agree on a program of common priorities. In reality, there are hardly any precedents for formulas of this type 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 have to share our responsibilities,” he added. This is, today, the only theoretical alternative that is being talked about, other than ceding the initiative to the progressives, and it is likely that the political situation will not change much: the popularity of the far-right has only grown since November .
