Despite the Netherlands’ reputation as one of the world’s leading liberal societies, the holiday season in that country has long been a time when racism reared its ugly head.
In the past, it was the tradition that Sinterklass (Saint Nicholas) would arrive in Holland on the first Saturday after Nov. 11 and begin his travels through the country with his assistants, called Black Peters, often presented in blackface with Afro wigs, who would help Santa know which children were naughty or nice.
This tradition was phased out in recent years because it was rightly seen as racist, a throwback to a 19th century colonialist view of the world. But this year the Dutch are introducing something new and even more odious. They made the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-EU leader of the misleadingly-named Dutch Freedom Party’s Geert Wilders the big winner in national elections this past Wednesday.
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Wilders, a fixture in Dutch politics for a quarter-century, whose bigoted views were too extreme even for the country’s major right-wing party at the turn of this century, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, founded the Party for Freedom in 2006. Wilders has since espoused consistently vile views on Islam.
He has said “I don’t hate Muslims, I hate Islam.” He has called for a ban on the Koran. He has condemned the influx of Muslims from North Africa, the Arab world, and Turkey into Holland. (It is noted here for the record that Saint Nicholas was from what is today, Turkey.)
Wilders has, understandably, been constantly under attack for these views. He has been accused on several occasions of violating laws against hate speech. He was convicted in a 2016 trial but that verdict was later overturned.
Wilders, for the above reasons, as well as his support of right wing leaders like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, and Marine LePen—not to mention his puffy blondish haircut—has been called “the Dutch Donald Trump.”
That alone should chill the blood of Americans seeking to understand the significance of the Dutch election results. After all, one Trump seems too many, and many international observers were already reeling from the recent election of Javier Milei as President of Argentina, an unhinged former tantric-sex instructor, with a pack of cloned dogs, a desire to tear down the Argentine government, and another really bad haircut who has also been likened to an Argentine Donald Trump.
Fortunately, as repulsive as Wilders views are—and as disturbing are his policy ideas like pulling out of the EU, blocking further aid to Ukraine, and stopping all grants of asylum—the Netherlands has a parliamentary system and although Wilders finished first with 37 of the 150 seats in the lower house of the country’s bicameral legislature.
The Green Left-Labor Party alliance finished second with 25 seats and the Party for Freedom and Democracy looks like it will end up with 24 seats. This means that while it is certain Wilders will play a significant role in the parliament, he is not guaranteed the ability to form a coalition large enough to make him prime minister. Even if he did, he would have to bring in other parties that would force him to moderate his views. (Sound appealing right about now, America?)
Nonetheless, Wilders’ victory is certain to push Dutch policies rightward. More importantly, it sends an encouraging message to Europe’s right-wing in the wake of recent victories in Hungary, Italy, and Sweden; surging right-wing groups in Germany, Austria, and France; and important elections to the EU parliament next June.
In The Guardian, the doyenne of France’s right Marine Le Pen was quoted as saying, “more and more countries at the heart of the EU are contesting the way it works… and want us to master immigration, which is seen by many European peoples as massive and totally anarchic today.”
Hungary’s Viktor Orban cheered, “The winds of change are here!”
Other leaders of far-right European parties joined him in a chorus of anti-immigrant, Euro-skeptic, Putin-adjacent huzzahs.
The Financial Times’ Andy Bounds offered a perspective that should also resonate with Americans, writing “Following recent opinion polls predicting Donald Trump could return as U.S. president, the Dutch vote again showed a gulf in a developed economy between better-off city dwellers and rural voters worried about rising immigration and declining public services.”
It will likely take months before the next Dutch government takes its final shape. Until then, current Prime Minister (and front-runner to be the next head of NATO) Mark Rutte will manage an interim government.
No matter for Europe’s far-right. They clearly feel those winds of change (to which Orban referred) are at their backs, and that their future looks bright. For them, Sinterklass has delivered a big present prior to the usual day he delivers them in the Netherlands, on Dec. 5, St. Nicholas Eve.
While references to “Zwarte Pieten”—Black Peters—have rightfully been largely phased out in recent years, the tradition that they would put bad children in sacks and send them out of the country now has to be seen in a disturbing new light.
The old stories had it that those children were sent off to Spain. If the new top man in Dutch politics has his way, deportations could become more systematic—and based less on the behavior of those being sent out of the country and more on the twisted racial and religious prejudices of that country’s right-wing and its newly empowered leader.
