It looks like the people might do it again. After the British electorate misled themselves so badly and American voters failed to rotate the Clinton and Bush families for another presidential cycle, the latest fear is that democracy might occur in Holland.
Polls currently show Geert Wilders’s Freedom party almost at level pegging with the governing VVD party, both milling around the 30-seat mark. Questions about when the Dutch became illiberal miss the point that this is a revolt in defence of liberalism rather than against it. The misinterpretation does Dutch voters a serious disservice and fails to acknowledge that the Dutch status quo of recent years — like that in the UK and US — has gone badly wrong.
Douglas Murray and Melle Garschagen discuss the turbulence in Dutch politics:
It is now a decade and a half since the Dutch voted for the party of a genuinely revolutionary figure: Pim Fortuyn. After his 2002 assassination and posthumous victory in the election of that year, Dutch politics struggled to keep up. If they had wanted to ameliorate his vote, politicians could have cut immigration, taken their foot off the eurozone accelerator and listened to the sincere concerns of the Dutch public (concerns shared across the continent, and far from delusional) that they are losing their national identity. It is not as though these were minority, or indeed recent, concerns. Four years ago, polls were showing that two thirds of the Dutch public believed there was ‘enough Islam in the Netherlands’, with just over half wanting a halt on all immigration from Muslim countries.
One of the mysteries of the Dutch political establishment is that they have continuously derided the concerns of the majority as the inexplicable prejudice of a kooky fringe.
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