The implosion of Geert Wilders He has alienated all of his allies

A common method of intimidation in Dutch gang warfare is to hang an illegal Cobra firework on your opponent’s front door and then run away. The method is not dissimilar to that of greying, far-Right politician Geert Wilders, who, less than a year after his Freedom Party (PVV) joined the government coalition, has just blown it all up.

Yesterday morning, Wilders told the leaders of the three other Right-wing parties in the governing coalition that he was quitting and withdrawing his ministers. Given that his party was the largest in the coalition — which also constitutes the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the farmer-citizen movement (BBB), and the good governance party New Social Contract (NSC) — this was pretty much a death sentence. By the afternoon, Prime Minister Dick Schoof had resigned, saying it was all “unnecessary and irresponsible”: a snap election now looks likely.

Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Wilders and his anti-migration, anti-Islam party. The man often called a “firebrand” has exploded what is likely to be his only shot at Dutch government.

Wilders’ official reason for leaving the coalition was asylum policy. A week ago, he presented a 10-point plan to cut migration; his measures included using the army to police the border and sending home many Syrian refugees. When his fellow coalition leaders refused to add his plans to the coalition deal, instead inviting the PVV asylum minister to submit them as policy proposals in the normal way, he walked out.

Yet the real problem for Wilders is not the asylum numbers — refugee applications halved in the first quarter of this year compared to 2024. It’s that Wilders’ party has been plummeting in the polls. In the 2023 election, his party won 37 of the 150 seats. Now it’s polling neck and neck with the centre-right VVD — another pillar of the governing coalition — though other polls put Frans Timmermans’ GreenLeft/Labour alliance in the lead.

Where, then, is Wilders going wrong? Asylum is normally the golden ticket for the Dutch far-Right: it was the most significant issue in the last election, after a row broke out about a small number of refugees who had priority for social housing during a severe national housing crisis. There were also widespread concerns about asylum centres opening across the country.

But today, the two greatest issues the Dutch think their politicians should be dealing with are the housing crisis and healthcare. Wilders’ poorly thought-through proposals on both have stuttered. His party demanded a rent freeze for social housing in the spring budget, which infuriated housing corporations and private owners, and received the worst possible feedback from the Council of State. It has since been withdrawn. Meanwhile Wilders’ promise of a lower future healthcare “excess”, it turns out, will also mean higher health insurance premiums, which is not exactly a vote winner.

His asylum minister Marjolein Faber has also made a series of missteps — most recently, refusing to sign honours for Dutch volunteers involved with refugees — and has struggled to answer questions on two migration bills: the first would introduce a dual status for political refugees and those fleeing war; the second would limit family reunification.

This experiment in government has revealed the deep inconsistencies in the Freedom Party’s policies and the inexperience of most of its ministers. Wilders is a staunch Thatcherite and yet has a voter base with ties to the Socialist Party. His manifesto is a hotchpotch of measures that claim to help the working class but don’t make economic sense. Despite being a veteran opposition politician, he lacks a vital skill set in a system of proportional representation: he cannot compromise nor build coalitions.

The other three coalition leaders have been talking about Wilders in terms normally used to describe a grumpy toddler. “It is totally irresponsible. It is so childish. I do not think it is worth a voter’s mandate,” said Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, leader of the VVD.

But Wilders’ relationship is even more strained with another coalition party, the NSC, whose popular founder Pieter Omtzigt withdrew from politics last month. Omtzigt, one of the key figures in uncovering a childcare benefits scandal in which some 40,000 parents were incorrectly accused of fraud, created his own Right-wing party on a ticket to promote constitutional rights. To enter into an uneasy coalition with NSC, Wilders, who has a criminal record for insulting Dutch Moroccans, promised to put “on ice” his manifesto’s anti-constitutional measures such as banning mosques, Islamic schools, and the Koran.

Ironically, like Wilders’ Freedom Party, the NSC benefitted from a 2023 protest vote, with many voters apparently wanting to punish a tin-eared elite that seemed to be ignoring the common man. Yet not much progress has been made on the policies on which both were elected. And in the background of this uneasy marriage, the Dutch housing crisis is getting worse, with one in eight houses facing subsidence due to climate change, and signs this week that some schoolchildren are sleeping in garage boxes or in cars after relationship break-ups, due to a lack of housing.

Like many other Dutch protest parties, the NSC and BBB have collapsed in the polls to virtual insignificance. But there are signs that central and Christian parties — traditionally the bedrock of Dutch politics — are recovering their support. Last week, Yeşilgöz-Zegerius hosted British startup Looking for Growth in a campaign-style meeting in Amsterdam’s business district. And the cherub-faced new leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Appeal, Henri Bontenbal, has seen his party’s poll numbers recover during its period in opposition. “What we have seen in the last two years is the evidence why we don’t want [to work with the PVV],” he told Dutch media on Tuesday afternoon. “I see the PVV standing on a platform with autocrats like [Hungarian prime minister Viktor] Orbán, flirting with Donald Trump, ridiculing the press… Especially when the world is so unstable, we should cherish democracy.”

While Wilders might have made world headlines, he has probably given up power for good. Although he told the Dutch press he would be back — “the next time to become prime minister and… make the PVV bigger than ever” — it is unthinkable that he could muster more than 50% of the vote in the splintered Dutch political scene. After this performance, surely nobody will want to go into coalition with him again — and some of his voters, in vox pop interviews yesterday, seemed baffled. The question going forward, as the Netherlands heads into its next election, is whether these fractious political gangs can stop fighting and get on with business.