by Jeroen Bouterse
On November 22nd, a far-right party received almost a quarter of the vote in the Dutch national elections, making it by far the largest of the fifteen parties elected to our new Parliament. Whether it will actually get to govern depends on its capacity to form a coalition, but what is certain is that it will take 37 out of 150 seats in the legislature this week; twelve more than the second-largest party.
International media reporting on this landslide all noted what the party and its leader Geert Wilders represented over the last decades: his aggressive attacks on Islam and his slurs on minorities with Islamic country backgrounds, his softness on Putin’s Russia, his resistance to climate measures, and his calls for a ‘Nexit’, to name a few. While Dutch media and (to-be) opposition parties have certainly not ignored these points, they barely played a role in the campaign, and in the initial domestic interpretation of Wilders’ victory.
In that interpretation, the vote for Wilders has to be understood as an anti-establishment vote: the result of general dissatisfaction with a centrist coalition failing to address the problems of the people. The far right won not because of its promises to close mosques, arrange “fewer Moroccans”, cut support to Ukraine, withdraw from the Paris agreement and quit the EU, but more or less in spite of those promises; it won, rather, because of social issues such as a persistent housing crisis.
I will push back against this interpretation later, because I believe it lets the voter off the hook too easily. Aspects of it are clearly true, however.
There has been a large anti-establishment vote in the Netherlands for decades, and it has proven rather mutable. Populist parties have won a significant share of the vote in many national elections since 2002. In 2019 a party arguably to the right of Wilders became the largest party in the Senate. It has subsequently fallen apart, and earlier this year a populist party representing agrarian interests took its place as the largest party. Until a few weeks ago, a newly founded and ostensibly centrist party that was in many ways Wilders’ polar opposite seemed on course to win the November elections.
The point is that, to the extent that voters moved between these parties, not all of them can have been motivated by a deep love for the radical right. In fact, while Wilders’ party was the most durable populist force in the landscape – it has existed for almost two decades now – its best days seemed to be behind it. Support had gradually dwindled to a little over 10% of the vote. Governing parties got used to the dead weight in Parliament, and the public seemed to be paying less attention.
A reason for its apparent decay, we have now learned from a near-perfect political experiment, was its effective isolation by prime minister Mark Rutte. Rutte, as leader of the main right-wing party (the VVD), had sworn never to work with Wilders again, having been severely disappointed when Wilders withdrew his support for Rutte’s first coalition government. This year, the very success of that strategy led to its undoing. Dilan Yesilgöz, Rutte’s successor as VVD leader, sought to bolster the right-wing credentials of her party after years of centrist coalitions. In particular, she decided to demonstrate her seriousness about restricting immigration by lifting the ban on Wilders, whose party seemed less threatening than ever.
This maneuver backfired spectacularly. Rather than gratefully returning to the mainstream right-wing party, many people decided that if a vote for Wilders was not a waste of a ballot anymore, they might as well go for it. The poor campaigns of the other populist parties did most of the rest of the work. The final piece of the puzzle, however – and this brings us to the point where I explain how my dissatisfaction with the political landscape in my country actually gets at something fundamentally wrong with our democratic culture – is the effective way Wilders was able to alter his image.
Minutes after prime minister Rutte announced that he would not seek a next term, Wilders changed his rhetoric, striking a much more conciliatory tone and suggesting that his party was ready to govern responsibly. In the campaign that followed, he proved able to pull this off with very little pushback. The media and the country marveled at the new, softer version of the far-right leader. Its very implausibility after twenty years of political vandalism led to this becoming the primary lens through which he was seen. He had become mild; ‘Geert Milders’, everybody kept saying, with some combination of surprise, irony and amusement. Of course everybody understood the strategy behind the transformation.
Less well understood, or perhaps simply unavoidable, was how little excuse a large part of the electorate needed to switch their vote to a party whose platform still included blatant rights violations such as banning the Quran. In the campaign, Wilders said he was prepared to put his anti-Islamic agenda on hold, and that was that: the very fact that he was working so hard on seeming acceptable proved enough to make him acceptable. It had been decided in advance that a vote for the far right was not, actually, a vote for the far right: even if pundits didn’t take Wilders on his word, a frame now dominated in which a vote for him could be read as an innocent cry for help.
In the run-up to the election, the national debate had centered around cost of living and a housing crisis, the failures of the government, and migration. The problems were easily connected. In particular, all the major parties agreed (though in different tones) that immigration was an unacceptable burden on the country’s resources and services. The national debate over migration became more nuanced than before – politicians found that not only refugees, but also migrant workers and international students take up housing space – but this had the paradoxical effect of making completely mainstream the notion that a migration crisis was going on. Attempts by social scientists and journalists to dispel this myth, or to fact-check alarmist claims about the impact of immigration on demand for housing, did not change this.
National discourse decided that a vote against immigration was not a sign of islamophobia or xenophobia, or even of ill will to refugees, but merely a plea finally to address a root cause of the problems of overburdened Dutch citizens. The change in discourse around migration made it possible to see the far right’s history of resentment against minorities, its cruelty to outsiders, and its undermining of the rule of law as accidental to its anti-immigration credentials. This was a convenient fiction; in fact, those strategies were, and remain, a window upon the ideological structure of the party, and upon the morals and political instincts of its leader and its (small) cadre.
There is an incentive for politicians to interpret a vote not in terms of the party that it brings to power, but in terms of the state of mind of the voter. Rather than admitting that people willingly and knowingly voted for the vision and policies of the opponent, it seems more constructive to theorize that there must be some kind of misunderstanding going on, preferably one that has been rectified by the very election in which it came to light. Their vote for the others was not a final judgment on what the balance of power should be in the next Parliament; rather, it was a signal to the system, and the question is still up for grabs which party gets to interpret that signal. The voter should be taken seriously, but not literally.
I think this is a paternalistic perspective on the meaning of the vote, that cheapens the democratic act. My vote is my vote precisely because its effect is not a matter of interpretation by others: it is simply counted, and the result of the counting results directly in a distribution of seats in Parliament. Though I am always perfectly happy to tell people what I voted, the secret ballot seems to me to embody perfectly the ideal of lay political agency: a union of a completely personal decision and an impersonal effect, abstracted from the incentives and preoccupations of the voter. A vote for a representative body is not a plebiscite, in which I get to be used in a political struggle between existing powers that can alter the meaning of my vote; it is an unambiguous, direct decision about who represents me at all.
Built into concepts like a ‘signal’ or a ‘protest vote’, moreover, is the populist premise of a distinction between the governing elites and the people. This may apply to flawed democracies that exclude new ideas or coalitions from representative government; but in countries where both constitution and practice allow for the easy entry of new parties, it is misplaced. Democracy is self-government, and self-government requires agency. A vote is not just the expression of the desire for things to be better; there has to be some notion, however crude, of why we ought to try to make things better this way rather than that way.
I am not saying that by voting for populists without clear-cut policy proposals rather than for those good-old establishment parties, voters are in fact choosing merely to ‘signal’ their dissatisfaction, discarding their responsibility to make substantive choices. That paternalistic model is only one of the interpretations on the table. The other is the more disturbing: it is that the vote for the far right is at least to some extent literally a democratic vote for its stated agenda of putting ‘Dutch people first’. Everybody has heard Wilders’ various threats to minorities, outsiders, and perceived elites; many, it seems, have calculated that those threats did not affect them, or that empowering the nationalist right might actually give them a leg up.
The interpretive frame of an anti-establishment vote in which those votes have come to be embedded whitewashes or softens these threats. I realize that my darker view is also just one possible interpretation. In a functioning and fair democratic system, however, there is one aspect of an election that cannot be undone through reinterpretation: that is who it brings to power.