The number of reports of discrimination increased by thirty percent last year, according to the police. Right-wing extremist groups “promoted their ideas and hatred against minorities more openly in 2023,” according to the AIVD’s annual report, while “in the right-wing terrorist movement” the “admiration for violence” increased.
You read it and thought: the country could use some authoritative politicians – the Johan Remkes type, the Els Borst type, the Lodewijk Asscher type – to moderate social overheating.
The leader of the largest party, Geert Wilders, wanted little to do with moderation. He decided to criminalize the leader of the second party, Frans Timmermans, by reporting him for sedition – which the GL-PvdA leader clearly had no aspirations for.
Many media thought the declaration was news, I thought of previous declarations by the PVV leader. 2017: report against “the criminal” Mark Rutte. 2017: complaint against a GroenLinks activist. 2018: complaint against Denk. 2019: complaint against members of the Public Prosecution Service. All dismissed.
And if you took a look at the archives, you knew that PVV members also saw the nonsense of such a declaration years ago. Martin Bosma (PVV), now Speaker of the House, against PowNed, 2017: “I don’t think it is appropriate for a parliamentarian to go to the police. Only if you are threatened or if your home has been broken into. […] Moreover, the Public Prosecution Service is really not going to do anything with it.”
Still, the https://twitter.com/casmudde/status/1782902542764048709?s=46&%3Bt=Tm2MfcEyA72KdrwVnCZ17Q some reporters don’t really like me. The Netherlands is a consensus country and journalists from The Hague are part of that culture: they tend to give the largest party more importance when weighing the facts.
You see this all the time now. The police discrimination report shows that discrimination based on origin is by far the largest category, that the number of (distressing) complaints about anti-Semitism is growing, and that Muslims experience the same in smaller (registered) numbers.
The day after the elections, an 11-year-old girl at her school hears: “You shitty Muslim with your picnic cloth.” A Jewish woman has an Israeli flag hanging on her house and posters of Hamas hostages in the window. A motorist: “Cancer Jew, your windows are going out tonight.” This is now the Netherlands.
Rob Oudkerk, really?
Yet the attention paid to anti-Semitism in politics and professional media is considerably greater than that for the much larger category (discrimination based on origin). A smaller category (Muslim discrimination) remains virtually undiscussed.
It is true that the debate in GL-PvdA about the war in Gaza has painful slip-ups, with which that party more or less orders attention. Although I don’t know whether the constant presence on television about this of former Amsterdam councilor Rob Oudkerk is such a fortunate choice.
You don’t wish him any anti-Semitic misery, but the reality is: you can hardly attribute to him sensitivity in dealing with discrimination. When the country was introduced to the term ‘shitty Moroccans’ in 2002, the sender was not Pim Fortuyn or the LPF – it was Oudkerk of the PvdA.
At the same time, the attention to anti-Semitism in GL-PvdA is also a curious case of selectivity. Consider the recent upsurge of anti-Semitism in Europe, and you find yourself on a different flank.
Take Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, https://twitter.com/geertwilderspvv/status/1289123010134278145 by Wilders. In 2022, a close adviser resigns after Orbán gives “a pure Nazi speech,” she says, which “even Joseph Goebbels” would have appreciated. The speech for Hungarian speakers in Romania is aimed at the mixing of “European and non-European races”, according to the NOS. It reminds the International Auschwitz Committee “of the dark times of our own exclusion and persecution.”
And sketched six months ago The Guardian that Orbán’s government is using the images of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Alex Soros, the son of George Soros, the Jewish investor who was Orbán’s favorite opponent for years, in an anti-EU billboard campaign. The name Soros has been used by Orbán for years to keep “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories” in the air, according to the EU director of the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith International.
Wilders’ Western European allies Marine Le Pen and Filip Dewinter also have their past. In 2017, Marine Le Pen’s temporary replacement as party chairman had to leave when it turned out that he had previously downplayed the Holocaust.
And Filip Dewinter will be drinking beer at an event in Aalst in 2020, where, according to the New Israelite Weekly is full of “anti-Semitic stereotypes”.
Editor-in-chief Esther Voet writes: “Dear Geert and Thierry [Baudet]If you had a moral compass, you would have condemned this blatant expression of anti-Semitism in Aalst. All other political quarters spoke of what was going on there as a shame. But you remained silent, […] because these kinds of sentiments are also rampant among the supporters of the PVV and FvD.”
Fighting democracy
Because imagine if someone had known this week, after that declaration, of Wilders’ contribution to one of the first corona debates, shortly after the outbreak in the Netherlands in 2020. The cabinet, surprised by the pandemic, is looking for knowledge and a sensible approach. Wilders knows everything for sure: there must be a strict lockdown, following the Chinese example (which later turns out to be a disastrous strategy). Prime Minister Mark Rutte rejects this. “I blame you for that,” says Wilders. „That is experimenting with human livesand that doesn’t do you any good.”
Blaming an insecure cabinet for deaths that you know will come: if you can even do that, then criminalizing an opposition leader is of course a small thing.
The silence of NSC and VVD about that declaration this week was telling. You understand: they do not want to burden complicated discussions with public recriminations, so that everything becomes even more complicated.
An attitude that suggests that consensus democracy can continue, while Wilders is already making the transition to a fighting democracy with that declaration. It is not mutual understanding or joint agreements that are decisive. Everything then revolves around the hard public fight – on all topics, between all parties, all year round.
No one knows where this will end – but anyone who reads the AIVD annual report about the hatred and desires for violence in the extreme right can hardly ignore the fact that it would be quite a risk.
To share
Email the editor
