- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
The unexpectedly meaty win for controversial, hard-right politician Geert Wilders in Wednesday’s general election in the Netherlands set international headlines on fire.
Right-wing nationalists across Europe rushed to congratulate the populist politician, sometimes dubbed the Dutch Trump - partly for his dyed, bouffant-like hairdo, and partly for his famously firebrand rhetoric.
Geert Wilders’ publicly expressed views - including linking Muslim immigration with terrorism and calling for a ban on mosques and the Quran - are so provocative that he has been under tight police protection since 2004.
Wilders was convicted of inciting discrimination, although later acquitted, and he was refused entry to the UK back in 2009.
But Europe’s far right believes their views have now become more mainstream.
Same thing that’s up with it in the US. They offer simple “solutions” to complex problems, and (at least in the UK and Germany, not sure about the Netherlands) they’re fuelled by right-wing media conglomerates.
That’s indeed also the case in the Netherlands. The use of gross oversimplification for complex problems, but it gets you votes. Too many people fall for it.
But his rhetoric is crazy. It’s filled with racism and hatred and meanwhile he wants to stop funding Ukraine, slash all cultural subsidies, stop climate policies and leave the EU. Idiot.
Also, what a lot of people seem to be missing is that this only works because of rampant hypocrisy among traditional parties. They promise time and again to make life better, to make work pay, to do this and that but they always fail because they’re neoliberals - whether they are lying or just fundamentally wrong doesn’t really matter.
This then allows far right wingers to swoop in and use a lot of the same underlying logic the traditional parties use, but without the hypocrisy. They just need to swap the hypocrisy out for hate towards minority groups.
This is a lot easier than the alternative left wing parties offer, which is fundamentally not aligned with the traditional parties in the West.
I’m Dutch and afaik right-wing media doesn’t play a role. The reason is quite simple, it’s because the previous coalitions lead by the neoliberal VVD have consistently fucked everyone who isn’t rich (and even some who are). Especially the crises that they’ve caused have completely eroded trust in the previously big parties. Some of these issues I’ll lost below.
In the northern province of Groningen houses started getting damaged die to earthquakes caused by government-funded natural gas extraction. The whole country got rich of of this for decades, but when the people of Groningen needed money to repair their homes they sometimes had to fight for years to get anything.
The tax agency started incorrectly marking people as fraudsters for claiming certain benefits, which often put these people in debt for thousands of euros. This has ruined the life’s of hundreds of people, yet the government initially just ignored it. While these people lost everything they had, the government seemed to do everything it could to avoid paying or helping. At some point they did start paying and pretending to help, but for many victims this was simply too little to late.
And then there’s plenty of other issues that erroded trust as well. Years of ignoring “the nitrogen problem” until it was too late and lead to all kinds of issues. The farmers (who are the biggest cause of this issue) suddenly become the target of the government, which they obviously didn’t like. This caused huge protests and the rapid growth of parties like the BBB and probably also the PVV. And there’s also a housing crisis, where buying houses is impossible.
In short: the previous normal coalitions kept fucking up, until people seemingly had enough. There were other alternatives to the PVV, but apparently voting on a right -wing extremist who has all the ideas is easier than voting left-wing for many people here. I hope the damage stays limited, but this is truly a dark day for our country.
I take it you haven’t looked at the Telegraaf or PowNews the last months? They definitely played a role.
Ongehoord Nederland as well
Who does nothing breaks nothing. Don’t be so hard on the left wing parties. Progress requires experimentation, it isn’t always a easy to figure out all the ramifications of a new policy.
Neolibs aren’t leftists and they don’t experiment, unless it’s to find a new way to steal from us and give to the rich.
I’m well aware of that, and far from defending neoliberals. I seriously can’t reconstruct my thought process when i posted this, sorry. But I was defending actual leftists, i wasn’t trying to represent neolibs as leftists. Any chance the original post was edited? Or maybe I just misunderstood something.
Let’s just call them capitalists or conservatives instead of their false branding
Neoliberal is good enough for Chomsky.
I’d say they’d prefer to be called Capitalists, Conservatives (or even Centrists, weirdly)
Yeah true it’s weird that a linguistic expert like Chomsky kind of submits to such manipulation of language
Besides simple solutions, they also offer simple culprits for everything that is bad, where the default is usually some form of immigrant. But green/left activists are also a well-received target. Or the EU.
The same everywhere.
Also, any other party thinks it has to push a neoliberal agenda (except one or two). And, this agenda makes people vote for the far-right at the end.
In the Netherlands, they have the issue with the Mocro mafia and this doesn’t help.