http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/a-setback-for-geert-wilders/print/
Last week, even as the Islamic world was erupting in yet another bout of Koran-fueled fury that put the 2006 explosion over the Danish cartoons in the shade, the Dutch electorate, apparently having decided that the clash of civilizations was yesterday’s news, handed Geert Wilders’s Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) , or Freedom Party – the only one of the Netherlands’s several major parties that is seriously critical of Islam and of the country’s current immigration and integration policies – its first setback ever. While the two top parties received about twenty-five percent of the vote apiece, up about five percent from the last election, the PVV got ten percent, down from fifteen. It remains the third largest party, but just barely, with fifteen out of 150 seats in the House of Representatives, while the fourth, fifth, and sixth largest parties will have fifteen, thirteen, and twelve seats respectively.
“For the first time since he founded the PVV in 2004,” reported De Volkskrant on Friday, “Geert Wilders lost an election, and substantially so. How can that be?” The newspaper Trouw claimed to have the answer: “The Netherlands of 2012 is radically changed….the protest vote for the PVV has disappeared.”
On Saturday, I met Wilders’s right-hand man and fellow Member of Parliament, Martin Bosma (48), at a café in Amsterdam, to discuss the election results.
“Rumors of our death are greatly exaggerated,” he said with a tired grin. It had been a long week and he hadn’t had much sleep.
Bosma rejected the idea that the election had been a referendum on immigration – in fact, he pointed out, “immigration was not a subject during the campaign.” The PVV didn’t bring it up, and “if the PVV doesn’t bring up immigration, nobody does.” This time around, with the Euro in what seem like its death throes, the PVV decided to focus its campaign on the EU. Should the Dutch should continue to slavishly follow directives from Brussels which, among other things, compel it to cough up 56 billion euros a year to subsidize Greece and other countries? The PVV said no.
Alas, the Dutch have always been temperamentally conservative, and, as Bosma put it, “leaving the EU feels like an adventure” – a leap into the unknown. (Of course, the EU itself was an “adventure” that was foisted on them, step by step, without their approval; but now it’s the status quo, and Dutch voters are reluctant to reverse it.) And so, on Election Day, the PVV took a dive.
Still, Wilders and Bosma are in it for the long haul. “Ten years from now, everybody will agree with us,” Bosma told me. “At least about the EU. About mass immigration, I don’t know. Maybe they’ll still be in denial.”
This I frankly don’t get. How can so many Dutchmen, at this late date, still be in denial about the reality of Islamic immigration? How – especially – can they be in denial about it at a time when violent mobs are attacking Western embassies in one Muslim capital after another?
Bosma shrugged. “It’s far away,” he said about all the Middle Eastern mayhem. He gestured toward our fellow customers, most of them elite Amsterdam types sipping lattes. “Ask anybody here what they think of Islam. They’ll say that, well, there are rotten apples everywhere.”
“Even after everything that has happened?”
“Yes. They’re deluding themselves. They don’t want to face the truth. Because if you face it, you have to do something about it.”