How the Dutch Stopped Being Decent and Dull

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/opinion/sunday/how-the-dutch-stopped-being-decent-and-dull.html

Version 0 of 1.

In normal times, few people outside the Netherlands would have paid the slightest attention to this week’s Dutch parliamentary elections. In normal times, even people who would have paid attention could have expected yet another solid middle-of-the-road government to be formed by a coalition of parties, usually including Christian or Social Democrats, or business-minded conservatives, led by earnest political managers.

In sum, Dutch politics were decent and dull.

But these are not normal times. Populism is sweeping across the Western world. Populists of the right like Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands are different in some ways, but they have a few important things in common: They despise the European Union and see Muslim immigrants and refugees as an existential threat to national identities — or what some now grandly choose to call “Judeo-Christian civilization.”

What happens in the Netherlands could be a harbinger for other elections in Europe, and this also means that the future of the European Union is at stake. Mr. Wilders, like Ms. Le Pen, has promised to hold a national referendum on membership in the union, and he favors a Dutch version of Brexit. He also wants to close the nation’s borders to Muslims, shut down mosques, deport Muslim citizens who commit a crime and ban the Quran, which he has compared to “Mein Kampf.”

According to recent polls, Mr. Wilders’s Party For Freedom should emerge as the biggest group in Parliament, followed by the conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, known as the V.V.D. For that reason, his views need to be taken seriously. The only reason he may not become the next prime minister, even with a resounding win, is the nature of the Dutch electoral system, which is proportional. As many as 28 parties will compete, from such zany outfits as the Jesus Lives Party and the Party of Non-Voters to the mainstream Christian Democrats and the V.V.D. No party is likely to be large enough to form a government on its own, so the elections will be followed by a period of horse-trading among party leaders. The most viable coalition will win.

Since even the increasingly right-wing V.V.D., headed by the current prime minister, Mark Rutte, has ruled out forming a government with Mr. Wilders, the Party For Freedom’s chances of leading the country are slim. But it is not unthinkable; after all, Mr. Rutte, like most politicians, is quite capable of changing his mind.

Not so long ago, Mr. Wilders would have been regarded as pretty zany himself. He is the only official member of his party, an expedient to ensure control over it. His agitated opinions on immigrants, Islam and the European Union, not to mention his bizarre dyed hair and crass speeches and tweets, would have placed him far outside the mainstream of Dutch society.

The Dutch have long prided themselves on being the most tolerant, most progressive, most enlightened country in the world, a beacon of multiculturalism, a haven for pot smokers, a place where gay equality and the right to euthanasia were championed, and immigrants and refugees from all parts of the world were welcomed. Liberalism became almost a badge of national identity, so much so that Mr. Wilders uses gay rights and gender equality as sticks to beat Muslims by characterizing them as less tolerant.

He is not the first anti-Muslim agitator to do this. At the turn of this century, a dandy named Pim Fortuyn, a politician who had once been a man of the left and was openly gay, emerged with the message that Muslims were a threat to liberal Western values. Outrageously amusing, he said things out loud that many people thought but were afraid to utter. Still, his stated wish to halt Muslim immigration was regarded as so inflammatory in 2002 that his own party, called the Livable Netherlands, rejected him. That same year, Mr. Fortuyn was shot dead by an animal-rights activist who hated his attitudes toward minorities.

The progressive nature of modern Dutch society is one of the reasons first Pim Fortuyn and now Geert Wilders became so popular, among not just conservatives but some former leftists, too. The Netherlands used to be a very religious country; Mr. Fortuyn, like Mr. Wilders, grew up as a Roman Catholic. It took a great deal of rebellious effort from the 1960s onward to enhance the rights of women and gays and diminish the influence of organized religion, Protestant and Catholic. Certain feminists and some progressives now blame immigrants from Muslim countries for challenging these social changes by bringing in a new faith-based orthodoxy.

But Dutch-style populism is based on a paradox. While some people hate conservative Muslims for their views on women and gays, others, who feel adrift in this more secular age, look to a leader like Mr. Wilders to bring back the old certainties of a more traditional and ethnically homogeneous society.

The kind of free-spirited liberalism that made Amsterdam a magnet for the backpackers of the Western world was always concentrated in the cities along the North Sea coast. It’s telling that Mr. Wilders hails from Limburg, a largely Catholic province in the southern hinterlands, bordering Belgium and Germany.

The Catholic Church and once-thriving coal mines had given Limburgers a sense of place, pride and identity. But even as the mines were closing in the ’60s and ’70s, the Church and the Catholic Party lost influence. At the same time, resentment of the metropolitan elites grew, and not just in Limburg.

Like populists everywhere, Mr. Wilders promises to “take our country back” and defend Dutch identity — from Islam, of course, but also from Brussels, the administrative capital of the European Union. People who feel abandoned and bewildered by globalization, new technology, secularism, immigration, refugee crises, economic stagnation and Islamist violence are susceptible to dreams of going back to some never-never land in the past when harmony reigned and all felt at home with their own kind.

What that country would look like in the Dutch case is unclear, for Dutch society was always a patchwork of different identities, mostly connected to religious affiliations. Protestants married Protestants, shopped at Protestant stores, played for Protestant soccer clubs, voted for Protestant parties, and were buried in Protestant cemeteries. The same was true for Catholics, or indeed socialists. Each community was tied to its own sociopolitical-cultural network, called “pillars,” or zuilen in Dutch. Politics rested on compromises made by the leaders of these pillars, who managed society together in carefully constructed coalition governments.

These pillars have now largely collapsed. Apart from the monarchy (descended from William, Prince of Orange, who rebelled against Catholic Spain in the 16th century) and the orange-shirted national soccer team, there is not much that defines Dutch national identity today.

Mr. Wilders, as well as more mainstream politicians who are afraid of losing votes to the far right, like to talk about “Dutch values,” but it is hard to know what they are. Gay rights and gender equality are hardly traditional national values. And so, stirred up by figures like Mr. Wilders, people get bogged down in absurd debates about Black Peter, the frolicking servant in blackface who accompanies St. Nicholas at his annual feast on Dec. 5. Not only black Dutch citizens now find this type of minstrelsy, invented in the 19th century, offensive.

But right-wing politicians and their supporters see any attempt to abolish blackface as a vicious attack on Dutch identity. There have been parliamentary debates on this burning issue. There have been violent demonstrations.

These disputes over Black Peter, the European Union and Islam are, in fact, a mere symbol of a deeper resentment, against the cosmopolitan elites, who live in cities, form paternalistic, technocratic, compromising governments, and feel comfortable with international institutions and a globalized economy.

Mr. Wilders, a former punk rocker whose maternal family is partly Indonesian, might seem an odd figure to purify the identity of a largely Protestant trading nation with a long tradition of allowing people of different faiths and persuasions to live in relative peace. But what he has in common with his followers is a seething rage against people he suspects of thinking they’re better than him.

This may not be sufficient to make him prime minister, but the politics of fury have done plenty of damage already.