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Relief Washes Over European Leadership After Dutch Vote Trump May Have Pushed Dutch Voters Away From Populism
(about 9 hours later)
LONDON — The sighs of relief among the European leadership were almost palpable on Thursday after Dutch voters turned out in record numbers to deny the populist leader Geert Wilders victory in an election seen as a barometer of far-right nationalism’s appeal on the Continent. THE HAGUE — If there is one thing the Dutch agree on, it is to preserve the dikes that protect this low-lying country from the ravages of violent seas. That sentiment translates into politics.
In the first electoral test in Europe since Americans voted in Donald J. Trump as president, Mr. Wilders, a professed “Dutch Trump,” did worse than expected, as many voters rejected his cocktail of feel-good nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment and antipathy for the European Union. For the Dutch, both the British vote to leave the European Union and Donald J. Trump’s election in the United States broke political dikes, leaving the Dutch ill at ease with the conflict and uncertainty that has ensued.
Instead, the party of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who adroitly co-opted Mr. Wilders’s tough line on immigration without cleaving to its extremes, won the most votes. Mr. Rutte’s party lost seats but remains the largest bloc in Parliament. That, some analysts said, helps explain why the Dutch ultimately chose to contain the populist surge led by Geert Wilders, the far-right icon, in their elections on Wednesday.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany called it “a good day for democracy.” Her chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, was somewhat less restrained, writing in Dutch on Twitter: “Netherlands oh Netherlands you are the champion!” “In Europe we all see the developments in the United States, and that’s not where we want to go because we see it as chaos,” said Janka Stoker, a professor in the School of Economics and Business at the University of Groningen in the north of the Netherlands.
That the appeal of populists might be declining had been foreshadowed in presidential elections in Austria in December, when voters rejected Norbert Hofer, a leader of the far-right Freedom Party, which has Nazi roots, in favor of the more soft-spoken, 73-year-old former Green Party leader, Alexander Van der Bellen. “We’re a coalition country, we don’t always like the coalitions, but we know it gives stability and people know here that we have to work together,” Ms. Stoker said.
Analysts said the British vote to quit the European Union, known as “Brexit,” and the ascent of President Trump had led many Dutch voters to weigh their options more carefully, and might have motivated more moderates to get to the polls. Mr. Rutte himself offered that theory on the night of the election. It is hard to say if the same feeling will prevail in other European countries holding elections this year. The Netherlands, a nation of essentially liberal social instincts, is some barometer, but an imperfect one, with its proportional electoral system that dissipates power and enforces cooperation.
It is far less clear that the political circuit breakers in places like France or Italy will similarly hold back a populist movement. They have already blown in Britain, where the incautious choice of a yes-no referendum on Europe removed the usual electoral safeguards, and in the United States, where the Electoral College has twice overridden the popular vote since 2000.
So while the sense of relief among European-minded politicians and voters was palpable on Thursday after the Dutch vote, Europe — its project of integration, its unity, its political ideals — was by no means free of populist threats.
Even if the Dutch refused to hand a big win to Mr. Wilders, they backed center right parties that adopted some of his positions and language in order to win.
Overall, right-leaning parties, including the parties defined as populist by academics and pollsters, gained seven seats in the Dutch Parliament, giving them 57 percent of the 150-member body in this election, in contrast to 52.6 percent in the last election when they had 79 seats. At the same time, one of the oldest Dutch political forces, the mainstream left Labor Party, cratered.
The result all but guarantees that policies toward immigrants and Muslims will be more restrictive, though less than if Mr. Wilders were running the Dutch government.
Yet there are several signs the “Trump effect” that was once expected to carry similarly minded populists is less powerful, or even having the opposite impact, several analysts and pollsters said.
Similarly, the British vote to leave the European Union, known as Brexit, may look less inviting as a model as the reality of its messiness comes into view.
Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research organization, said the “Trump factor” had played a role in “making people think twice about voting for a populist, as people have seen that if you elect a populist you can get all kinds of wacky policies.”Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research organization, said the “Trump factor” had played a role in “making people think twice about voting for a populist, as people have seen that if you elect a populist you can get all kinds of wacky policies.”
“At the same time,” he added, “we have seen a drop in populism in Europe since Brexit, as citizens have realized that, while a protest vote is fun, it can lead to the uncertainties of Brexit, which are not funny at all. That helped shift the mood in the Netherlands.”“At the same time,” he added, “we have seen a drop in populism in Europe since Brexit, as citizens have realized that, while a protest vote is fun, it can lead to the uncertainties of Brexit, which are not funny at all. That helped shift the mood in the Netherlands.”
The turnout in the Dutch elections was astonishing: about 82 percent, among the highest in decades. That was in sharp contrast to the 32 percent of voters who turned out in a referendum last April that rejected closer ties between the European Union and Ukraine. In polls in the Netherlands that looked at perceptions of Mr. Wilders before and after Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Wilders did significantly better before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, said Maurice de Hond, one of the Netherlands most seasoned pollsters.
The vote in the Netherlands was seen as a test of the political winds leading up to critical elections in France and Germany, where far-right parties have sought to capitalize on anti-immigrant sentiments and on a growing anger against the status quo. “The reason Wilders ended in second place has to do with Trump,” he said, noting that there were other factors, like Mr. Wilders missing early debates.
According to an unofficial tally by the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation, Mr. Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy won 33 of the Dutch Parliament’s 150 seats, while Mr. Wilders’s Party for Freedom came second with 20 seats. Not everyone agrees, and some analysts underscored that all politics are local. More important than Brexit or Mr. Trump may have been last weekend’s diplomatic spat with Turkey, which gave the center-right party a lift after it took a strong stand against Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president.
In a post on Twitter, Mr. Wilders gave a positive spin on the results, writing: “We were the third largest party of the Netherlands. Now, we are the 2nd largest party. Next time we will be nr. 1!” “It’s not just that the Netherlands was not that concerned with Trump and Brexit, it’s that there’s a provincialism about these European elections,” said E.C. Hendriks, a Dutch researcher in social sciences and cultural anthropology who is now at Peking University in Beijing. “Really, everyone is on his island.”
In his victory speech, Mr. Rutte praised his compatriots as having avoided the populist trap that ensnared the United States and Britain. “The Netherlands, after Brexit, after the American elections, said ‘Whoa’ to the wrong kind of populism,” he said. Certainly, there are factors in both France and Germany that make their respective elections idiosyncratic and potentially less affected by the American and British political winds.
In France, where the rise of Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, has sent shudders through the establishment, President François Hollande praised the Dutch vote as a “clear victory against extremism.” Nonetheless, in France it is striking that for the most part Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, has steered clear of analogies between her politics and those of Mr. Trump.
For all the celebrations, however, analysts warned that it was premature to herald the death of populism in Europe, saying that many local factors made it hard to extrapolate the direction of coming elections on the Continent. “Geert Wilders, the Le Pen Dutch equivalent, spoke a lot about Trump, he praised him on the Muslim ban and was one of the few European political figures to praise that ban,” said Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer, director of the German Marshall Fund office in Paris. “Le Pen was quieter, I think she understood that to be too close to Trump right now when his administration was in a chaotic phase was not to her advantage.”
Mr. Wilders offered a particularly incendiary and extreme version of populism, experts said. He railed against “Moroccan scum” and called for the banning of the Quran, which he compared to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” Those views seem to have been too much for many in a country with a deeply embedded tradition of social liberalism and tolerance. Some Dutch voters said they took Mr. Trump’s sometimes bellicose tone seriously, and consciously voted for parties that supported the European Union because they believe that Europe is stronger together and better able to stand up to the United States under Mr. Trump.
By contrast, Ms. Le Pen has tried, at least on the surface, to moderate the tone of her message to appeal to more mainstream voters. For similar reasons, some said, they did not favor Brexit. “I don’t like Brexit, it weakened the system, it weakened the European Union and indirectly the Netherlands,” said Max den Voort, 19, a student at The Hague University of Applied Sciences in Delft.
In the Netherlands, Mr. Rutte also capitalized on a last-minute spat with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after ministers from that country were barred from campaigning among Dutch voters of Turkish ancestry for a referendum on the strengthening of Mr. Erdogan’s powers. Mr. Rutte’s nationalist credentials were buttressed by having confronted the Turkish president. The Green Party, led by 30-year-old Jesse Klaver, was an unexpected winner, scoring the biggest parliamentary gains on the left. The D66 party also had a successful showing, getting the left’s largest share of votes. Both parties are pro-Europe.
Even if Mr. Wilders had been able to win a plurality of the seats, he would have faced little chance of assembling a government. In the Dutch system of proportional representation, as many as 13 parties could have positions in the 150-seat lower house of Parliament, and mainstream Dutch parties had vowed not to form any coalition with Mr. Wilders’s group. One important difference between the Netherlands and countries that vote later this year is that the Dutch have already had experience with populists in government, said Ronald Kroeze, a political historian at the Free University of Amsterdam.
While the Dutch election was a welcome relief to Europe’s battered elites, they were still far from declaring that the tide had turned. Mr. Wilders was part of the governing coalition in 2010, but when it came to supporting austerity measures in the wake of the recession, he refused to go along. That left the impression he was not serious about governing.
Mr. Grant, of the Center for European Reform, said that the twin challenges of immigration and suspicion of the European Union as an emblem of economic austerity continued to fan the fires of populism on the Continent. In contrast, France and Germany have no direct recent experience with populist leadership and they may be more open to them as a result.
Looking ahead, he said that his biggest existential fears for the European Union resided not primarily in France or in Germany but in Italy, where the populist Five Star Movement, which wants to hold a referendum on abandoning the euro, appears to be gaining in appeal. Regardless, the continent seems to be moving in an anti-immigrant direction that relies more on identity politics, Ms. Hoop de Scheffer said.
Unlike Mr. Wilders’s Party for Freedom, the Five Star Movement is not wedded to ideology, left or right, and is not so viscerally anti-immigrant. “The mainstream parties are now stealing parts of the populist discourse, and this is undermining the attraction of the populist parties,” she said. “But it’s a dangerous game because it almost normalizes these ideas.”
“If the Five Star were to win in Italy, that would have serious consequences, as they could lead to Italy leaving the euro and destabilizing the eurozone,” Mr. Grant said.
Warning against premature glee among liberal internationalists over the Dutch results, he noted that immigration problems and economic challenges in Europe were not going to disappear. “Moderates have won a battle,” Mr. Grant said. “But the war will continue for years and years.”