Wilders’s two-year-old party comes in second in the Netherlands

In the European Parliamentary elections in the Netherlands yesterday, Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party (PVV) won 16.9 percent of the vote, second after the ruling Christian Democrats (CDA), who won 20 percent of the vote. This translates into five of the Netherlands’ 25 European Parliament seats for the CDA, and four, possibly five, seats for the PVV. The PVV was the winner in several key areas of the country, demonstrating, as Paul Belien of The Brussels Journal puts it, that it “appeals to the whole spectrum of the Dutch indigenous population, from the right to the left, with its program against the Islamization of Europe, its outspoken support for Israel, and against the transformation of the European Union into a European superstate.”

Wilders founded the Freedom Party two years ago after he was ousted from the Liberal Party because of his opposition to Turkish EU membership. And guess what—the Liberal Party came in fourth in the EP elections, with 11.3 percent of the vote. Looks as though opposing the admission of a Muslim country into the EU was not only the right and vitally necessary thing to do, but the politically advantageous thing to do as well. Will Dutch politics get the message?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 05, 2009 09:02 AM | Send