Islamophobia sets the terms in The Netherlands

The Dutch government didn’t fall over involvement in Afghanistan last February; the unstable coalition stumbled over it. The islamophobic right might be the beneficiary of it.

Until the twentieth of February the Netherlands were ruled by a coalition of the Labor party (PvdA) the Christian-democratic CDA and a smaller Christian party. The Dutch system of proportional parliamentary representation means that to have a majority in parliament the largest party has to enter into coalition with other parties in order to form a government.
Especially the relationship between the PvdA and the CDA has been fraught with difficulties. What caused the eventual rupture was the PvdA’s determination to pull out Dutch troops from Afghanistan after the end of the current mission. The CDA wanted to keep open the possibility of Dutch military involvement, maybe in the form of instructors for the new Afghan army.
Ironically, one the reasons why the PvdA refused to make a new compromise with the CDA – after compromises over an investigation into Dutch support for the war in Iraq and cutbacks - was that during the previous election campaign the Christian democrats had painted them as unreliable. With municipal elections only a few days away, this seemed like a good opportunity to show some backbone. After all, an end to Dutch military involvement in Afghanistan was one of the promises made by the PvdA during its election campaign, a majority of the population supports it and the party had seen its support continuously decline while taking part in an increasingly unpopular coalition government. It were political calculations like this that determined the PvdA’s approach: there’s no anti-war movement in the Netherlands to influence the debate. The break between the Labor Party and the Christian-democrats means that there will be new national elections for parliament in June.
All coalition parties would lose seats if these elections were held now. A large part of the discontent with the previous right-wing government coalition went to the left social-democratic Socialist Party that made a significant breakthrough in 2006, increasing its seats in parliament from 9 to 25 (out of a total 150). This time it looks as if the big winner will be Geert Wilders’ Party of Freedom (PVV). Over the last few years, Geert Wilders has had a major impact on Dutch politics. He’s a career politician who started out with the right-wing, secular and pro-business VVD party but in 2004 he left the party to form his own. The PVV took part in two cities for the municipal elections, becoming the largest in one and coming second in The Hague, the seat of government. According to polls the PVV could win as many as 25-26 seats in the upcoming parliamentary elections, maybe even becoming the largest party of the country. Only the VVD and the CDA – traditionally one of the large ruling parties in the country – leave the option of forming a coalition with Wilders open.

Racist populism
The main point of the PVV is easy to summarize: Islamophobia, anti-Islamic racism that conflates religious, cultural and ethnic identities. Especially since forming his party Geert Wilders has been making more and more extreme statements about Dutch Muslims and people with a background in the ‘Muslim countries’, a group that forms about 1 million out of a total population of 16 million. Some of Wilders’ proposals include scrapping the first article in the Dutch constitution that forbids discrimination on basis of race or religion, closing the borders for Muslims, banning the Koran (just like Hitler’s Mein Kampf  is already banned in the Netherlands) a special tax for wearing any kind of Islamic head covering and banning anybody wearing such clothing from public buildings. True to his background in the VVD, in parliament Wilders and the other eight parliamentarians of his party have supported the neoliberal economic policies of this and the previous government.
But where first the PVV was vocal about plans like abolishing the legal minimum wage and weakening the rights of workers, the party has cultivated an increasinly populist image in the last period, especially since the outbreak of the economic crisis. The party objected to the crisis measures of the government and when the ruling coalition proposed to raise the pension-age from 65 to 67 it threatened to organize street protests. The PVV’s opposition against the involvement in Afghanistan – skillfully exploiting the sentiments in the country about an unpopular war - is also contradictory. Geert Wilders is not so much against war and occupation – he is in favor of attacking Iran and is a supporter of the Israeli government – but he opposes the kind of mission the Dutch army was involved in; too much re-building, not enough fighting the ‘Islamic fascists’ that are out to ‘colonize Europe’.

A larger trend
With his mixture of anti-Muslim racism and populist appeals against ‘traditional politics’ Wilders is part of a West-European trend than includes the British National Party in Britain, the Danish People’s Party and the Belgium Vlaams Belang. Since the meteoric rise of Dutch right-wing populist politician Pim Fortuyn - murdered in May 2002 by an environmental activist – Muslims in the Netherlands are targeted as scapegoats for all kinds of social issues and the idea that Dutch society should have space for several different cultures is under heavy attack. Like in other European countries, the scapegoating has become and more intense, giving birth to a new kind of Dutch (and ‘European’) nationalism based on a mythical, ‘superior Judeo-Christian civilization’.
A large part of the appeal of Wilders is his clear presentation of friends (‘the common man in the street’) and enemies (‘Muslims and the left-wing elite that support them’). Wilders is one of the few Dutch politicians that is committed to politics, to changing society, and not just to managing the current state of affairs. This has allowed him to dominate the public debate – other politicians shape their positions in reaction to Wilders’ statements. Even when news about the financial meltdown was on the frontpages, a large part of the public debate revolved around what is euphemistically called ‘the integration question’. Wilders has build on feelings of resentment and xenophobia that have been building for years in Dutch society and that have their own dynamic.

Silence of the left
The Dutch left has been largely unable to respond to Wilders. By far the largest force on the left is the SP but this party has done very little to resist the rise of anti-Muslim racism in Dutch society. Traditionally, it neglected anti-racism in favor if more directly economic policies, arguing that racism will mostly disappear by it self when the discontent that is assumed to generate it disappears. The party lost heavily in the municipal elections and it looks like it might lose more than half of its seats in national elections. But so far it seems unlikely that it will change its course. Since the outbreak of the economic crisis, the SP has refrained from organizing protests or taking a radical stance against neoliberalism. After years of continuous growth, there was an assumption that further growth was inevitable and that the party had to present itself first of all as a ‘responsible candidate for government’. The crisis, the SP leadership thought, would force the other parties to renounce neoliberalism and move them closer to its positions. What is happening instead is that working people are made to pay for anti-crisis measures and that the SP lost its profile as the party of the opposition. A left-wing perspective in the debate about the causes and solutions for the crisis was barely visible.

An anti-racist movement hardly exists. Whereas in some other west-European countries mobilizations against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan formed a counterweight against rising Islamophobia, the Dutch anti-war movement has been moribund for years. Traditionally, anti-racism in the Netherlands was based not so much on demands for equal social and economic rights but on appeals to ‘decency’ and an ideology of a ‘tolerant, multicultural Netherlands’. But since the rise of Fortuyn, the idea of what it means to be Dutch has changed, taking shape more and more in opposition to the Muslim ‘Other’. The tasks of Dutch anti-racists and leftist activists are many compared to their small number.

Alex de Jong, 20 March 2010.

This article first appeared in Against the Current.