23 February 2017

Whether he wins or not, Geert Wilders has successfully managed to put Islam at the centre of the Dutch elections

.... From this starting point, the liberals eagerly wanted to attract voters from the political right, especially from Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), which according to the polls has a substantial chance of becoming the country’s biggest party in March. The PVV portrays itself as a two-solution party.

On the one hand, it uses a discourse focused on conflict and Islam, while on the other it focuses on financial expense and the European Union. In doing so, it presents both Islam and the EU as underlying factors in almost all of the problems currently faced in Dutch society.

The PVV’s popularity among the electorate is predominantly based on Wilders’ Twitter-based media strategy in which he profiles himself as being strongly against the Dutch political elite, who are presented as being too blind to see the disastrous Islamisation taking place in the country.

He shies away from many public debates and only rarely gives interviews. His party programme remains extremely vague: it runs to only one page, focusing above all on opposition against the destabilising forces of “Islamisation”, which the party associates with violence, terror, and also mass-asylum, immigration and a lack of security. [London School of Economics] Read more