Last night I DVRed the BBC’s profile of Dutch politician Geert Wilders because I knew I wouldn’t be able to watch it live. So, I checked it out as soon as I got home and what do I know, I got sucked into watching the entire thing before I realized how late it was.
The profile was a damning, damning report that called him “The most dangerous politician in Europe”. It didn’t show anything I didn’t know already, but it made for compelling story telling nonetheless. I believe the worst wasn’t necessarily related to him (again, nothing new as I’ve been following his raise to infamy for a number of years already). No, the worst part was seeing his followers. A certain DJ from a small radio station in a farming area in The Netherlands (a native Dutch, or autochtoon as they are called around these parts) who is obsessed with all things US Country music and has a confederate flag hanging in his DJ booth. This guy who, nonchalantly stated that Wilders will be as good for The Netherlands as Milosevic was for Bosnia (it sent a chill through my spine). Or the other guy, also from a very small town in the middle of farmland who cannot talk about Wilders without breaking into tears, overpowered by emotion and admiration.
It would be easy (too easy) to dismiss these people as either “dumb” or “crazy”. But they are neither. These people are not fundamentally different from everyone else. Pretty much like the rest of us, they have searched for answers to their problems (both real and perceived) and found that Wilders addressed them. He gave them a voice when they had none. That Wilders answers them with lies, half truths and distortion is nothing new, but he did what other politicians weren’t doing: he paid attention. The BBC profile failed in providing this context. It presented the Wilders phenomenon in a vacuum, the byproduct of the raise of populism, but it didn’t go further, to analyze why this populism came to be embraced in the first place. Wilders is the festering wound in the entire political system, not just “a shameful turn to the right”. Sure, that is the most glaring, apparent consequence, but he only became what he is because others didn’t step to the plate to address all too real concerns and increasing discontent. The left failed to represent these growing pains and unlocked the door so that the wolf could come in and have dinner.
Wilders is the child of a Labor party that forgot the “Labor” part of its name and, instead, became engulfed in “yuppie politics”, selling a capitalist model of trendy social housing design and the promotion of IT businesses, completely ignoring the farmland, which makes a significant portion of Dutch life. It is so tempting to believe that life in The Netherlands is nothing more than urban, hip styles encountered in Amsterdam, Utrecht or The Hague. Wouter Bos, former leader of the Labor Party seemed to believe so. If Dutch politics were Dr Frankenstein, creating the unmanageable beast that is Wilders party, Wouter Bos would probably be the face that smiles to the camera while activating the new creature. Now Dr. Frankenstein refuses to take charge of the “baby”, instead, pointing fingers and claiming the beast is not “one of them”. Oh how wrong they are. Wilders, his followers and party are the expression of a system that refused to listen. And it failed both in addressing the concerns of native Dutch and the growing disenfranchisement of minorities. A system that created and distributed wealth pretty efficiently, but didn’t provide the necessary education and tools to both manage the wealth and live through times when wealth dries out.
The profile was effective in one area, though: it reminded me of the all too real fear I sometimes experience when I try to envision life if he came to be Prime Minister of this country. An idea too scary to consider on most days.
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