So after the troubles with “Freedom” Party (PVV) member of parliament Eric Lucassen, who turned out to have been a neighbourhood bully as well as fond of (consensually) fondling women in his chain of command when he was in the military, you might think the worst was over for Geert Wilders, but you’d be wrong. Since then the floodgates have opened, with several more members turning out to have been a bit naughty. There was the guy who transformed his old job of teacher into having been a school director on his resume for example, a surprisingly common sort of vanity amongst Wilders’ MPs. More serious was the case of James Sharpe, whose Hungarian company was allegedly fined for text message fraud, while he himself was also accused of battery, supposedly having hit a sporting buddy with a spiked shoe. Sharpe resigned on Thursday, denying either allegation was true, but tired of having to do so.
This was still not the end of the trouble for Wilders. Today it was MP Marcial Hernandez who was in the spotlights, accused of having headbutted a civil servant in a “well known pub” in Den Haag. This incident had been in the news before, but had gone nowhere, with Wilders defending him, saying that Hernandez had denied headbutting anybody and he had no choice but to believe him. But today it turned out the public prosecutor had video evidence, from the security cameras in the pub, while Hernadez’s victim has complained to the police. Whoops.
You wonder where it will all end. The doom scenario Wilders must have nightmares about, is what happened to his idol, Pim Fortuyn, when they had won the elections after Fortuyn’s murder. Without Fortuyn the party tore itself and the government apart in a few months. Wilders has been determined the same would not happen to him, keeping strict control of his party. The PVV has no members, no internal democracy, but just Wilders making all the decisions, vetting candidates and so on in an attempt to make sure he would not be saddled by the same sort of changers that joined Fortuyn’s party.
Unfortunately for him, this approach causes its own problems. For a start, having no members means little to no income for the party, hence no money to vet prospective candidates professionally, which would’ve prevented some of the embarassement the PVV is going through now. Meanwhile, the fact that Wilders can overrule his own MPs is causing annoyance within the government parties and opposition alike: you can’t make deals with PVV MPs as Wilders will overrule them. And with next year’s provincial elections coming up for which the PVV neds a couple of hundred of candidates and for which only Wilders and his MPs are available to interview and vet them, on top of their work in parliament — how well do you think this will be done?
No wonder one of his closest confidants, Hero Brinkman (who himself had a bit of a drinking problem), is calling for more democracy within the party. He argues that if the PVV had been a proper party, with members and local chapters a lot of the problems it’s been having could’ve been avoided. Other PVV members of parliament disagree though: that makes the way free for the wrong sort of people to infiltrate the party and before you know it, the PVV would think Islam was only a religion not a dangerous terrorist ideology!