One of the more frustrating aspects of the rise and rise of Geert Wilders and his Freedom (sci) Party has been the general unwillingness of serious people in the media and politics to actually call them what they are: bigots and racists. That the average Dutch person was never as tolerant of foreigners as our reputation of a liberal, tolerant country would imply I long knew, but I assumed that at the very least his leftwing political opponents would have the courage to call him out on his bigotry, rather than hiding behind terms like “populist”. Yet with some honourable exceptions, Wilders and his ideas have been taken seriously by the political establishment, both on the right and the left, in so far as they are not rejected out of hand, but as viewpoints that can be debated and taken seriously into consideration, even if you disagree with them, as normal bits of political thought. Hence such foulness as the upcoming burqa ban, now in parliament, where the bullying of a minority group in Dutch society by forbidding its members their traditional clothing is sold as somehow feminist and serious people debate the merits of this.
But now Wilders may have gone too far. Not content with being an anti-Muslim bigot, where in the past decade he had the political climate with him, he has now branched out into more traditional territory for bigots, by starting hating on Eastern and Middle European migrants — and he doesn’t mean Austrians by that. Polish and other Eastern European migrants have been coming to the Netherlands in large numbers in the past ten years, ever since these countries became part of the EU and they gained the rights of all EU citizens, to work and live in any country in the union. These migrants fit the classical pattern of the labour migrant, first coming over for short term work Dutch workers are hard to find for, slowly branching out into more permanent work, finally bringing over their families and settling in the country for good. There’s the usual exploitation, as Dutch employers under pay or under report their Polish workers, landlords rent them awful flats and charge them a fortune for it, which in turn brings along the usual fallout of social problems any city with a huge influx of unexpected migrants has to deal with: lack of living space, lack of amenities for these people in their own language, culture clashes, heightened visibility of social conflict (petty crime, drunkenness et all) the more noticable because it’s done in a new language, and so on. Nothing new, but the same Wilders voter who dislikes Islam is more than likely not to find these Poles all that attractive either.
Which Wilders has now attempted to cash in on, by opening an online registry for complaints about those people, about how they took your job, they were criminal, they were violent, noisy neighbours, spoke filthy foreign languages, just are not properly Dutch. Classic racist dogwhistling, in other words. Surely now the fiction that Wilders is just a populist, a too strident critic of Islam and certain of its practises but not a bigot or a racist, oh no, can no longer be maintained. Or can it?
I hope I’m right and serious political commentators will finally have the courage to say what is plain to see, that he is a bigot and should be treated as such, but I’m not hopeful. If nobody twigged on three years ago, when he’d said he would like to deport millions of Jews Muslims from Europe, why will they now?