Sometimes rightwing populism backfires, as Geert Wilders’ party the PVV found out last week. A PVV member of the Den Haag city council proposed an “allochtonenstop” in amateur football, in response to the supposed “flood of problems” football clubs with too many non-western immigrant members were having. According to Richard de Mos (also a PVV member of parliament), such people don’t volunteer for their clubs, are disrespectful and responsible for daily violence on the football pitch. To combat this behaviour clubs should stop accepting new non-western immigrants as members.
Deliberately controversial, this sort of proposal is what helped make the PVV into the third biggest party in the Netherlands. You just make up a lot of stupid but tough sounding shit about Muslims or “non-western immigrants” that reinforce already existing stereotypes in your base, let the experts explain why you’re wrong but emerge as the party of common sense, in touch with the public mood, unlike the elitist eggheads who refuse to see deportation of all muslims to Texel is the right answer to Holland’s crime problems.
This time, it failed spectacularly. Because this time the PVV talked nonsense on a subject their voters actually knew something about. Too many people voluntarily spent their weekend running around wet and cold football pitches to believe this nonsense about foreigners running amateur football. this time therefore the backlash came not just from the experts, but from the very same people the PVV normally has on their side. Richard de Vos forgot that if you want to bullshit people, best not attempt that on subjects they actually know something about…
In short: the PVV got roundly thrashed on this proposal, with everybody from the Dutch football union on down ridiculing it.
