EUROPEANS ARE ABOUT TO GO DUTCH
Dutch politician Geert Wilders
By Frederick Forsyth
THE Dutch politician Geert Wilders is well named – pretty wild, or is it weird?
He was over here a few days ago to screen his film Fitna, which is little more than a tirade against Islam, a creed which the gentleman loathes pretty passionately.
From this one might think that Master Wilders is so far off the map as to be an also-ran in Dutch politics but
this would be a grievous error. Wilders is striking a very loud chord indeed among his fellow Dutch.
For one thing he is very persuasive. For another the Islamification of great chunks of Holland makes our own
debate over the relatively new omnipresence of Muslim claimants in our society pale into insignificance. In the
Dutch polls Wilders and his Freedom Party are roaring ahead.
And not just in the polls. Recent municipal elections in the Almere region saw his party the winner and the odd thing is that one third of Almere’s population is actually Muslim.
So the non-Muslims must have been voting almost rock-solid for him. And he came second in another municipal contest in
The Hague seat of government. If he can take the cities, let us recall that rural district voters are usually to the Right of urban electors. All of which means next June’s national elections could put him and his party in the parliament with 27 of the available 150 seats instead of his present nine.
Still a minor party? Not in the Dutch system which is proportional representation, the voting method lusted for by our Lib Dems and other nitwits. With 27 seats out of 150 he could still become prime minister. And no, I’m not joking.
Thanks to PR, Holland is normally governed by a multi-party coalition of achingly politically correct drones, what we call (mockingly) the great and the good. In their House the leader of the largest-scoring party has to be
invited to form a government and be prime minister.
But it seems the Dutch Establishment and the broad masses of the Dutch volk are experiencing a yawning gulf, a phenomenon spreading across the EU, which Wilders also roundly dislikes. Some years ago another demagogue called Pym Fortuyn looked about to sweep to power until he was assassinated by an animal-rights nutcase, even though Fortuyn had nothing to do with animals.
Nor is this just ultra-traditional bigotry: Fortuyn was openly gay. Last, let us not forget that four years ago it was the Dutch, founder members of the EEC (now the EU), who rejected the EU Constitution in a referendum, against the almost tearful pleading of the establishment. And so of course did the French, also founder members and also against the passionate pleadings of their establishment. No wonder Brussels’ absolute insistence was that in the case of the Lisbon
Treaty, the re-write of Giscard d’Estaing’s rejected constitution, the peoples of Euroland must under no circumstances be consulted by referendum.
Despite this the Irish, the only ones of the 27 to get a referendum, rejected it first time round. And it was the Danes and the Swedes who, also at referendum, refused to join the Eurozone.
My point is: right across Europe, apart from the begging-bowl South whom we have to subsidise up to their
armpits, there seems to be a yawning abyss on this issue between the political class and the people. Which gives us British the right to ask our premier after May 7: “Do you want to represent us or the EU-luvvies? Because you
can’t do both and the issue is too important to keep on pushing it under the carpet.”
