A political dance that never ends: at the VVD, everything has been around the PVV for twenty years

When Geert Wilders was released from the VVD Lower House in September 2004, he ended up in a messy attic room, the VVD fractional courses. For the Wilders group there was room for a small desk, an employee (one Martin Bosma) and a printer. While the VVD continued as if nothing had happened, Wilders built his new political movement, the PVV, founded in February 2006.

Wilders still lives in the attic room of the VVD, free. You notice how VVD members talk about their party. It always seems to be more about the PVV than about the VVD itself, even if they don’t say that out loud. With every choice, every idea, every strategic dilemma dominates the thought: what does this mean for the PVV? They never put Wilders out of their heads.

The consequence of this permanent PVV obsession was shown in recent days, after the fall of the Schoof cabinet on Tuesday morning. For the first time, PVV and VVD had been together in a fully -fledged cabinet. The coalition lasted, stumbling and fighting, eleven months full – until Wilders got out.

Liberal wing

The collaboration with the PVV has always been difficult for many VVD people. Some, in the more liberal wing of the party, hoped that the fall of the cabinet would be a good reason for party leader Dilan Yesilgöz to exclude the PVV for a future cabinet participation.

That just didn’t happen. Yesilgöz thought it was ‘too early’ on Tuesday, and she was ‘too angry’, to think about that question, as if the VVD itself had not prepared itself for months to get out of the coalition itself. She already knew that she had no sense at all to be in a cabinet after the elections with GroenLinks-Pvda.

Since then it stays quiet in the party top, and the unrest in the party has grown, VVD people say. Pim van Strien, Member of Parliament up to and including 2023, ply This Friday on LinkedIn a call to his party to finally turn away from the PVV. « The populist remains a populist. Unreliable. Illiberal. Illiberal. Ontemocratic. Now that the mask is finished, there is also clarity. Those who gave him a chance (…) can now turn the head and exclude the PVV in horror. The VVD in front. »

Van Strien was also critical of the party top, a rarity in the VVD, so far reserved for a small group of dissatisfied liberals. « The party leadership has taken this path. Went along. Made a step further every time. Despite all the warnings. Criticism was waved away – the PVV had to get a chance? Well, that chance was. And has been lost. »

Right -wing voters

Dilan Yesilgöz pretended to exclude the PVV was too big a step to put in the emotion of the cabinet trap. But what she did was also a decision: she remained behind her choice of the summer of 2023, when she would keep the possibility open that the VVD would rule with the PVV.

Until then, in the Mark Rutte years, that would have been non-negotiable. By not rejecting the collaboration, it will keep this option open for next time. If the liberals oppose the PVV too much, then there is a fear that the party will dispose of voters from the right flank.

For more than twenty years, the party has been living in the right flank, after which Wilders picks up their voters. But they can’t go with him either. They know that Wilders ultimately chooses himself, and the VVD, his former political family, hates. And that the exclusion of the PVV was an effective way for years to keep their deepest fear overwing by Wilders, to keep it out.

They know that Wilders ultimately opts for himself, and the VVD, his former political family, hates

Just as VVD people cannot put Geert Wilders out of their heads, Wilders was able to never let go of the VVD. Both parties have been playing a game of attracting and repelling for decades. Wilders is trained as a conservative liberal, with his later rival Mark Rutte he was inspired by Frits Bolkestein, VVD leader in the 1990s. Shortly after he was removed from the VVD in 2004 by party leader Jozias van Aartsen, Wilders came up with an ‘declaration of independence’ who mainly dealt with right-liberal themes: low taxes, the retention of the mortgage interest deduction. Wilders was not just about Islam or multicultural society. He wanted to fight the « elite of cowardly and frightened people. »

‘Playful and freedomy’

The rapid growth of the PVV in 2006 (nine room seats) coincided with a crisis in the VVD. Mark Rutte had won the battle for the leadership of Rita Verdonk, but concerned about the course in the party. Rutte was too playful, was the thought, in freedom. Only in the 2010 elections had he disciplined his story, and did he mainly make it about economics and safety.

The PVV continued to grow on the right side of the VVD. And Wilders managed to make the PVV tolerance partner in 2010 of the first Rutte cabinet (VVD and CDA). The VVD agreed, hoping to « tame the lion », as former minister Uri Rosenthal (Foreign Affairs, VVD) called it this week. Rutte was talking about an agreement « where the Netherlands can take the fingers on the right ». Two years later, Wilders broke again, in a crisis provoked by himself, with the VVD. He could not live with new cuts.

It offered Rutte the opportunity to portray Wilders in the following years as ‘runaway’. Because Wilders did not distance himself from his « fewer Moroccans » judgment, in 2014, Rutte even excluded the PVV from further government participation. Rutte once ruled on the left, with the PvdA, and in two center -right cabinets. What happened in those years was that the VVD wanted to look more and more like the PVV.

Zwarte Piet and ‘Wokism’

Inspired by fear of losing voters to the PVV, MPs of the VVD tried to get the news with right -wing plans. Bente Becker about ‘integration locations’ for status holders, Halbe Zijlstra about the preservation of Zwarte Piet, Dilan Yesilgöz about ‘wokism’ as a major threat to the Democratic constitutional state-in The Hague this behavior was called ‘PVV corvee’ outside the VVD. In those years, the VVD became a party with two faces: administrative and populist at the same time. But voters who had crossed the radical-right did not return. Political scientists saws in 2021 That a third stable power block in Dutch politics had formed in addition to the center-left and center-right: that of radical-right.

In the summer of 2023, the VVD made a big twist: MP Ruben Brekelmans (in Elsevier Weekblad) And the new party leader Yesilgöz no longer wanted to keep the door to the PVV closed. Just before that, the VVD, the party that invokes being the last major director’s party in the Netherlands, had the cabinet falling on migration. The goal was, again: retained the right wing. But the opposite happened: for many voters, the PVV suddenly became attractive. The party obtained a record number of 37 seats, and joined the formation.

In all those years, Geert Wilders has increasingly turned away from the VVD. His election programs became increasingly radical, and were less and less about conservative-liberal topics. They were almost exclusively about Islam, asylum and migration. He started his break with the coalition of VVD, NSC and BBB last Monday with a ‘ten -point plan’ about migration. Exactly in this way he also forced his first break with the VVD, in 2004. Even then he came up with a ‘ten -point plan’ that he knew the VVD could not accept. The most important point then was the EU membership of Turkey, for which the VVD was then.

The VVD was rejected three times by Wilders: in 2004, in 2012 and in 2025. Yet Dilan Yesilgöz does not want to attach any conclusions to this last rejection. She said after the cabinet trap that she is « as death » that there will be a left cabinet, and wants to continue with « right policy. » Some party members hope that she may still exclude the PVV at the VVD congress (they call it the Liberal Open Day) next Saturday. But the fear of the PVV and its magical influence on VVD voters is deep in it.

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