Column | Wilders: no successor, nothing built up

When Geert Wilders announced last week during a press conference that has been inserted with a lot of bombing that « the gloves of the PVV » and he unexpectedly confronted his coalitators with a package of asylum and migration with the title ‘the limit has been reached’, that must have happened in the realization of politics. And this time probably forever. There is a real chance that the PVV will again be the biggest in the case of new elections. But two of his coalitionmates, NSC and BBB, have now shrinked in the polls. The VVD will again « run away from responsibility » by Wilders. Wilders has given Left Free! The party on the rise, the CDA of Henri Bontebal, has already announced that they would not go into the sea with the PVV – because of the hatefulness, because of the swip with Putin, Orbán and Trump, because of the constant quarrels, because of everything, in short, what you saw coming in advance.

What Wilders remains after any new elections is at most the fire of the familiar indignation about « excluding X million voters ». He himself is now 61 years old. He does not have a successor. He has built nothing. « His » cabinet, the cabinet sheaf, has lasted eleven months. It was a hopeless cabinet from the start.

It is also not surprising that it has done practically nothing. First of all, there was the misconception that the voter had opted for a « legal policy », as if more political consistency could be expected on the right than from a central party cabinet. Nothing could be further from the truth. The political right is ideologically much more divided than the center parties.

The fact that a party like the NSC of Pieter Omtzigt, who wanted to regain the confidence of the citizen in the rule of law, chose to step into a cabinet with a much larger radical right party – who does not know party democracy – of which the leader nurses the distrust of the same rule of law day in day out, has been an equally stupid misstep. You really didn’t have to be a visionary to see that Omtzigt went to his own downfall when he went into the sea with Wilders.

Wilders’ rhetoric should keep his lack of administrative qualities out of sight

That one on the right is not the other on the right, was also evident from the radically different views on support to the Ukraine. Where the cabinet was full behind NATO and Ukraine, Wilders – following his spirit of the spirit of Viktor Orbán – really did everything to undermine that unity. That this was being hidden away says enough.

In order to disguise that ideological split of the cabinet under the leadership of the hesitant official Dick Schoof, it was done from the start whether it was a purely practical cabinet, which was aimed at ‘solving problems’. Everything would finally be tackled. Schoof himself spoke of a « enthusiastic pragmatism. »

It was not enthusiastic and also not pragmatic. It was precisely in his practical contribution to ‘his’ cabinet that it turned out that the fatal weakness of the politician Wilders – he mainly supplied political amateurs, such as Marjolein Faber and Reinette Klever, who let his ruthless rhetoric end up in administrative impotence and clumsiness. The PVV ministers who did want to take their function seriously soon came into contact with a unruly reality, in which the compelling demands of « immediateness » of Wilders were rhetorical fata morganas.

The most beautiful illustration remains the collision between MP Emiel van Dijk and State Secretary Ingrid Coenradie, both PVV. The latter was previously forced by the chronic cell deficiency, the first demanded – following Wilders himself – that eight men were put together in a cell if necessary. You don’t need to know more about this cabinet.

That political rhetoric and political practice are two different things applies to every politician. But at Geert Wilders, his rhetoric has to keep his really hideous lack of administrative qualities out of sight. His regular supporters will continue to enjoy his Jennery Hoon, his aggressive contrary, his Twitter visions of threat and downfall of our beautiful country. That is nice for them, because they will have to do it with that from now on.

Bas Heijne is editor of NRC.

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