The Netherlands is the latest country to lurch to the right amid the global cost of living crisis. The 22 November election saw maverick far-right populist Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) come first. A hardline Islamophobe who’s called for the Quran to be banned and was once convicted of discrimination could be the country’s next prime minister.

Change – of what kind?

Change always looked on the cards – the only question was of what kind. Serving since 2010, outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte had been his country’s great political survivor, somehow piecing together governing coalitions after the previous four elections – no mean feat given highly fragmented politics in which a strongly proportional voting system and a low entry threshold sees numerous parties take seats.

Rutte even bounced back from resigning, along with his entire cabinet, in 2021, following a scandal over mass false fraud accusations against child benefit claimants, only to come first in the subsequent election. But his last cabinet fell apart in June over immigration when other parties rejected his proposal to tighten restrictions on the right of asylum seekers to be joined by family members. Rutte announced he wouldn’t run again.

Suddenly the election had a fresh look. Rutte’s party, the People’s Party for Freedom for Democracy (VVD), had a new leader, Dilan Yeşilgöz, who arrived in the Netherlands as a child refugee from Turkey and hoped to become the country’s first female prime minister. The New Social Contract (NSC) party, founded by Pieter Omtzigt in August, sought to capitalise on anger at government scandals and for a spell rode high in the polls. On the centre-left, the Green and Labour parties joined forces (PvdA-GL) under former European Commission vice president Frans Timmermans, seeking to appeal to voters concerned about climate change and those looking to stop a right-wing coalition.

But it was Wilders and the PVV who capitalised. The result suggests that multiple government scandals and the high cost of living haven’t just dented trust in the parties involved – but in politics in general. That generated a protest vote that Wilders was able to harness.

Another important factor was a strong campaign focus on immigration – and not just by Wilders. The NSC and VVD also called for tougher limits on asylum seekers. The VVD may have thought it was a better bet to focus on this issue, even though it tore apart its government, than other topics it had underperformed on.

But all this played into Wilders’s hands. Evidence from elections across Europe suggest that, when election campaigns centre on immigration, people are tempted to back the party that has banged the drum the longest: the original, rather those they see as seizing on the issue opportunistically.

Bigger trends

The Dutch election is the latest that suggests, regionally and globally, there are bigger trends at play. The first is a broad rejection of incumbents in many countries during a time of high cost of living. Time and again, ruling parties are being punished for the painful financial squeeze and people are more willing to give alternatives a go. In the Netherlands, all four parties in the outgoing government lost support.

There’s also a longer-term trend in multiple European countries of right-wing populist and nationalist parties building up their media presence and electoral respectability over the years. Electoral tipping points can come after years of efforts to normalise the role of parties once considered extreme.

In many European countries, far-right politicians have succeeded in tilting the political centre ground towards them. Established parties have reacted to their rise by adopting their discourse, most often by promising more hardline migration policies. This has two effects: far-right parties succeed even when they don’t win power, because they influence policies, but it also further boosts their chances of success, because it enables them to fight elections on their strongest territory.

The result is that one third of European voters now back populist parties. The Dutch result has come in the wake of far-right parties heading the government in Italy, winning the election in Switzerland, joining the governing coalition in Finland, propping up the government in Sweden and surging in support in France and Germany. Although there are some ideological differences, each advance encourages the others: Wilders was showered with praise from leaders of other European far-right parties.

Wilders is no new arrival. He first entered parliament in 1998, initially as a VVD representative, before splitting to form his own party over the issue of Turkey’s potential European Union (EU) membership. He represents an anti-Islam current of thought that’s been present in Dutch politics since the 1990s, initially popularised by Pim Fortuyn, the populist politician shot dead by a left-wing activist in 2002. PVV came third in elections in 2010, 2012 and 2021, and second in 2017.

In 2010, after taking over 15 per cent of the vote, PVV entered into an arrangement to support Rutte’s first government. While it didn’t enter cabinet, it promised to back the minority coalition on spending and confidence votes. The deal ended following a dispute over economic austerity measures.

Now that long campaign of normalisation appears to have paid off. Wilders has continued to offer simplistic solutions to complex problems, and they resonate with people who haven´t seen any improvements in their lives in years. The country’s racial and religious minorities and migrants and refugees are scapegoated, blamed for genuine problems like high prices, affordable housing shortages and education and healthcare problems. Historically high standards of public services and social welfare are presented as something to be defended from non-native incursion.

Bad news on climate

The result also augers bad news for the climate and environment.

The Netherlands has been home to two distinct currents in recent years. One is an increasingly active climate movement insisting that the government end its fossil fuel industry subsidies, something it said it would do in 2020 but hasn’t done yet. Campaigners have been communicating this demand through non-violent direct action, repeatedly blocking a major highway in The Hague, the country’s administrative centre. Dutch authorities have reacted with rising repression. Around 25,000 people took part in an action on 9 September, and the police used water cannon and detained some 2,400 people. In August, seven Dutch Extinction Rebellion activists were found guilty of sedition for encouraging others to protest. Undeterred, tens of thousands marched through Amsterdam in November to demand urgent climate action.

On the other side stand the farmers’ lobby and those who sympathise with them. The Netherlands is an agricultural powerhouse, but the industry causes almost half the country’s nitrogen emissions, a greenhouse gas and air pollutant. A 2019 Supreme Court ruling found the state was in breach of EU nature protection laws and ordered that emissions be cut. This means lower livestock numbers. For farmers’ groups, this is both a threat to their way of life and a symbol of the government’s lack of understanding of them. In recent years farmers have staged disruptive protests, including through roadblocks, although compared to the climate protesters, relatively few have been arrested.

The farmers’ protests were given an electoral voice in 2019 through the formation of the Citizen-Farmer Movement (BBB), a party that calls for an end to nitrogen emissions cuts along with various other pro-farmer policies. It came first in provincial elections in March, taking close to 20 per cent of the vote. This makes it the biggest party, with 16 out of 75 seats, in the Senate, parliament’s second chamber.

Wilders clearly isn’t on the side of the climate movement. He’s promised to rip up environmental regulations, downplay international agreements and increase oil and gas extraction. All this despite mounting evidence of the impacts of climate change and the need to act fast to prevent even worse.

What’s ahead?

Months of negotiations – the normal process of government formation in the Netherlands – will determine who the next prime minister is. Wilders says he wants the job, and the convention is that the largest party provides the prime minister, although that isn’t a firm rule. Negotiations haven’t got off to a straightforward start: as is customary, Wilders appointed what’s known as a ‘scout’ to talk to various party leaders, but his appointee quickly had to resign due to fraud allegations.

A right-wing coalition looks the most likely. The NSC has indicated it might be willing to join a coalition, while the BBB is the most enthusiastic backer of a deal. The VVD has ruled out being part of any cabinet, saying it would only back it on confidence and spending votes, but this could be a negotiating tactic.

Other coalitions are possible but seem unlikely. The other parties on the right have so far expressed no enthusiasm to link up with PvdA-GL in a broad coalition. If Wilders were excluded, it would be possible for him to portray the government as anti-democratic, a cosy establishment stitch-up, and likely gain further support.

In comparison, as prime minister, Wilders might disappoint his supporters. He would likely have to rein in his usual performatively outrageous bluster. Coalition partners would insist that his most extreme policies be dropped, among them any move to take the Netherlands out of the EU, and Wilders already indicated a willingness to shelve some proposals during the campaign. Some would likely be unconstitutional anyway, violating guarantees of religious freedom.

The hope for more progressive forces is that ultimately the current trend may be cyclical. It’s harder to position as anti-establishment outsiders once power has been won and deceptively simple solutions have failed, although as Donald Trump has shown, it isn’t impossible. But at the same time, it may be significant that one of the rare setbacks for right-wing populist and nationalist parties in recent elections has come in Poland, where many voters saw the Law and Justice party as the political establishment and blamed it for the high cost of living. The wheel can turn.

The problem is that much damage can be done during a regressive spell: to the rights of minorities and excluded groups, with political rhetoric invariably normalising hatred and violence, and to civic space, since civil society and fundamental civic freedoms are always attacked. There’s also the danger that a vanishing window to act to keep global temperatures at a liveable level will be missed.

So it can’t simply be a matter of waiting for this time to pass. Civil society and progressive forces must offer ideas that speak to people’s current anxieties and frustrations, based on a narrative in which a better future for some doesn’t come at the expense of the rights of others.