| Unstable coalition governments aren’t new on the Dutch political scene. The threshold for a party to enter parliament is quite low compared to other European countries. In 2002, a coalition government collapsed in less than 100 days. Still, this latest debacle stands out. Things were rocky for the coalition from the beginning. The two biggest parties, the PVV and NSC, were not especially eager to join the government, as Mudde explains, and neither was the VVD. They eventually reached an agreement that allowed the PVV to be part of the government, but barred Geert Wilders from becoming prime minister or taking a cabinet post. “From the start this was a very unlikely coalition and they have been fighting about almost everything. That has a lot to do with the fact that Wilders isn’t in the government. He’s the leader of the biggest party who is very isolated,” Mudde said. It’s important to remember that Wilders is the PVV. “You have all these people in the government from Wilders’ party who have no power because the only one who decides is Wilders. He’s mostly communicating through Twitter,” Mudde added. The BBB and NSC are both new and inexperienced political parties that were slipping in the polls. The former dominant party, the VVD, was internally divided about joining the coalition and likely to have been searching for an exit strategy. “Despite this and despite a number of crises, the government survived 2024,” Mudde said. Then came the so-called issues around immigration and asylum. From all accounts, none of the other coalition parties saw it as a crisis – except Wilders. What were Wilders’ immigration policies? Wilders had wanted to adopt a 10-point plan to radically reduce immigration and asylum. This included enlisting the army to secure and patrol the borders, turning all asylum seekers back when they reached the Netherlands, closing refugee accommodation facilities, deporting all Syrian refugees, suspending EU asylum quotas, and banning family members joining refugees already in the country. Unsurprisingly, legal experts said several of these proposed policies breached European human rights laws or the UN refugee convention, to which the Netherlands is a signatory. Still, Mudde said the government had tried to bring immigration down through drastic measures. For one, the government wanted to declare a national immigration crisis, which would have granted special powers, but a court struck it down as unconstitutional. “They have passed many other legislations, but of course it has to be implemented. And that often takes a long time. This is much more about impatience than about not having policies passed,” Mudde said. One of the parties in the coalition was against declaring an immigration crisis. “But they mostly didn’t want to do that because it was clear that it would be struck down by the court. So the difference between the parties has not so much been about what we should do. It is much more about how to do it. It is not as if these other parties have said, no, you are too extreme. They’ve pretty much given Wilders everything on immigration,” Mudde added. What the government did push for, he said, was bringing immigration down within the legal framework of Dutch liberal democracy. Why did he pull out? Wilders’ decision to pull out of the coalition is widely seen as bizarre. Recent polls show the PVV has lost significant voter support since its shock election victory in November 2023. The party is now polling at about 20%, roughly level with the Labour/Green alliance, currently the second-largest bloc in parliament (more on them soon). “There is no strategic decision here. It is being framed by the other parties as him being unreliable, and this plays into the broader narrative of populists being irrational, like he is some kind of Trump. He is not reckless usually, so this is a very odd decision,” Mudde said. Unlike some other far-right politicians, Mudde added, Wilders is a true believer. “Wilders has been living for more than 15 years under 24/7 police protection because of the threat of jihadists. And while he denies that this has affected the way he looks at the world, there’s no way that this hasn’t impacted him.” For Wilders, the fight against immigration, or more bluntly, against Islam and Muslims, is existential. “It is the only issue for him, it is fundamental. He’s not concerned about surviving as leader because he is the party. He believes that the government didn’t do what he wanted, so he got out of the government. It’s an ideological decision, which strategically doesn’t make much sense. That is very rare in politics: to put ideologies over strategy.” What happens next? It is hard to predict who will come out on top in the October election – and much of what is happening now may be forgotten by then. After the collapse, Wilders came out swinging with one clear message to voters: I wasn’t allowed to implement the radical changes the country needs. Vote for us because we’re too big to ignore. The VVD, under Dilan Yeşilgöz, has responded in a way reminiscent of former prime minister Mark Rutte, Mudde explains: acknowledging that immigration is a major issue but insisting that far-right populists like Wilders are all talk and no delivery. Yeşilgöz hasn’t ruled out governing with Wilders again. That risks a repeat of the 2023 election, which was framed around immigration and whether Wilders should be allowed into government, which is a narrative that ultimately benefits him. There is still a chance the VVD could pivot back to traditional issues, such as lowering taxes, he added. If that happens, the Netherlands could end up with a centrist government made up of the VVD, GroenLinks–PvdA, D66, and the Christian Democrats, “bringing the Netherlands back to where it has been for a long time”. According to Mudde, two key players in setting the political tone are the Dutch media, which has been “obsessed” with the far right and immigration since the 2002 assassination of Pim Fortuyn, and the VVD itself. “Politicians create their own realities,” Mudde says. “And so just as Starmer thinks that if he is going to be Reform-lite, then he’s going to win back the white working-class vote, which he never lost actually, the VVD has a similar story: they think that if we campaign as the trustworthy anti-immigrant party, then we will win back the voters who we lost to Wilders.” But if they choose to focus on immigration, the media will follow, and the far right will benefit, he added. And what of the centre left? The Social Democrats and the Greens are running on a joint list and are very close to merging, Mudde explains. That’s made them more interesting to the media and helped them poll neck-and-neck with the far-right PVV. “They’ve got Frans Timmermans, who’s a heavyweight. But they haven’t been able to truly shift the discourse. He’ll likely campaign against the far right — ‘Vote for us, or you’ll get Wilders’ — but that still keeps the focus on Wilders,” Mudde said. “Whereas if you campaign on housing, education, healthcare, which are major issues in the Netherlands, then you force the VVD to have a position on that. You even force Wilders to have a position on that.” | 