Far-right fast becoming the mainstream in European politics as Gaza and Ukraine wars shift continental sentiments
By David P Goldman, ASIA TIMES 25 Nov 2023
Geert Wilders’ surprise victory in last week’s Dutch elections portends an upheaval in European politics long in the offing, but provoked by two pressing events.
The first is the mass demonstrations in support of Hamas by Muslim migrants after October 7, a triumphalist assertion of power by a minority that believes that it may become the future majority.
This cast a harsh light on uncontrolled mass immigration, now Europe’s top political issue. The failure of the mainstream parties to address the continent’s most pressing problem opens a path to power for an opposition that only months ago was dismissed as a political fringe element.
The second issue is popular hostility to the Ukraine war, which Ukraine is visibly losing.
Long derided as extremist throwbacks, Europe’s right-wing parties have become the last bastion of what used to be conventional wisdom in the West. Their nationalism has more in common with Charles De Gaulle than Jean-Marie Le Pen, and their views on key issues – immigration, Russia, China, and the United States – are rational and considered.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who describes himself as a Christian Democrat in the style of the late German chancellor Helmut Kohl, is the standard-bearer of the new European right, but prospective leaders are emerging in several European countries.
Wilders, to be sure, has taken colorful positions on his country’s Muslim problem, proposing at one point to ban the Koran and close mosques. These are rhetorical gestures rather than statements of policy. What qualifies the European right for a position of leadership is that it offers rational policy alternatives on economic, social and security policy.
Migration, legal and illegal, is transforming the character of European society. Officially, about 7% of the populations of France, Britain and Germany are Muslim migrants, but the actual numbers are higher.
In 2017, the Pew Institute estimated that 8.8% of French residents were Muslim, and that the total would rise to 18% by 2050. More than half of all schoolchildren in the German city of Hamburg are from migrant families.
Wilders represents traditional European conservative political values. There is nothing “far right” about him.
Wilders has only 37 seats, he need 76 to form a coalition able to govern , lot of pressure from the EU NGO USA to make Wilders an outcast , I do not see him able to govern.