“Total disapproval and disquiet. Wilders’ party is the opposite of what we defend in terms of economy, rule of law, values, climate, Europe. Compromise with the far right is unacceptable.” Valerie Hayer is furious. How could it happen that a delegation from the group that the French chair presides over in the European Parliament, Renew Europe, could decide to go off on its own and make a government agreement with one of the most extreme sovereignist right-wing leaders in the European galaxy? At the base, there is the fear that with new elections Wilders would have won again with the majority to govern. But the birth of the new Dutch government, although foreseen and feared, is a bombshell among European liberals, led by the French, namely by Emmanuel Macron. But no action will be taken before the vote. Hayer postponed everything to the Renew meeting on 10 June, the day after the European elections.
A little further on, in the socialist house, an even stronger earthquake is underway. After all, the liberals had been alerted for some time about the risk that their Dutch ‘cousins’ could reach an agreement with Wilders, given that they have been talking to us since the day after the November elections won by the Islamophobic leader and were also l the only party not to close the door on him. The socialists, on the other hand, really didn’t expect it.
This morning in Brussels the reaction is one of amazement. “We’re trying to understand,” they tell us. They had trusted the barbs of Frans Timmermans, the former European commissioner and candidate for prime minister in the Netherlands, who in recent months was unleashed by saying: “Never an agreement with the right!”. Therefore, in the PSE it was thought that the “drift”, as some define it, concerned only the liberals, which certainly would have been a problem in any case given that they are part of the same pro-European majority at least in the legislature that has just ended. But at least one could have professed ignorance of the facts. But no. Because the prime minister of the new political creature that brings together the right, the liberals, the farmers and the centrists is nothing less than a socialist: Robert Plasterk, biologist, esteemed expert in molecular genetics, former minister, unrepentant member of the Labor Party. Until proven otherwise.
Now there is a storm among the Labor Party in The Hague. Mohammed Chahim, a long-time socialist MEP who is also Muslim and therefore anti-Wilders down to his DNA, simply tells us: “I don’t comment on indiscretions, but our statute prohibits us from working with other parties.” An attempt is underway to persuade Plasterk not to accept, but it seems done in The Hague. An expulsion or at least an internal debate is looming for him. It is not clear. Timmermans himself limits himself to denouncing that the government agreement is “disastrous” because “there is not a word on the minimum wage and it provides for cuts to unemployment benefits”. But he carefully avoids the topic of Plasterk, the ‘traitor’ who said yes to Wilders months ago, when he agreed to lead the negotiations to form a government and now helps him close the circle by agreeing to be prime minister.
But it all sounds like much ado about nothing. The Liberals are postponing any step until after the European elections, exposing themselves to the real risk of losing votes due to the Dutch faction. The latter leave the choice to Timmermans: “It is the Dutch who must decide what to do,” a source from the socialist group in Brussels tells us. As if Plasterk was an alien and not family. What really happens?
The Dutch case is the latest confirmation that everything can go well, as long as the real red line of this phase for the West is not crossed: being with Kiev against Putin. In fact, the new government in The Hague on the solid commitment to help Ukraine “economically and militarily”. In the new global challenge that the countries of the Atlantic Pact have found themselves facing since the Russian invasion, the rule of law, the rights of migrants, principles such as hospitality and solidarity, the democratic values on which the EU is founded and the West take a back seat in what seems like a call for national unity typical of emergency situations. Except that the call is not admitted by the traditional parties, it is not transparent, indeed it is denied in the narrative with the voters which relegates the right to the hell of the professionals of illiberal democracy like Orbán, only to then make agreements if the state of necessity requires it.
Holland is only the latest confirmation in this sense. Macron voted for an immigration law alongside Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in December. Scholz’s German socialists are restricting migrant welfare in Germany, after the clash with Giorgia Meloni over funding for NGOs operating at sea. In Germany the liberals said they agreed with the Italian prime minister: the organizations that rescue migrants in the Mediterranean should not be financed. And on this they managed to put the Greens, partners of the traffic light coalition, in the minority. “The threat of the far right coming to power is real. In the Netherlands, liberals and conservatives have not learned the lessons of the past: we must stand up to the far right. Together, as democrats. This will remain our goal as Greens,” The group leader and leading candidate of the Greens, Terry Reintke, from Germany, writes on of the German nationalists Alice Weidel.
The important thing is to stand with Kiev against Moscow. Meloni understood this well, having renounced his past political closeness to the Kremlin leader since the election campaign to embrace the cause of NATO. And Wilders knows this well too, despite having to take back certain sentences against Kiev. Even Le Pen, with all her ties to Moscow, knows this, so much so that in France Macron is trying to compete with her in the elections by supporting the need to send NATO troops to Zelensky in an attempt to take yet another battle for security to the right. It is a game in which the immigrant, the last one, is sacrificed with all due respect to all or many. It is the new course of an EU under siege that is no longer subtle in its relationship with right-wing nationalists, who are decidedly incorporated into power.
