The PVV is doing pretty well in the polls. Geert Wilders’ party competes with the VVD for the largest number of seats in the next elections. It’s a head-to-head race, where the VVD emerged as the biggest so far, the PVV only being allowed to call themselves the biggest for one week. Wilders is steadily on the rise, although he is no more able to tie VVD members to his party than he is. These go mostly to Caroline van der Plas’ JA21 and BBB, according to pollster I&O Research. In the Senate everything talks about it. There the VVD gets eleven seats in the polls, the PVV ten (a double). Wilders has a stable and lifelong following and actually only wins Forum for Democracy seats in the polls.
While things are going according to plan for the PVV, Wilders’ statements go three-star and three-star. The elections are approaching, this is clear, even if there are still four months to go. Criticisms of cabinet policy are fine, but Wilders mostly opts for personal attack. A selection of comments/tweets from the last few weeks: think Mark Rutte likes to be a big boy and has an infinitely large ego, Secretary of State Eric van der Burg has a dirty grin on his face, and celebrity Ed Nijpels is a decrepit climate pope.
He calls CDA member Hugo de Jonge a deranged nut and then mourns Hugo. To Wopke Hoekstra says: Come on, I want you raw.
Frans Timmermans (PvdA) is a Brussels bigwig. Sigrid Kaag worshiper of IS and lover of terrorism, and Vera Bergkamp, even on her best day, is still a thousand times worse than her predecessor Khadija Arib. It’s also notable how Wilders Arib, once cast aside by him as someone working for the Moroccan king, is a sham president and not loyal to the Netherlands, is now suddenly praising to heaven. He wants the investigation into Arib to be stopped, apparently forgetting that his party mate Martin Bosma was in full agreement.
It’s not cute and substandard, those personal attacks by Wilders on colleagues, but it’s allowed. Whether that is wise is another story. Now that Wilders hopes even more than ever to become the oldest and the new prime minister of the Netherlands, he will really need other parties to make that dream come true. JA21, BBB, Forum for Democracy and the Van Haga group, it won’t be enough to get a majority behind them.
Certainly not now that Caroline van der Plas is past her prime, according to polls. Then you quickly get to the parties, the leaders of which were ridiculed by Wilders. The VVD has often said it never intended to govern with Wilders.
But Wilders has another problem, Forum for Democracy. The media attention Thierry Baudet receives, however negative, was meant for Geert Wilders not too long ago. But he is now he is in the shadows. For many years the PVV was the only far-right party in the political centre. But now a handful of newcomers have joined, with more or less the same ideas. In last year’s elections, the Forum for Democracy went from two to eight MPs (three of whom founded their own parties after secession). A quarter of the profit came from PVV voters who believed the most in the commotion caused by Baudet.
Wilders would like those voters to return to bring his dream closer. And it seems that Baudet risks losing some of his supporters with his sharply divergent views and conspiracy theories. In the polls, the party has halved compared to last year, only four of the original eight seats would remain. They could go back to the PVV. But then the Wilders Forum shouldn’t fall too hard, because of the old PVV voters who went there and the ideas that partly match.
Wilders thinks he can continue to rage against coalition parties; there are no voters for him to get. It’s short-term thinking; if Wilders is to be prime minister, he desperately needs those parties.
