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2024-06-02 Europe
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The anti-Muslim, pro-Israel far right now runs Holland. Is the European Parliament next?
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[IsraelTimes] Upcoming elections for the EU’s legislature are expected to see gains by parties with ideologies feared by many Jews — even as they may be the community’s most ardent champions.
At a particularly bleak moment for European Jews, one of their most vocal supporters has effectively reached power in the Netherlands, the European Union’s fifth-largest economy and an influential founding member of the bloc.
A staunch advocate of Israel who worked as a volunteer in his youth in an Israeli agricultural community, Dutch politician Geert Wilders last week formed a new coalition that’s so pro-Israel and pro-Jewish that its founding contract promises to look into moving the Dutch embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and mandates Holocaust education for all new naturalized citizens.
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The new coalition led by Wilders and his Party for Freedom marks an unprecedented departure from the Middle East policies of all its predecessors, not only in the Netherlands but in all of Western Europe.
There is, however, a significant caveat: Wilders is a far-right provocateur — a strident anti-Islam firebrand who supports laws that would ban the production of both halal and kosher meat. The possessor of a conviction for inciting ethnic discrimination against Moroccans, he has called Islam a “reprehensible, hateful, and violent” religion.
As Europe nears the potentially dramatic June European Parliament elections, the rise of Wilders and the divided Jewish response to it encapsulates the broader dilemma facing many European Jews and others: embrace the rising far right despite historical baggage and exclusionary views, or reject it in favor of a mainstream with milder politics but a questionable record of standing with Israel, the Jews — and even Europe itself.
The May 16 formation of a coalition led by the Party for Freedom, which won the highest share of the votes in the 2023 Dutch general election, is likely to help its performance in the June 6-9 European Parliament elections. In those elections, voters from all EU member states choose their national representatives to the bloc’s legislative branch.
The victory by Wilders, who has agreed to not serve as prime minister in order to facilitate a coalition agreement, is a rare achievement that could give the far right a new and prominent podium, and galvanize sister movements across the EU in next month’s vote.
Polls from before the formation of the Dutch coalition predicted that the Party for Freedom, which nationally has 37 seats of the 150 in the lower chamber of the Dutch parliament, would jump from currently not having any seats in the European Parliament to 10, becoming the largest Dutch party in the European Parliament (The Netherlands has 29 seats in the 720-seat European Parliament)
These projections are part of an EU-wide trend, where far-right parties are expected to increase their electoral strength collectively by at least 20% over the previous European Parliament elections of 2019, reaching 163 seats or 22% of the house.
More than just a gauge for the popularity of the major forces and ideologies in the European Union, the makeup of the European Parliament can affect budget votes and political appointments. The European Parliament has supervisory powers over the EU’s executive bodies and can confirm or veto the appointment of officials to top positions.
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