The flying dutchman has no friends in europe | thearticle

Britain’s ardently pro-Brexit media have been excited at the formation of the new Dutch government last week. It seems to tick all the boxes of modern rightist ideology – hostile to the

European Union, immigrants, Net Zero and taxpayers’ subsidies flowing to citizens and outfits that should be made to stand on their own feet. They should hold their breath. When Geert

Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party of Freedom came top in the Dutch parliamentary election last November, there was a similar excitement that the onward march of the new identity right was

unstoppable. Wilders matches hostility to Islam with hostility to the European Commission, which he accuses of re-distributing honest Dutch taxpayers money to lazy Italians and other

Europeans he doesn’t like. His party has only one member – Geert Wilders – and he will not be the Dutch prime minister. Having him as the front person for the Netherlands was not acceptable

to Mark Rutte’s Liberal Party, nor the citizen-farmers’ party, nor the fourth party in the new ruling coalition, the Social Contract Party. Nonetheless the long, detailed coalition contract

laying out what the four parties want contains several measures which may come as a surprise to fellow members of ALDE. This is the pan-European alliance of liberal parties, in which the

outgoing prime minister Mark Rutte has been a fixture for a decade and to which both Emmanuel Macron’s ruling Renaissance party and our own Liberal Democrats belong. The measures on Dutch

borders are straight out of the Nigel Farage-Richard Tice playbook, with major limits on all forms of immigration. The new policy includes a call to repudiate the recent EU immigration pact,

which included enforced returns and using third countries that are safe in human rights terms to place undocumented immigrants, such as refugees, while their cases are processed. This EU

pact, which opens the way to Rwanda-style measures, is tough, but it is apparently not tough enough for Wilders. More significant are calls to reduce downwards all EU transfer payments from

rich to poor countries and especially to major beneficiaries of Common Agricultural Policy handouts. These countries are in the east or south of the EU, far away from the Dutch. There is

only one problem. Many of Mr Wilders’ fellow nationalist, anti-immigration, populist identitarians like France’s Marine Le Pen, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, or Slovakia’s

(now badly wounded) Robert Fico are very keen to see EU taxpayers’ money flow to their farmers or poorer regions. To reduce or reverse the monies paid by the Netherlands to the EU funds

managed by the Brussels Commission needs the unanimous vote of 27 independent sovereign nations. There is no evidence of the bouffant-haired Wilders having a single friend amongst his fellow

nation-firsters and Muslimphobes, hoping to overturn existing European governments on the continent. Marine Le Pen, for example, is locked in a permanent angry argument with the extreme

right German AfD party, which she accuses of stirring up independence and secessionist violence in New Caledonia, a French territory in the Pacific. The AfD is the last party left on the EU

new right that praises Brexit and suggests Germany might follow Britain’s example. The European right has the anti-immigrant wind in its sails, but shares few other common ideas and

policies. Mr Wilders can name a Dutch prime minister but he can’t change Europe. _Denis MacShane is the former Minister for Europe. His latest book is “Labour Takes Power” (Biteback)_ A

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