Geert Wilders, the head of the Netherlands’ far-right, anti-immigration Party for Freedom and a legitimate contender for prime minister, has been convicted of inciting discrimination for remarks he made at a campaign rally in 2014, when he said the country would be safer with fewer Moroccans. From the New York Times:
Mr. Wilders was found not guilty of hate-speech charges in connection with comments he made about Moroccans in a nationally broadcast TV program filmed at a public market a week earlier, but he was found to have violated laws on inciting discrimination when he led a crowd at a political rally in chanting “fewer, fewer” to the question, “Do you want more or fewer Moroccans in this city and the Netherlands?”
The three-member judiciary panel elected not to penalize Wilders, one of Europe’s most prominent Islamophobes and immigration hard-liners. “Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology, the ideology of a retarded culture,” he characteristically told the Guardian in 2008. Wilders has also promised to work toward shuttering all mosques in the country and banning the Quran outright. Support for his Party for Freedom has been on the rise amid Europe’s increasingly nativist political climate. A June poll found that the party would have become the largest in the Dutch Parliament if elections had been held then. Though he is not currently favored to win, if this support holds until next March’s elections, Wilders could well be the Netherlands’ next prime minister—as he told attendees of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July.
Trump’s campaign and victory have been invigorating for Wilders, who has adopted the slogan “Make the Netherlands Great Again.” “We are witnessing the same uprising on both sides of the Atlantic,” he wrote in a Breitbart op-ed the day following Trump’s election. “The Patriotic Spring is sweeping the Western world. People are standing up and liberating themselves.”
