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The liberal-left pontificators have been having a field day with the Dutch election, which put the Islamophobic anti-European Geert Wilders top of the polls, with 25% of the vote.  As

Timothy Garton Ash tweeted:  “Shocking news from the Netherlands of election triumph for Geert Wilders: exactly what we have started to fear for European elections next year.” As he told the

BBC Today programme, the “Geert Wilders win in the Dutch election shows voters are turning to far-right parties as they did after the migrant crisis in 2015.” Except they didn’t. David

Cameron, who is not far-Right, won in 2015. So did Syriza, a Left-wing party in Greece. Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, both Davos consensus centrists, won in 2017. Nigel Farage, who is

the closest Britain has to a Geert Wilders type Europhobe anti-immigration populist, has been rejected eight times when he stood for the Commons. Spain and Portugal elected socialist prime

ministers after 2015 and both countries have Left parties in office. It took seven years before Italy had a hard Right prime minister in Giorgia Meloni. Now that she is in office, she has

embraced EU membership and has allowed 425,000 non-EU immigrants to arrive in Italy to fill job vacancies in sectors Italian citizens won’t work in. Professor Garton Ash reflects the

conventional wisdom in the London-Oxford commentariat that Europe is moving ineluctably to the Right. How then to explain the clear defeat for the Polish Right-wing PiS (Law and Justice)

ruling party — which Tim Garton Ash, one of our great writers on Poland, rightly celebrated last month? And if, as seems very likely, there is a Labour government in Britain next year, how

does that fit the thesis of Europe turning far-Right? It is interesting to trace the rise and rise of Geert Wilders, still only 60, through the pages of the New Statesman, Britain’s left

weekly — now apparently on its last legs. He first featured 14 years ago when the Labour Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, banned him from entering the UK because of his inflammatory hate speech

against Muslims. Wilders then described Islam as a “totalitarian political ideology with some religious tinges” which “prescribes to its supporters a perpetual war until the moment that the

whole world is Islamic.” About 5 per cent of the Dutch population is Muslim, probably smaller as a share of the total population than Britain, France or Germany. The  lead candidate for the

previous ruling centre-right liberal party — for 13 years headed by Mark Rutte, who stood down, thus precipitating the Dutch election — is a Kurdish-origin Muslim woman, Dilan Yesilgöz. In

the UK, the Conservative Party has a Hindu Indian-origin Prime Minister and a Foreign Secretary whose mother is from Sierra Leone. Wilders was seen as the coming man in Dutch politics from

2010 onwards. In 2017 the _New Statesman_ told its readers “Geert Wilders is the latest ethnic nationalist to threaten the European liberal order. With his party on track to win this month’s

election, a country famed for tolerance is being dragged to the right.” He came a poor second and a broad coalition of parties was formed that disproved the _New Statesman_ prediction.

Dutch parties go up and down like a yo-yo. In 2017, the social democratic PvDA was a poor seventh. Today, under a smart centrist leader, Franz Timmermans, who sounds like a Dutch Keir

Starmer or Olaf Scholz, the party came second and it is easily possible to see a multi-party coalition forming to keep Wilders out. Like our own Nigel Farage, he can make headlines but may

not be able to form a government. To be fair, the Dutch are a fair people and having come top of the poll, albeit with 3 out of 4 voters not voting for Wilders, there may be a consensus to

let him  try and cobble together a coalition from the 10 parties who scored under 5 per cent in the polls. These include the Party of Animals and a Calvinist Party which rejects all other

faiths. Wilders does not have a shadow cabinet, as his party only has one member – himself. Most of Europe’s 21st century national identity populists have two main themes – immigration and

the EU. It is a problem for British mini-Wilders who promised that a vote for Brexit meant full control of immigration. The latest figures shows 962,000 immigrants entered Britain in the

last 12 months, mainly from Asia and Africa – the biggest number ever. Wilders fuses obsession with immigration and the EU as he denounces “Eurabia … the multicultural super state which has

Brussels as its capital—the empire that wants to impose even more Islam on us in order to take away every memory of an independent and recognizable Netherlands.” Other European rightists

like Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni no longer attack the EU, demand Frexit or Italexit referendums or consider leaving the Euro. The economic plight of Britain under its post-Brexit

premiers has killed quitting the EU as a rallying call of Europe’s nationalist anti-immigrant right. The Wilders vote was a protest vote against the sense that Europe has no clear answer to

the mass people movement that has sent so many from impoverished corrupt failed states in non-EU Europe, on its southern and eastern Mediterranean borders, in states like Iraq, Afghanistan,

Libya and Syria, partly destroyed by US-EU interventionism. In some African states Putin is now in alliance with military warlords and failed state leaders. He is weaponising the mass flight

of immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and the Caucasus to destabilise EU governments now helping Ukraine. The liberal-left is certainly culpable in not looking the mass immigration

question squarely in the face. But nor have right-wing governments. Britain’s failed Rwanda deal, like Italy’s reception centre in Albania, are gimmicks, not policy. The immigration issue

will feature big in the European Parliament elections next June. But the crass racist denunciation of Muslims, like the Hamas denunciation of Jews, is no answer. Wilders is back in the news

just as Nigel Farage is, as he cavorts in the Australian jungle. The bad news for the commentariat is that the new politics of 21st century Europe is a mosaic, not a monolith. It is by no

means an easily described landscape of two big parties, with one or two small parties on the edge of government and politics. Europe today is best described as a place of “palette politics”,

with different parties and personalities offering a selection of colours to use. Each election allows voters to draw their own picture of the politics of their dreams — even as they know

that the reality will be more of the same. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one

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