Transcription
A few years ago, no one would have believed that this man would become the top political leader in the Netherlands. It's here to builders. In November 2023, his party was the most voted in the general elections. [Applause] [Music] >> And to achieve that, he said things like these. Woke is over. Multiculturalism and mass immigration has proven to be a total failure. The majority of the Europeans are very clear in what they want. They want secure borders. They want an end to mass immigration. They want us to expel illegal aliens and criminals from our countries. >>
For decades, the Netherlands was considered the most tolerant country in Europe. They legalized same-sex marriage, soft drugs, and euthanasia before anyone else. And for centuries, they celebrated religious and cultural pluralism as a national virtue. But we know that something changed when the most voted party proposed closing mosques, banning the Quran, and declaring Islam incompatible with democracy. How can a society like the Netherlands, built on tolerance, produce a leader who wants to restrict it? This wasn't an accident. It was the result of a silent process, of a fracture that grew over decades while everyone pretended it didn't exist. This is the story of a society so open that one day it no longer knew what held it together.
In the 17th century, while Protestantism was prohibited in France and in Spain they burned heretics at the stake, in the Netherlands Catholics and Protestants lived together peacefully. At the same time, they managed to open up to the world and become a global commercial power. It was that double pressure between internal religious fragmentation and the need to trade with everyone that forged their reputation as a tolerant nation. The Dutch understood before anyone else that you couldn't build a global power by persecuting the different. You had to welcome them. So Amsterdam became a refuge for minorities persecuted across Europe, and it was a capital of printing, free thought, and global trade.
But that tolerance had a condition. All those minorities who were different accepted living within the cultural framework of Dutch society. You could have your religion, your language, and your customs, as long as you didn't challenge the common norms that kept the country unified. Norms that had roots in Calvinism, which promoted the ethics of individual effort, austerity, and discipline as central virtues. It was an invisible contract that everyone understood, even though no one named it. A contract that remained alive for centuries, keeping a fragile balance between openness, tolerance, and internal cohesion.
In this context, by the mid-twentieth century, the Netherlands was one of the most progressive and liberal societies in the world. They were pioneers in fighting for the legalization of controlled recreational drug use and the recognition of rights for gay people. But despite this climate of freedom, something began to break. In the 1960s, the Dutch economy was booming. Unemployment was below 2%. The country was growing rapidly, exporting, and modernizing, but it didn't have enough workers to sustain the growth. It didn't have people to do the hardest, most repetitive, and poorly paid jobs. To solve this problem, the government signed a series of bilateral agreements with other countries. So, between 1965 and 1975, more than 110,000 workers arrived from Turkey and Morocco, in addition to other European countries. In the following years, with family reunification, that number grew. And by 1980, more than 200,000 non-European immigrants lived in the Netherlands, almost entirely concentrated in the largest cities.
The term for these immigrants was explicit. They were gastarbeiters, guest workers. The idea was that they would be temporary workers, coming for a few years, saving money, and returning to their home countries. But with the Moroccan and Turkish workers, that almost never happened. Most stayed, along with their families, customs, language, and religion. What's most surprising is that once they stayed, no one in the government thought about how to integrate them. There were no requirements to learn Dutch, no policies to promote citizenship or common values. In the name of tolerance, they were encouraged to preserve their cultural practices intact, to maintain their religious identity, and to educate their children in their native language. The state funded Arabic and Turkish classes within the school system and promoted so-called passive multiculturalism. It was something like living together but separately. It was assumed that long-term coexistence would be enough to generate spontaneous integration. In short, any form of assimilation was avoided because, in the intellectual climate of the time, it was considered a form of cultural colonialism. And so, for the first time in its history, the Dutch state offered openness and tolerance without requiring integration in return. They stopped being an open society with shared norms.
In this ideological framework, immigrants were placed in specific neighborhoods in the large cities of the country through public housing programs. And there, over time, closed communities began to form, becoming true parallel societies. Entire neighborhoods became foreign enclaves where Dutch was not spoken and where the proportion of Moroccan or Turkish residents was over 80%. Children went to schools in their communities, while their parents maintained the expectation, increasingly distant, of returning one day to their home country. But they would never return. And unknowingly, the country stopped building a cohesive society and started building one of separate cultures.
Although at first, this didn't seem problematic. The first generation that came from Morocco and Turkey worked hard, accepted the conditions, and didn't get into trouble. Crime rates were lower than those of native Dutch people. They didn't speak the language, but they knew they were there to build a better future for their children. But those children, the ones born or raised in the Netherlands, grew up caught between two worlds. They weren't fully integrated into Dutch society, but they didn't fully belong to their parents' culture either. They grew up without clear roots, without a sense of belonging, and without a defined horizon. And in that intermediate generation, those who arrived as children or were born in the country, the cultural fracture became more visible, a fracture that persists to this day.
In immigrant neighborhoods, school dropout rates skyrocketed, and the mastery of Dutch is almost non-existent. This resulted in high youth unemployment rates, social frustration, and a significant increase in criminal activities. More than half of young men of Moroccan origin had been suspected of at least one crime by the time they turned 23. And some studies put that number at 65%. Neighborhoods like the Bijlmermeer in Amsterdam, built in the 60s and 70s as idealistic modernist projects, turned into areas invisible to the social system, with high rates of vandalism and crime. And the response from the education system didn't help. Instead of mixing, it separated further when the so-called black schools appeared, schools where more than 50% of the students are of non-Western origin. In some areas, there are primary schools where more than 90% of the students come from immigrant homes. In entire districts, mosques replace churches, supermarkets adapted to Islamic food standards, and community customs were far from the secular and liberal standard of Dutch society.
But it's not just a difference in language or religion. It's a difference in cultural values. According to a 2014 study by the Berlin Social Science Center, 65% of Muslims surveyed in Western Europe, including the Netherlands, believe that religious rules of Islam should take priority over the laws of the country where they live. While 60% don't want to have gay friends, 47% say they can't trust Jews, and 53% believe that the West wants to destroy Islam. These are not minor disagreements. They're deeply different worldviews, and often incompatible ones. And this can be seen in specific situations: public pools with gender-segregated hours, pressure on girls to wear a veil, and teachers facing cultural authority challenges in their own classrooms. In some neighborhoods, religious codes become parallel norms that compete with the authority of the state because those who uphold them see themselves as part of a community with its own rules, living inside the Netherlands, but not necessarily within its culture.
And this cultural fracture also destabilized the country's economic system. Unemployment among people of Moroccan or Turkish origin is more than twice that of native Dutch citizens. And more than 40% of Moroccan households rely entirely or partially on state aid. The pressure on the system is huge. More spending on education, more strain on the healthcare system, and more investment in public security. Some warned that if this trend continues, the Dutch welfare state model could become unsustainable in certain regions because a society cannot sustain itself if a significant portion of its population fails to integrate into the labor market but still depends on the system that others fund.
Added to all of this, the real underlying problem is that for decades, no one wanted to see what was happening. The model worked as long as no one questioned it. The economy grew. The cultural elites maintained their moral authority, and the troubled neighborhoods were off the radar of decision-makers. The political consensus was to avoid cultural confrontation. Center-left and center-right parties tacitly agreed to keep the immigrant issue out of electoral debate. It shouldn't become a political tool. It shouldn't polarize the country. And above all, it shouldn't fuel racism. Multiculturalism was a moral mandate, and any criticism was interpreted as a form of intolerance. The media, in line with this moral consensus, prioritized positive stories of integration, while the worrying data about school dropout rates, youth unemployment, or violence in segregated neighborhoods were relegated to footnotes. Academics who warned of structural problems were discredited. Public officials who called for a review of immigration policy were displaced or silenced, and citizens who expressed concern were labeled as reactionary or xenophobic.
But not everyone accepted this new moral code. In 2002, Pim Fortuyn, a sociologist turned politician, broke with that narrative, proposing that the problem wasn't immigration, but the lack of integration, and above all, the refusal of Dutch society to recognize it. Fortuyn wasn't a right-wing extremist. He was openly gay, a defender of secularism in the welfare state. But he warned that liberal values were at risk and that political Islam represented a threat to gender equality, freedom of expression, and national cohesion. His candidacy grew as an unexpected phenomenon, and with it, the idea that maybe the country needed to talk about what it had been silent about for decades. But on May 6th, 2002, nine days before the elections, Fortuyn was murdered by a radical activist who declared he did it to protect Muslims. It was the first political assassination in the Netherlands in more than three centuries, and the clearest sign that silence hadn't prevented violence; it had incubated it.
Two years later, another episode shocked the country. Theo Van Gogh, a filmmaker and columnist, was murdered in broad daylight by a Dutch Islamist of Moroccan origin. He had directed a short film critical of the treatment of women in Islamic contexts. From then on, fear settled in permanently. Not just fear of extremism, but fear of speaking, debating, dissenting. Because in the new cultural logic, the one who pointed out the problem became the problem. And so, a society paralyzed by its own identity was born. Convinced of its openness, proud of its tolerance, but one day waking up in a country it no longer recognized.
By then, the cultural fracture was no longer a marginal issue. It was the invisible center of the life of the country. It was present in the neighborhoods, in the schools, and in the accumulated resentment of those who felt something had broken, but no one could talk about it. That gap between what was lived and what could be said was what opened the door to a different kind of leadership. One that didn't come with nuances or euphemisms, nor did it offer complex solutions. That's when Geert Wilders emerged. A career politician who had passed through the Liberal Party but, frustrated with the political correctness of his colleagues, founded the Party for Freedom (PVV) in 2006. And from day one, the issue was Islam. "Our culture, which is based on Christianity, Judaism and humanism, is better than the Islamic culture. And this is tough to say, but it's true." >>
Wilders didn't talk about multiculturalism. He talked about Islam as a totalitarian ideology disguised as a religion. He called for closing the borders to Muslim countries, closing mosques, banning the Quran, and declaring Islam incompatible with democracy. "Islam preaches hatred, propagates violence, and is barbaric and violent by nature. It wants all Muslims to submit. It is incompatible with freedom as we know it." His brutal statements and aggressive style resonated socially because he said what many thought but no one else dared to say. He even published "Fitna," a short film that generated enormous international controversy. In it, he denounced what he considered the link between Islam and violent extremism, using verses from the Quran interspersed with images of terrorist attacks.
In his first elections in 2006, Wilders' PVV won nine seats in parliament. Four years later, in 2010, it rose to 24 seats, becoming the third largest force in the country, just seven seats behind the most voted force. And since then, it never disappeared. Not from parliament, not from the public debates, nor from the center of conversation. Over the years, his rhetoric evolved. He went from calling for the closure of mosques to demanding less non-Western immigration and expanded his topics to security and the economy. His voters didn't necessarily share all of his proposals. They were simply fed up with institutional silence. And voters with his incendiary remarks at least didn't pretend everything was fine. His figure grew alongside social discontent. And the more they tried to silence him, the more he grew. He was excluded from parliamentary deals, tried for incitement to hatred, subjected to assassination attempts and threats, and lives to this day under permanent police protection.
But his discourse is no longer marginal. It's part of the center of the debate. According to a report from the Netherlands Institute for Social Research published in September 2024, immigration and integration are the main social issue for 37% of citizens. While 2017 studies from the Brookings Institute showed that 45% of Dutch people thought Islam was incompatible with Western values. These are figures that reflect a deep discontent in a large part of society. Because while traditional politicians talked about diversity as wealth, many citizens experienced it as a loss of identity and common sense. Wilders didn't do anything but gather those feelings and turn them into a political platform, which resonated with a part of the country that didn't feel heard by traditional parties and saw how their neighborhoods were changing without anyone discussing it.
In the general elections of 2023, the PVV won a quarter of the seats and became the party with the most representation in the House of Representatives. And although Wilders wasn't prime minister, his party managed to form a coalition and dominate the legislative agenda. But in June 2025, Wilders pulled his party out of the ruling coalition in a row over immigration and asylum policy, leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Dick Schoof and the collapse of the government.
The rise of Wilders as a political leader was the result of a system that preferred silence and postponed the conflict. But today, the conflict can no longer be postponed. And the question is already inevitable. Can a society survive without a common identity? Without sharing a language, history, or a common vision of the future? For centuries, the Netherlands was a historical exception. A nation that managed to open up to the world without losing its cohesion and knew how to welcome the different without ceasing to be itself. A society built on tolerance but within a common framework. It was a fragile but real balance. Today, that balance is broken. Tolerance is still there, but cohesion has been lost. There's no integration, no shared identity. What exists are separate communities, each with its own values and rules. And the worst part is that between them, there are fewer bridges to connect them.
That's why the question facing the Netherlands today isn't whether it should be more open or strict, or whether it should close its borders or reform its migration model. The real question is whether it is still possible to rebuild a shared common sense beyond the differences. Because an open society can only sustain itself if there's something that everyone shares. And when that's gone, when the word "we" loses its meaning, a society stops being a society and becomes something else. It's a space where everyone lives together, but no one feels part of the same thing anymore. What happens in the coming years will tell us if the Netherlands is truly an exception, or if it was just a fragile balance that time couldn't sustain.
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