Year in and year out, his two-decade-long march through Dutch politics has proved him right.
Wilders may not be premier, but he leads the Netherlands’ largest party. Without the PVV, no one can govern.
That’s an indispensable role to have secured. Given the country’s far-right turn, the demagogue could dominate governments for years to come.
Yet, when Wilders told the Patriots for Europe gathering in Madrid on Saturday that Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, and Pedro Sanchez’s time was over, and that “They are history,” he failed.
If his opponents had been leftists, it would be different. Macron and Scholz? Most definitely not. The proof is in the pudding.
Now, everything is about borders and deportation. Few European centrists have lifted more from the populist playbook than the French and German leaders.
In typical neoliberal fashion, Macron and Scholz appropriated populism instead of refuting it. Propaganda only works when everyone says the same thing.
There’s no other way to explain the mainstreaming of Marine Le Pen and Alice Weidel’s parties.
Populists such as Geert Wilders do not signify a break with the past, but its continuation. Just ask their targets. For minorities and immigrants they’re just more of the same.
The sole difference lies in how much populists proclaim their significance, as if the establishment has somehow oppressed and excluded them.
This edition of Aperture Priorities speaks to this so-called turning point. Featuring photos of transgender Italians and refugees, these are the real marginalised peoples, not rich white men.
Even more importantly, the crises the images reflect, particularly those in Syria and Gaza, reflect conflicts that flourished under the so-called ancien régime, not the incoming populist one.
If anything, as Donald Trump’s rhetoric reveals, the fate of the Palestinians is going to be a continuation of the tragedy inflicted on them by the Biden Administration.
That says it all right there. The Middle East is always a good way to separate the wheat from the chaff and call right-wing party politics out for what it is.
Living in a Mediterranean country, a stone’s throw away from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Syrian civil war, it’s impossible not to know the truth and sympathise with the victims.
That’s how photographs like these help, by erasing the distance between them and us, between the Global South and the Europe it overlaps with.
Visuals are always more convincing than ideology.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
