The Dutch Give Up on Trumpism

Since he founded the Justice and Development party in 2001, the onetime Islamist mayor of Istanbul Recep Tayyip Erdogan has done more to revive his country’s standing in the world than any leader this side of Vladimir Putin. Now Erdogan is president. He has Islamized Turkey’s laws steadily, tightened its links to Iran and the Arab world, and refused U.S. military requests (including for logistical help during the Iraq war), all while remaining under the umbrella of NATO military protection and pursuing negotiations to enter the European Union. The only people who seem to be chafing at Erdogan’s rule are his fellow Turks. In the summer of 2016, military officers staged a coup against him. He rallied his loyal followers and put it down.

Erdogan is ensuring it won’t happen again. He has arrested tens of thousands of people and jailed more journalists than any leader in the world. He has also proposed a referendum to alter the Turkish constitution. Till now, a good part of the president’s time was spent opening orphanages and smashing champagne bottles on the bows of destroyers. Erdogan wants to eliminate the prime minister’s position, consolidating power in his person and making it possible for him to rule until the year 2029. His supporters call it an Americanized system. His foes call it an Ermächtigungs-gesetz. The vote is scheduled for April 16.

And the road to its passage, oddly, runs through Europe. Turkish migrants have been pouring into the continent for half a century now, and about 3 million of them retain Turkish citizenship, including many who have acquired a European passport as well. Of the 396,000 Turks living in the Netherlands, 300,000 can also call themselves Dutch. Like Boston Irishmen, they have the sentimental extremism of the exile. They give Erdogan about 70 percent support in national elections, and he will need their votes, the more so since the Turkish national economy is in a tailspin. That is how Erdogan got the idea of sending foreign minister Mevlüt Cavusoglu to hold a campaign rally in Rotterdam on March 11.

Trouble was, that was only four days before the Netherlands’ own national elections, in which the biggest campaign theme till then had been various problems, military and demographic, emanating from Turkey and the rest of the Muslim world. It is through Turkey that Syrian and other Muslim migrants have made their way to Europe over the past two years. In the autumn of 2015 they were coming at the rate of 10,000 a day. Turkey has successfully demanded billions in euros to stop the flow.

Long before the refugee crisis, Erdogan had acquired a mastery at probing European weaknesses and shaking down European leaders. In 2008, he told Turkish migrants in Cologne that the expectation they would assimilate into European culture was a “crime against humanity.” In 2013, he used a state visit to the Netherlands to protest that a Turkish boy named Yunus had been given in adoption to a lesbian couple in The Hague. In 2014, one of Erdogan’s ministers called Dutch immigration policy “xenophobic, Islamophobic, and racist.” A lot of Islamic proselytizing in Europe is carried out by Turkish religious authorities. In January, German prosecutors opened an investigation of imams working for the agency Ditib who, they allege, reported back to Turkish intelligence on the activities of Gülenist Turkish Muslims, whom Erdogan suspects of having fomented the 2016 coup plot against him.

That made Cavusoglu’s appearance potentially explosive. The anti-immigrant populist Geert Wilders, who heads the most Islam-focused party in Europe, had been leading the polls for much of the campaign. He would have a field day with a Turkish rally, were it held. The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, whose coalition paired his own businessmen’s Freedom and Democracy party (VVD) and the formerly working-class Labor party (PvdA), is mild-mannered. Among European center-right leaders, he is quite possibly the most important piano virtuoso and confirmed bachelor since Margaret Thatcher’s Tory predecessor Edward Heath. You could even call Rutte prissy and proper. But it would have been electoral suicide to let himself look like the doormat for an Islamist demagogue. So he posted on Facebook: “In our opinion, Dutch public space is not the right place for other countries’ political campaigns.”

Erdogan would not take this polite “no” for an answer. When Rutte’s government suggested, as a compromise, that Cavusoglu meet discreetly with a few dozen supporters inside the Turkish embassy, Cavusoglu urged “heavy sanctions” on the Netherlands. Rutte withdrew landing permission for Cavusoglu’s official plane. The Turkish government then sent Erdogan’s family minister Fatma Kaya in a four-ton armored car traveling from Germany to address the mobs. She was halted by Dutch authorities​—​backed up by more than 20 police, according to the daily NRC Handelsblad, for fear her own detail was heavily armed​—​and escorted back into Germany as an “undesirable alien.”

But Erdogan was only getting started. He called the Netherlands a “banana republic,” “fascists,” “latter-day Nazis.” Hitler’s name came up. He blamed the Dutch for the massacre of 8,000 Bosnians during a U.N. mission in Yugoslavia a quarter-century ago, declared the Dutch ambassador persona non grata, and hinted that he would drop out of the migration deal that is keeping the hungry hordes from marching into southeastern Europe. He threatened to drag the Netherlands before the European Court of Human Rights. He did so in a way that seemed more and more unhinged.

While Erdogan did not get the deference he sought, he did not meet significant resistance, either​—​and the deference may come yet. Rutte told Erdogan’s prime minister that, really, the two of them ought to settle their differences over a good meal. Former foreign minister Ben Bot accused Rutte of having been oversensitive to being taunted as a Nazi; using a priceless Dutch word, he scolded Rutte for not having “bagatellized,” or played down, the insult. The NRC newspaper was appalled that Dutch statesmen had “allowed themselves to be provoked by disreputable Turkish rhetoric”​—​provoked into not giving Turkey everything it wanted. None of the Netherlands’ EU neighbors rallied to the country’s side. The French even permitted Cavusoglu to speak in Metz. There was a pro forma EU declaration of solidarity, to which Erdogan replied: “We consider this shortsighted declaration of the EU worthless.”

For the last several elections, the Netherlands has had a candidate unwilling to take such insults lying down. Geert Wilders is a working-class populist who never went to college, a gifted politician from the southern province of Limburg. He left Rutte’s free market VVD party in 2004 to protest its support for, among other things, Turkish membership in the EU. Islam and the way it spreads in Europe through immigration are his big worries. “We want to be the boss in our own country,” he says constantly. This means closing the border and (eventually) pulling out of the European Union. “We signed our sovereignty away,” Wilders told this magazine in 2014, “and I want it back.” Wilders calls Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán a “hero” for having built a border wall at the height of the 2015 migrant crisis. He constantly mentions that 60 percent of the Netherlands’ prison inmates are of foreign background. Over Christmas, Wilders was convicted of incitement to discrimination for leading his supporters in a chant calling for fewer Moroccans in the country. Lately he has brought this show to Twitter. The newspaper De Volks-krant has noted the coarsening, Trumpian effect of scrunching populist messages into 140 characters. Thus one business leader is a “blockheaded elitist weirdo” and the radical imam Yusuf el-Qaradawi “sick in the head.”

Sometimes Dutch mainstream politicians have to put up with Wilders, sometimes not. His strength waxes and wanes. His party was in Rutte’s government until 2012. But in this election Wilders’s Freedom party (PVV) and Rutte’s VVD were vying for the top spot and the right to take a first crack at forming a government. In the campaign’s final days, they were each polling at around 25 seats, or a sixth of the 150-seat lower house. Rutte treated Wilders as a sworn enemy of democracy and said he would “never, ever, ever” enter into a coalition with him. Wilders was a wegloper, a loose cannon. Against calls for defending the national interest, restoring the national border, and protecting national pride, Rutte said things that sounded detached from reality, at least in the context of the past year’s populist triumphs. When Wilders accused him of having broken all his campaign promises, he said, “You need to do deals.”

Rutte, though, knew his electorate. His VVD took 33 seats against 20 for Wilders’s PVV. While this was a loss for Rutte and a gain for Wilders against 2012 results, it is a massive exceeding of expectations for Rutte and a comedown for Wilders. Rutte can now both form a government and keep his promise to freeze Wilders out. While there is in theory a way for him to rule with the help of small Christian parties, his most likely coalition would come from adding Christian Democrats and the limousine-liberal D66 to his current arrangement with the PvdA, the Labor party. He might even replace the PvdA with another party. Perhaps the emergent Green-Left, which tripled its representation from 4 to 14 seats under a youthful leader. Upshot: The government moves left and the opposition radicalizes.

The rise of Green-Left has been sudden. The venerable Labor party has died at the national level, falling from almost 40 seats to under 10, the largest loss in Dutch political history. It was the core of the Dutch political system from World War II until last week. Now it is just another splinter party: the country’s seventh-largest, in fact. The PvdA died locally in the 2014 municipal elections when it lost Amsterdam, Groningen, Utrecht, and The Hague. This is the equivalent of the city governments of New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia throwing out the Democrats. Part of the reason for the PvdA’s failure is that it entered into one of those “grand coalitions” that have formed almost everywhere in the West, as the mainstream parties have stopped competing with each other and begun to collude against disgruntled voters. Its fate resembles that of the Liberal Democrats who joined David Cameron’s conservatives, of German Social Democrats who worked with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, and, mutatis mutandis, of the Obama-era Republican establishment.

The younger generation no longer feels it needs a party that represents the industrial working classes. It needs a party that will stand for environmentalism, feminism, immigration, multiculturalism, and identity politics. That is Green-Left. Its 30-year-old leader Jesse Klaver has been compared to Justin Trudeau of Canada, partly because his voters find him dreamy. They call him “the Jessiah.” He is indeed an attractive fellow, a hunka hunka burnin’ Social Justice Warrior. Of course, much of this partisan crush involves not pulchritude but power​—​the prospect that its object will one day plot your destiny. Green-Left voters might find Klaver less fetching if he came to shovel their driveway or repair their thermostat.

A trained social worker and a career youth politician, Klaver has been more tellingly compared to Barack Obama. His plan for running his country focuses on its flaws, not its greatness. He has a hard time distinguishing between his platform and his autobiography. He mentions his Dutch mother (from whom he gets his surname) as often as his Moroccan father. “The only thing that stands between you and your dreams is your fear of failing,” he said when he took over the party leadership. His platform is frankly utopian. Here is part of it: “There is an undercurrent in society that is gaining strength and longing for change .  .  . that wants decisions to be made on the basis of ideas and values, not economics .  .  . that won’t be told something can’t be done but believes that almost everything is possible.” This kind of talk about “values” really touches young people. It reassures them that they are not racists. It is a balm for the wounds Erdogan’s insults inflame.

This election is a harsh blow to Donald Trump, or at least to what White House strategist Steve Bannon has called the “global Tea Party movement.” Wilders was riding high in the polls on the day Donald Trump got inaugurated. After that, he lost half his voters. The best explanation might be in the title of a column by the veteran French journalist Pierre Haski: “Has Trump’s Incompetence Killed Europe’s Populism?” It is a curious question. Haski’s premise is wrong factually. Trump’s political position is exactly the same as it was two weeks before he got elected. The country remains split roughly 50-50, but Trump’s supporters, who control all the levers of formal government power, are happy with him. He has been thwarted by an activist judiciary, which may provoke a showdown at some point. And he has been condemned by a daily press that opposes him 100 percent. This does not make him incompetent.

However, Haski is right politically. Foreigners cannot build their understanding of U.S. politics on hunches and conversations around the water cooler, and they don’t tend to surf Breitbart. When Dutch voters, Dutch politicians, and Dutch journalists examine whether Donald Trump is succeeding or failing, what they are examining is the Washington Post and the New York Times. And this is true even of those Dutch voters who feel themselves in tune with populism. In the narrow band of American media that they access, they see unanimous disapproval of the West’s first experiment with populist rule.

Rutte’s anti-populist campaign was masterful. He got the Dutch public to ignore certain real political issues and stand up to imaginary ones. He convinced the 20 percent who backed him that they could confront the bellicose Turk the way Wilders wanted, without risking the “chaos” of Brexit or Trump, or an end to the Turkish refugee agreement, and without acting in a way that would make people call them Nazis or Islamophobes. They could have it all.

The most important thing was the refugee deal that Erdogan was threatening to pull out of. In exchange for just a few billion euros, Turkey blocks the hordes who are ready to stream into Europe by the millions at a moment’s notice. Isn’t that a sensible division of labor? Turkey’s army has 510,000 men in it. It is roughly the size of Europe’s three largest armies​—​France (222,000), Germany (186,000), and Britain (169,000)​—​combined. And it has been annealed in battles both domestic and foreign. The Turks have lately been in northern Syria, clearing out positions held by Kurdish militias, the common enemy of Turkey and ISIS. Let them tell Syrians they have to stay in Aleppo. Because if Turkey abandoned the deal, then the European Union would have to either find a way to bottle up the flow of migrants itself or submit to it.

Migration pressure from North Africa and the Middle East is a military problem. This aspect of the problem can remain latent for a long time, but not forever. European politicians like the refugee deal because it spreads the illusion among European citizens that a complacent, comfortable, consumerist decline is possible. That may be what Erdogan likes about it, too.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.