The PVV stigmatises and discriminates against population groups. Their anti-Pole website is the latest proof. When will prime minister Rutte say enough is enough? asks Frans Weisglas.

The website set up by the PVV to report problems caused by central and eastern Europeans has given rise to numerous spoof websites. Report a lazy Limburger! But the protest mustn’t end there.
A website to report problems caused by people from specific countries is discrimination pure and simple. And that is against article 1 of the constitution. History shows many other examples of citizens grassing on groups of fellow citizens, anonymously and without any means of checking the veracity of their gripes. But even if there were cause for complaint, this would not be the way to go about remedying the situation.
Toy
The PVV is not after a solution for what may or not be a problem, it just wants to stigmatise and discriminate against another population group. After the Muslims it was the Greeks and now it’s the turn of the Poles. Who’s going to be next? The PVV’s found a new toy to play with, as GroenLinks’ Jolande Sap put it.
In 2010, at the VVD party council meeting in October, the close cooperation of the VVD and CDA with the PVV was put to the VVD members. I objected because the PVV stigmatises and discriminates against population groups. Mark Rutte’s answer was that any reprehensible words and deeds from Wilders and his party would be summarily dealt with by him and the VVD parliamentary party.
I am still waiting. Reprehensible terms like ‘head rag tax’, ‘palaces of hate’ (mosques) and insults directed at MPs Cohen and Albayrak did not prompt any reaction from either the prime minister or parliamentary party chairman Stef Blok.
Discrimination
Now it’s happening all over again. A website to report troublesome central and eastern Europeans? It’s every political movement’s right to do this sort of thing, said Rutte and minister Kamp. The cabinet then is not going to speak out against a political movement – one that is it has an alliance with, no less – which is openly discriminating against a population group in our society.
The European Committee objected, and rightly so. The website contravenes the European principles of freedom and non discrimination, Euro commissioner Viviane Reding said. Wilders reaction was as typical as it was predictable: ‘Brussels can go stuff itself’.
Prime minister Rutte – and the parliamentary VVD and CDA parties – should take a leaf out of the European Commission’s (and the governments of ten eastern European countries) book and roundly condemn the setting up of such a site. When is this cowardly behaviour towards the cabinet’s alliance partner going to stop? Or does it take a cabinet crisis?
Frans Weisglas is a former chairman of parliament and a member of the VVD.