Dutch far right leader Geert Wilders is being sidelined by geopolitical developments elsewhere, writes journalist Gordon Darroch.

Just three weeks ago Geert Wilders seemed to be a roll. Donald Trump was back in the White House and, together with his straight-armed right-hand man Elon Musk, was wasting no time in firebombing the apparatus of state, particularly international development aid, in a way that the Freedom Party leader could only dream of.

Wilders himself had just returned from a conference of European nativist parties in Madrid, organised by the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, where he hailed Donald Trump as the leader of a global revolution against the “extremist agenda of the woke left”. “As President Trump ushers a golden age for America we must ask ourselves: are we ready to do the same in Europe?” Wilders asked.

By the end of the week JD Vance had made jaws drop across the continent with his speech at the Munich security conference at which he berated European governments for ignoring “the threat from within: the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values”. Values which, in Vance’s view, were being undermined by mass migration.

It was music to the ears of Wilders, who posted an uncharacteristically long tweet at the same time, in which he about “left-liberal woke decadence” and claimed: “we have not stopped radical Islam but cultivated it”.

But Vance’s speech turned out to be a turning point in other ways. It was the moment when Europe’s leaders had to swallow the awkward truth that the United States was no longer a reliable partner in global security. The following week Trump’s foreign minister, Marco Rubio met his Russian opposite number, Sergei Lavrov, to discuss not just ending the war in Ukraine, but restoring diplomatic relations and investment opportunities.

And two weeks later, Trump and Vance subjected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to a verbal mugging in the Oval Office with a bunch of attack lines that could have been scripted over vodka cocktails in the Kremlin.

Vance’s speech aimed to tap in to the anxiety across Europe about mass migration that has driven support for hard right and far-right parties in recent elections. But his actions towards Zelenskyy have propelled geopolitical security to the top of the political agenda at the expense of migration.

Shameless interference

Within hours of being confirmed as Germany’s chancellor elect, Friedrich Merz told a television debate that Washington’s interference in his country’s elections had been “no less dramatic and drastic, and ultimately shameless, as what we have seen from Moscow.”

He said his number one priority, ahead of migration, was to ensure that Europe achieved “independence” from American security guarantees. And he attacked the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, telling its leader, Alice Weidel, that her party had no solutions to Germany’s problems and “rejoiced” when those problems worsened.

It was the kind of language that centre-right politicians have shied away from until now for fear of polarising the debate further. Just a month ago Merz was widely rebuked for seeking the AfD’s support to steer a tough new migration law through parliament. His shift in tone emphasised how European minds are now, thanks to Trump and Vance, fully concentrated on the threat from outside.

The United States abdicated as the custodian of world peace on February 24, 2025, the third anniversary of the Russian invasion, when it voted against a Ukrainian resolution at the United Nations calling for the withdrawal of Russian forces.

It turned its back on European democracy and stood with some of the world’s most notorious and murderous dictatorships: Eritrea, North Korea, Belarus, Sudan and, of course, Russia itself. Following the monstering of Zelenkyy in Washington, Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign affairs chief, said Europeans needed to compensate for the leadership black hole that had opened up in Washington: “Today it became clear that the free world needs a new leader.”

Bad news for Wilders

All of this is bad news for Geert Wilders, simply because migration is no longer the dominant political theme. The problem with being a one-issue party is that when your hobby-horse is no longer at the front of voters’ minds, you’re left chasing shadows.

Opinion polls show support for the PVV sliding downwards, though it still enjoys a healthy lead and its coalition partners are faring no better. But the 37 seats Wilders won in November 2023 are now at the top end of predictions.

Geopolitics is, to put it mildly, not Geert Wilders’s strong suit. The PVV leader has been unable to formulate a coherent position on Ukraine since the start of the invasion in 2022. Perhaps mindful of the fact that the Netherlands has lost more civilians to Russian aggression in Ukraine than any other country apart from Ukraine itself, he abandoned his previous support for Putin and has described the war as an illegal invasion, while insisting that military support be kept to a minimum.

Backtracking

Even here he has frequently had to backtrack, partly because the Dutch government’s coalition agreement includes a firm commitment to keep supporting Zelenskyy, but also because PVV voters are out of step with wider Dutch public opinion. He knows that breaking the coalition over Ukraine would put him in a weak position going into another election.

There is also the risk for Wilders that his stance on Ukraine will put him outside the circle of Trumpist true believers. In the turf war on the Dutch far right, Forum voor Democratie’s unstinting support for Russia was one of the factors that allowed the PVV to regain the upper hand after 2019.

Wilders is clearly wary of making the same mistake. He tweeted just one message of support for AfD during the German election campaign and restricted his congratulations to five words, three of which were “Alice Weidel” and “AfD”. In general, the more explicitly Putinist a party is, the more muted Wilders’ support for it, though he makes an exception for his longstanding friend, Viktor Orbán.

Asylum

The war in Ukraine has had another unintended consequence for Wilders: since the collapse of Bashar Al-Assad’s dictatorship in Syria, which depended on Russian military support, the number of Syrians fleeing to Europe has fallen sharply, putting a potential spanner in the works of his efforts to declare an asylum crisis.

“The world is changing rapidly before our eyes,” Wilders said at the start of his speech in Madrid. So fast, in fact, that by the time the next election comes round he may find reality has run away from him.