Geert Wilders: Meet the rabble rouser from the Netherlands who could be the next nail in EU's coffin

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SOURCE: THE DAILY MAIL

URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4189856/Rabble-rouser-nail-EU-s-coffin.html#ixzz4XmT8Hg4n

by Sue Reid


Wearing spivvy shoes, a tight blue suit and a crooked smile, the wide boy of European politics strides into a room in the Dutch parliament building, flanked by armed security men.
He holds up a fat paperback entitled Anger, full of stories of ordinary folk worried about the kind of issues that swept Donald Trump to power in America.
'Our people have been betrayed by politicians and want a new Patriotic Spring,' he tells his audience, who nod enthusiastically.

This is Geert Wilders, the 53-year-old of part-Indonesian heritage with peroxide blond hair, who is turning Dutch thinking on its head. He is described by some as a rabid racist and has been convicted for inciting discrimination.



Once temporarily banned from Britain as 'persona non grata' by the Labour government, he lives under threat of assassination for his fiercely anti-immigration stance, and only this week tried (unsuccessfully) to plaster 'Stop Islam' adverts over Holland's trams.

He is in such danger from Left-wing activists and Islamic militants that he often wears a bullet-proof vest and is guarded at a safe house round the clock.

He can only visit his wife Krisztina, a former Yugoslav diplomat, once a week at the family's secret address because of security concerns. Nobody, he says with truth, would want his sort of life.

Yet next month there are national elections in the Netherlands — and Wilders's Freedom Party is ahead in the polls and expected to win at least 20 per cent of the vote. It could be even higher.

One paunchy man listening on Thursday at the book launch admitted: 'At first we dared not think like him or talk like him. Now many of us in Holland do both.'
For a groundswell of support for Wilders among the Dutch — his is the most popular party in the Netherlands — is fast gathering momentum.

In 2012 he was doing well but not that well, with one in ten supporting him.
Today his Right-wing, Trump-like promises of imposing border controls, stopping Islamic sharia law, sending home migrants who reject Dutch values or cause crime, and even banning the Koran, has won him an extraordinary following in this Christian country, which has a Protestant 'Bible belt' and is dotted with Catholic churches.

One of his favourite mantras (confirmed, so he claims, by university studies in Holland and Berlin) is that 80 per cent of Muslims in the Netherlands believe it is heroic to travel to Syria as a fighter.

He says Islam is not a religion but an imperialist ideology like communism or fascism. And the Dutch, from the urban middle class to those out in the sticks, are lapping it up.
Wilders's meteoric rise means the Netherlands, long famed for its liberal outlook, could well provide the next shock to the European political elite.

On his agenda is a Dutch exit from the European Union and possibly a return from the euro to the traditional Dutch currency, the guilder, too.

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