While he was still alive, Pim Fortuyn was more vocal than most about feeling threatened by young immigrant men, but he was not the only one. Among Jews and gays, there is a palpable fear of being targeted. And, as in France, it has made right-wing parties seem a palatable option for these groups in a way that was never possible before.
Bram, a pseudonym for a prominent supporter of Geert Wilders’s PVV party in Holland who wishes to remain anonymous, recently told me, “It’s an outdated reflex for Jews to always say the problem is the extreme right. We have new enemies, and we need new ideas.” It’s an echo of what the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut wrote in 2003: “If we want to face reality we must saw through the bars of our retrospective prison.” Both insist that seeing today’s anti-Semitism as a reincarnation of Europe’s past is misguided.49
The threat, Bram is adamant, is not Wilders or Le Pen or the AfD in Germany. It’s the left and Islam.
“We shouldn’t discriminate between the socialist anti-Semites and the right-wing anti-Semites. Jews are always fucked in Europe. We should go for the short term.… It’s a historic anomaly that we’re not in danger. We should be active and vote for parties that are good for us now.” And right now, Islam is the biggest enemy, he says emphatically. And in his view, Geert Wilders is the only politician standing up to it.
As far as Bram is concerned, “we’re at war with Islam,” which means the Dutch government should be cutting off satellite television, WhatsApp, and trade with and travel to certain countries. “If Iran can do it, we can,” he insists. Bram would also remove the idea of equality of religions in the constitution, effectively demoting Islam. He would ban all mosques for a period; he would forbid or penalize conversion to Islam. He even believes that internment camps might become necessary, although they “could be reduced to targeted administrative detention,” he allows. “Chamberlain was a much more pleasant man than Churchill, I’m sure,” he says. “But we’re at war, and we need war leaders.”50
Bram ended up in PVV circles because his interests were security, the EU, immigration, and, as he puts it, “they liked the fact that I was Jewish.” Geert Wilders is famous for arguing that Holland must be de-Islamized and calling for “no more Islam.” Bram is not short of ideas about how to accomplish this. His policy vision is blunt and punitive when it comes to immigrants. No more Muslim schools. No more extremist mosques. Stop exporting Dutch welfare payments—a reference to immigrants who allegedly send remittances to their families drawn from state subsidies. Much more stringent punishments for crime—a “three strikes and you’re out of the country” program. “You can incentivize people to leave,” he insists. That said, he adds, “I don’t think there will be a kickout program. It’s not in the DNA of Geert Wilders to go against the rule of law.”
When pushed on the question of education, he argues that “you can’t close Muslim schools, but you can cut public funds to them.” He admits that there would then be calls to withdraw public funds from Jewish and Catholic schools, too, but he views these religions as fundamentally different and deserving of recognition in a way that Islam is not. That’s because, as Wilders is fond of saying, “Islam isn’t a religion, it’s an ideology.”
“The Islam we currently see is not part of our culture,” Bram argues. “Currently it is so against what we find pleasant here” that abandoning a few core liberal democratic values is acceptable in his view. “It’s wrong to put equality of laws first,” insists Bram. “The protection of Islam should be excluded from the constitution.”51
Wilders didn’t do as well as expected in the March 2017 election, but he may win without ever coming to power. “You can have a lot of influence in politics by steering the debate.… The PVV has shifted the whole political discussion to the right,” Bram says. He is convinced that the battle has already been won on some level, regardless of the election outcome. Pointing to France’s 2016 burkini debate, he says approvingly, “Sarkozy is saying, ‘Let’s change the constitution’” and a socialist government contemplated closing mosques. So even if Le Pen loses, he told me six months before her defeat, “they’re making elites move to the right,” and that is precisely what is happening in Holland. “The Labour Party is saying exactly the same thing Geert Wilders said five years ago,” he tells me with evident satisfaction.52
The Labour Party’s policy shifts on immigration have had political consequences. In late 2014, two Dutch-Turkish lawmakers, Tunahan Kuzu and Selçuk Öztürk, broke away from Labour and formed their own party, Denk (Think). Kuzu, the leader of the new party, told the press that all the traditional parties had moved too far to the right on integration and asylum. Painting himself as the anti-Wilders, he argued that he had no choice but to leave Labour.
Ahmed Marcouch is not so charitable toward those who left his party to form Denk. He argues that his erstwhile colleagues Kuzu and Öztürk split off because they were opposed to the Labour Party’s stance on recognizing Turkey’s massacre of Armenians as genocide (Holland is home to a significant Armenian diaspora) as well as their disagreements over integration policy.
They also saw an opportunity. The Dutch Labour Party is hemorrhaging votes; it has gone from being the country’s largest party to winning only 9 seats (out of 150) in the March 2017 election, a staggering loss of more than three-fourths of its seats, including Marcouch’s own. “They are infected with the success of populism,” Marcouch told me before the election with evident disdain for his former colleagues. “They want to be the Wilders of minorities.”53
Kuzu made headlines in September 2016 during Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s state visit to Holland; in a receiving line, Kuzu refused to shake Netanyahu’s hand, outraging the Israelis and many Dutch politicians.54 Bram, who is a huge Netanyahu supporter, was not at the event but claims he “would have liked to punch Kuzu in the face” had he been there. Nevertheless, he concedes the cold shoulder was a political masterstroke and predicted it would win Kuzu’s party a couple of seats by galvanizing the anti-Israel vote among Dutch Muslims.55 He was right; Denk exceeded all expectations and won three seats in the new parliament.
But for Marcouch, Denk is playing a dangerous game. The party risks taking Holland back to the 1950s, when pillarization separated communities, schools, and resources along religious lines, allowing Catholics and Protestants to live almost entirely separate lives. What the new Denk party is doing, he insists, is similar, and Holland cannot go back to that model. They institutionalize discrimination by creating a party based on ethnicity, he argues, and when ethnicity is so central, then voters’ views are very simple.56
For Dutch Turks, there is a strong counterpull on their identity by leaders like Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğgan, who broadcasts a strong Turkish nationalist message to the diaspora in Europe. And Denk is vehemently pro-Erdoğan. This came into full view just days before the March 2017 Dutch election when Turkey sought to send its foreign minister to Rotterdam to campaign for a referendum that Erdoğan eventually won, giving him almost unlimited executive powers. Wilders denounced the Turks; Erdoğan called the Dutch “Nazi remnants.” As the journalist Bas Heijne remarked, “Geert Wilders has his mirror image in Erdoğan.”57 Both are peddling nationalist identity politics. In the end, the Dutch government refused landing rights to the foreign minister’s plane and expelled another Turkish official. Rotterdam’s Moroccan-born Muslim mayor replied to the Turkish Nazi talk by asking publicly, “Do they not know I am the mayor of a city bombed by the Nazis?”58
It may have been enough to shore up the centrist prime minister’s shaky support just days before the election. Rutte won convincingly, Marcouch lost his seat, and Baudet is now in parliament.
Unlike some of the nationalist supporters of the PVV, Bram is not motivated by unquestioning love of country. He has a fraught relationship with Dutch culture and does not see Holland as an inherently friendly and innocuous country. Bram’s great-grandfather obtained exit permits for his five daughters to leave Germany
in 1937 but ripped up the tickets, assuming that Jews would be safe. Only two of the daughters survived.
“He did not worry enough,” says Bram. And on the other side of his family, in Holland, “it wasn’t the Germans who pulled my grandparents from their home,” he tells me. “It was the Dutch.” The municipal government gave the occupiers a detailed map showing where all the Jews were living, but it was local police and collaborators who made the roundups and deportations possible.
Given that history, Bram’s default assumption is that the capacity for murderous violence is always lurking beneath the surface given what happened to his relatives during the war. “Anne Frank was not betrayed by the Germans,” he reminds me. “But by Dutch. Regular Dutch. Neighbours.” The fact is that Jews might need to find new allies in a new war, he argues, because they will never be safe.
“The trains for the Jews will always come,” he declares ominously. “I’d rather be wrong than be too calm.” Bram is convinced that until the West wins its war against Islam, Jews will be in danger. “I’m not under any illusion,” he tells me, that being a prominent PVV supporter “will buy me a ticket off the trains. It might delay it.”59
When we discuss the details of his family’s history—many of his relatives were killed by the Nazis in the years after my own family fled Berlin for South Africa—he stands by his position on welcoming refugees to Holland today. “South Africa shouldn’t have taken your relatives,” he is adamant. That would be akin to Holland and Germany accepting Syrians today. Many are genuine refugees, like the German Jews of the 1930s, he concedes, “but they should have been taken by neighbouring countries,” he contends, rather than going somewhere thousands of miles away.
For Holland to take German Jewish refugees during World War II was appropriate by this logic. Today, he argues, “Saudi Arabia should be taking them all.” That neighbouring countries should absorb refugees is an argument that makes sense on the surface but overlooks the fate of those German Jews who were denied entry when they sought refuge far away and were then resettled in countries near Germany, most famously the passengers aboard the MS St. Louis. The ship, carrying 937 passengers, was turned away by Cuba amid large anti-Jewish demonstrations by the Cuban right in 1939. It then sailed north, and the Jewish passengers sought refuge in the United States. The passengers were rejected; at the time, they sailed so close to Florida’s shore that they could see Miami. They cabled President Roosevelt, asking for asylum; he never replied. The ship turned back to Europe on June 6, 1939, and the passengers were mostly resettled in European countries deemed safe at the time—primarily Belgium, Holland, France, and Britain. All in Britain survived, except one killed in an air raid. Some of those resettled in continental Europe were relocated a second time after their safe havens were occupied by the Nazis; those in countries bordering Germany were not so lucky. In the end, more than 250 of those sent to Belgium, France, and Holland were killed in the Holocaust.60
Even today, “Europe is not so civilized,” Bram maintains. “There’s a thin line between the guys who danced after Srebrenica” and everyone else—a reference to the members of the Dutch peacekeeping force during the Bosnian war, who withdrew from Srebrenica, clearing the way for the mass killing of Muslim citizens, and later celebrated the end of their mission with drinking and music on their way home to Holland. It’s an odd reference for someone who blames Muslims for most of Europe’s current problems, but Bram is not entirely unsympathetic to the plight of European Muslims. He even sees parallels to the persecution his family faced. But he does not believe it is Jews’ role to defend the new victims.
“At this time in history, Jews can’t be heroes.… I don’t think in politics Jews have the luxury of choosing their allies.” And he cannot bear it when left-wing Jews stand up for Muslims. “When a rock is thrown at a Jewish synagogue or home, there is no public condemnation. When a little Molotov cocktail is thrown at a mosque in the middle of the night, we are the first to weep.”61
Though they occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum, the Green Party’s Zihni Özdil and Bram agree on one thing: there is a deep and potentially violent strain of racism lurking beneath the surface in Dutch society. “After Poland, the Netherlands is the country where the Holocaust was the most successful,” Özdil reminds me. The local police went “Jew-hunting … they were so eager. Not SS officers, not Germans—Dutch police officers!” he exclaims.62 Like Bram, he has no illusions and is holding on to his second, Turkish, passport.
“If I were a Muslim in Europe at this moment, I’d be very uneasy,” Bram admits. “If Europeans regain their manhood, it could be bad. It’s the history of Europe to treat foreigners terribly. We Jews know that.” And for that reason, he argues that “every Muslim should be happy Geert Wilders exists.” If he didn’t and “if someone else channeled these hateful feelings, it would be much worse,” Bram says menacingly. “Wilders is civil. He is a democrat. He is not the new Hitler.”63
PART IV
THE NEW NORMAL
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WHEN THE RIGHT TURNS LEFT—AND THE LEFT’S VOTERS GO RIGHT
In the postindustrial French town of Hayange, the mayor is a thirty-eight-year-old gay vegetarian who used to be a left-wing activist with a group called Workers Struggle. Things have changed. Now the young mayor, Fabien Engelmann, fears the Great Replacement and sees halal meat as a harbinger of Islamization. Despite his own diet, Engelmann sees the absence of pork as truly worrying—“a conquest of France through its dishes.” On September 30, 2016, he moved to evict the well-known charity association Secours Populaire from its local office, accusing it of being pro-migrant and in league with his old Communist Party comrades.1
According to Andrew Hussey, a British-born academic teaching in Paris, you can’t understand the rise of the FN without looking at the demise of the French Communist Party, which was the continent’s largest on this side of the Iron Curtain. As the party collapsed, its members and adherents were left rudderless. “Where do the people who were Communists go?” asks Hussey. The Socialist Party technocrats who graduated from the prestigious École nationale d’administration, “are so disconnected from ordinary people” that, even if their roots are in Marxist politics, old leftist voters shun them.2 Distrustful of the establishment and searching for a state that protects them, many have turned to the FN.
Whether or not there is an ethnic (or culinary) Great Replacement happening in France, it is unquestionably happening in politics. In France’s postindustrial north and east, uneducated working-class people, whom the left once saw as its base, now vote for Le Pen.3 Whereas once the FN relied on the south, with its religious Catholics and many pieds-noirs, or settlers, who fled Algeria during the early 1960s, it now has an additional base. And unlike in the United States, where a new coalition of enfranchised immigrants, progressive millennials, and professional college-educated whites was almost enough to offset the Democratic party’s losses in the Rust Belt, there hasn’t been a similar phenomenon in France’s economically ailing regions. In Britain, UKIP’s former leader, Paul Nuttall, had for years focused the party’s electoral strategy on winning votes in old Labour strongholds—but in France, where Marine Le Pen won over 50 percent across large swaths of the northeast, the Socialist Party’s loss of the working-class heartlands is nearly complete.4
“I think you’ve got a big political question here about who looks after you; this is a very communist way of thinking. It’s a paternalist way of thinking,” argues Hussey. In his view, there are two large sections of French society that feel excluded: the white working class and Muslims. Because the left no longer speaks to these groups, they find new homes with Le Pen or extremists. “Nobody believes that the left is going to help them,” Hussey argued. “The left is disconnected in Paris … They don’t live in the banlieues.”5
With Marine Le Pen having discarded the image of fascists and skinheads, ex-leftists are now at the centre of the party’s modernization campaign. After the economically conse
rvative François Fillon’s ill-fated victory in the 2016 Les Républicains primary, Le Pen tacked to the left. She clearly believed that there were more votes to be won among the old left than from Catholic conservatives.6 Although Le Pen prefers to avoid the phrase “welfare state” (“That’s a socialist concept,” she insists), she has appealed directly to this yearning for a large, nurturing state that fights for the little guy and not the rich. “I defend fraternity—the idea that a developed country should be able to provide the poorest with the minimum needed to live with dignity as a human being. The French state no longer does that,” she told me. “We’re in a world today in which you either defend the interests of the people or the interests of the banks.” And she has seen results. She pointed to the 2015 local elections in the northern Pas-de-Calais region. “It was socialist-communist for eighty years,” she says. “I won 45 percent.”7 She took over 52 percent there in 2017.
In much the same way that Donald Trump swept the American Rust Belt states with high union and ex-union membership that have historically voted Democratic, she is appealing to traditionally left voters who resent the capitalist class but no longer see Socialists as representing their class interests. As Democrats in the United States and Socialists in Europe have joined the Davos class while paying lip service to the working class, the workers are looking elsewhere. The divide today, Le Pen argues, is no longer a left-versus-right ideological split. “The real rift,” she maintains, “is between those who think the nation is the only structure capable of assuring their security and prosperity and defending their identity and those who have a postnational vision—who consider the nation-state an outdated concept, who want to get rid of borders and sovereignty.”
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