Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders will face trial for hate speech

GEERT WILDERS, a far-right Dutch politician who wants to shut down the country’s mosques and withdraw from the European Union, is doing well in the race for the country’s general elections in March. Depending on which poll you consult, he and his Party for Freedom (PVV) are either in first or second place. On October 14th, a court in The Hague did the PVV’s campaign prospects a favour. It allowed the country’s public prosecutors to go ahead with trying Mr Wilders for incitement to hatred, based on a speech he delivered in 2014 calling for “fewer Moroccans” in the country. The trial is scheduled to start on October 31st, and if past precedent is any guide, it will lead to a boost in the PVV’s popularity.

Mr Wilders has been pushing the boundaries of the Netherlands’ tolerance for racially provocative speech since 2004, when he left the centre-right Liberal party (VVD) to launch his career as a radical populist. He was an early adopter of the familiar talking-points of European Islamophobia, warning of a coming tsunami of Muslim immigration, denouncing Islam as a totalitarian ideology rather than a religion and so forth. He also called for taxing women who wear hijabs and for banning the Koran, which he compared to Hitler’s autobiography “Mein Kampf”. This landed him in his first trial for incitement to hatred and discrimination, which he won in 2011. An Amsterdam court ruled then that the justice system should allow a broad latitude to express political ideas, however repulsive, and that this freedom is especially important for politicians themselves.

The current charges against the PVV’s leader stem from a speech he delivered at a party rally in 2014, during the campaign for elections to the European Parliament. At the end of that speech he entered into a call-and-response session with the audience, asking whether they wanted “more or less” of a series of things, the last being “Moroccans”. The Netherlands’ large ethnic Moroccan community has relatively high rates of unemployment and youth crime, and it serves as the target of much of the PVV’s xenophobia. In the wake of the rally, thousands of citizens filed hate-speech complaints against Mr Wilders and public prosecutors took up the case.

Mr Wilders’ antagonists argue that because his comments this time targeted an ethnic group, rather than a religion as in his earlier hate-speech trial, they do not deserve protection. His lawyer, Geert-Jan Knoops, says this is an excuse for political repression. “This discussion belongs in political debate, not in front of a court,” Mr Knoops told the judges in The Hague. That view may well prevail at trial; the judges made no comment on the strength of the prosecution’s case. They simply said that the defence had not met the high standard that would have been needed to throw the case out before trial.

In any case, the prosecution of Mr Wilders will not hurt his electoral chances. “If it has any effect, it will be positive for him,” says Maurice de Hond, a Dutch pollster. “It will confirm his followers’ belief that he is being persecuted by the elite.” As with his earlier prosecution between 2010-2011, the trial will give Mr Wilders a platform in which to claim that accusations of racism against him are merely attempts by a multicultural liberal elite to protect its power. The PVV’s support has been sliding since the summer, when many polls put it clearly in first place with 25% or more of the vote; it is now down to less than 20%, roughly even with the governing Liberals.

Mr Wilders seems aware that the trial could help him arrest the slide. “Prosecuted for the same thing millions of people are thinking,” he tweeted eagerly after the ruling, along with the hashtags #politiekproces (“political trial”) and #pleurop (“bugger off”, roughly). His calls for “fewer Moroccans” angered and frightened large numbers of Dutch folk, and brought ethnic tension to a fever pitch; the court may decide they fall under the rubric of “incitement to racial hatred”. But so far, the attempts to try Mr Wilders for his rhetoric have demonstrated that prosecuting politicians for hateful speech only deepens the wounds.