Why far-right Wilders won the Dutch election

The uncertainty epidemic, part 2.

A bomb went off in Dutch politics last week. Far-right leader Geert Wilders won 23.5% of the popular vote, making his Freedom Party (PVV) the largest in parliament and the initiator of the new coalition government. The PVV is known for its staunch anti-immigrant stance, its desire to exit the European Union, its nostalgia for the pre-Euro national currency Gulden, and other populist-nativist ideas. It couples these with socialist talking points around health care (but not taxes) to craft a left-ish “Netherlands First” agenda that appeals to many.

Wilders after learning about his victory. Remko de Waal

Though shocking in a country known for its moderate ideas and compromise politics, the Dutch election outcome fits in a larger trend of Western European voters drifting right. Italy, Sweden, Poland and other countries have seen populist parties rise to power on anti-immigration and nativist rhetoric.

It’s worth developing a better understanding of why so many people in the Netherlands voted for a far-right party, as it seems to reflect an important change in how people feel about the way their lives are going. So let me try to make a contribution, starting with one aspect of the situation that puzzled me this week.

The recessive right

Here’s the puzzle. A long-standing belief in political science is that anti-immigration politicians do well in economically hard times, because people are not eager to share what little wealth they have left with newcomers. This logic is simple enough and feels intuitively fair to many. However, in economic terms the Netherlands are actually doing great:

• Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is higher than ever before, ranking 12th in the world;

• The Netherlands are 10th in the world on the Human Development Index;

• The unemployment rate is incredibly low at just 3.6%;

• And the Dutch achieve all this with the shortest working week of all of Europe, with an average of only 33.2 hours per employee per week (not even counting the 4 mandatory weeks of vacation time per year).

Combine this with an excellent free education system and socialized health care and you have to wonder why Dutch voters are feeling threatened by immigrants at all.

Vacation in the Netherlands. Photo by Loes Klinker on Unsplash

Inequality breeds intolerance

One alternative possibility is that Dutch prosperity is not divided evenly over the population. If you can’t profit from the wealth of your nation, you might still be weary of competition from immigrants. A good amount of scientific literature suggests that people in more unequal societies are indeed more preoccupied with their own wellbeing (read e.g. The spirit level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson). And this is true for the poor but also for the rich, who are afraid to lose their wealth if the structure of the society changes. In more unequal societies, the rich actually feel more of this “status anxiety” and are more likely to be anti-immigration.

In the Netherlands, however, inequality is very low with an after-tax Gini coefficient of about 0.3, on par with neighboring countries and roughly stable since the 1980s. Wealth inequality is higher according to some estimates, but only if you ignore the mandatory pension investments owned by nearly all citizens (see this excellent video). And most importantly, in practice, social mobility in the Netherlands is very high (6th in the world), meaning that people are reliably rewarded for their talents and motivation. All these indicators point to an egalitarian society in which most people get the chance the share in the prosperity of the collective, which should lower anxiety over immigration.

After-tax income inequality is stably low in the Netherlands. Source: Our World In Data

Precarious hospitality

So the Dutch economy is thriving and the benefits are shared by almost everyone. And yet, 1 in 4 people in the Netherlands just voted for an anti-immigrant populist. Why? Let’s turn to a third good-faith hypothesis: precarity. According to an article in the Guardian, many young PVV voters feel uncertain about their future despite the present economic successes of their country. Here is one 24-year-old Wilders fan from Volendam:

“I voted for Wilders, and many of my friends did too,” he said. “I don’t want to live with my parents for ever. I want my own home, and to be able to provide for my family later on. Wilders wants to figure out the housing crisis, and make our healthcare better. Those are the most important topics for me.”

Political scientist Catherine de Vries is quoted in the same piece as labeling these feelings as precarity: the sense that your quality of life might slip through your fingers. De Vries:

“We know in many countries young people are more pro-immigration than older voters. They have not become xenophobic. But their lives are more precarious. These are often votes for what in this Dutch election was called ‘livelihood security’.”

The Dutch word bestaanszekerheid translates roughly as an existence with a sufficient and predictable income, a satisfactory home, adequate access to education and healthcare, and a cushion against unexpected eventualities.

Issues such as housing, overcrowded classes and struggling hospitals were key to the youth vote, De Vries said. “Wilders may want ‘Dutch people first’ but he promises to fix these things,” she said. “The government parties imposed austerity.”

From my perspective as a psychologist, precarity seems like a relevant hypothesis because it increasingly recognized as a driver of mental ill-health. A group of researchers summarized the evidence in a 2020 Science paper on the topic:

The anticipation of economic shocks, not just their occurrence, may cause mental illness. People living in poverty face substantial uncertainty and income volatility and juggle what are, in effect, complex financial portfolios, often without access to formal insurance. Sustained long-run exposure to stress from managing this volatility may threaten mental health.

The idea of precarity has been around for a while, but was popularized by social scientist Guy Standing in his 2011 book The precariat: the new dangerous class. Here is from the opening chapter of that book:

In the 1970s, a group of ideologically inspired economists captured the ears and minds of politicians. The central plank of their ‘neo-liberal’ model was that growth and development depended on market competitiveness; everything should be done to maximise competition and competitiveness, and to allow market principles to permeate all aspects of life.

One theme was that countries should increase labour market flexibility, which came to mean an agenda for transferring risks and insecurity onto workers and their families. The result has been the creation of a global ‘precariat’, consisting of many millions around the world without an anchor of stability. They are becoming a new dangerous class. They are prone to listen to ugly voices, and to use their votes and money to give those voices a political platform of increasing influence. The very success of the ‘neo-liberal’ agenda, embraced to a greater or lesser extent by governments of all complexions, has created an incipient political monster. Action is needed before that monster comes to life.

Although the phrase “dangerous class” is alarmist to the point of being tone-deaf, I think this quote says a lot about the uncertainty many people experience today—not just in the Netherlands, but worldwide. Consider the labor market. In many countries there are plenty of jobs, but these jobs are increasingly unreliable. This is partly captured by the notion of the “gig economy”, in which people get paid for single-serving tasks such as driving an Uber or delivering food. But even people who work for a company full-time do so more and more often in flexible rather than permanent arrangements. According to the Dutch Central Bank (DNB), the labor market has become increasingly flexible in the past few decades, with 28% of the labor force now working in a flexible contract versus 55% in permanent employment. Since a permanent contract can be required for mortgage lending and other investments, this affects opportunities for buying a house and establishing a secure life for yourself.

A second cause of precarity is the shifting nature of jobs. Even if there are many jobs around, having to switch between them frequently can give you the sense that you are walking on quicksand. This is reflected in what economists call the structural “churn” or turnover of the labor market. Say 100 thousand news pharma jobs are created thanks to the success of a new weight loss drug, but 100 thousand other jobs disappear because an AI can now answer customer e-mails, this means a total churn of 200 thousand jobs in this sector even if the total number stays the same. For individual employees, higher churn means a greater need to move around, even if they are continually employed at the end of the day. So how bad is structural labor market churn right now? The World Economic Forum just released some research on this, suggesting that about 25% of all jobs will be disrupted (turned over) in the next five years. So although the net job loss is relatively small (about 2% by 2027), one in four workers will have to switch jobs to stay employed.

Finally, on top of less reliable jobs, I saw some data this week suggesting that more individuals today rely on the social safety net (e.g. tax benefits) for their income than ever before. To make this point, researchers compared the income of four generations of Americans at age 30. It turns out that although poverty rates among Millennials (born 1980-2000) at age 30 are roughly similar to those for Generation X (1965-1980), Baby Boomers (1946-1964), and the Silent Generation (1928-1945), Millennials are much more reliant on government assistance programs to supplement their income than any generation before them. While this social safety net creates de facto stability in after-tax income, it is dependent on government policies that could change over time. This never feels quite as stable as a permanent job or accumulated wealth.

By Marybeth Mattingly, Christopher Wimer, Sophie Collyer, and Luke Aylward

In sum, we live in a world where people do have jobs and income—which looks great on the surface—but are less certain about their livelihoods into the future. This precarity generates sincere feelings of fear that need to be addressed productively.

Meaning as antidote to precarity

At the end of the day, however, this degree of precarity is not nearly enough to justify closing the borders and being completely selfish for a while. The Silent Generation mentioned above may have enjoyed more stable employment conditions than young people today, but they also lived through wars and had to deal with other kinds of precarity far beyond the imagination of PVV voters. In the bigger picture, people in the Netherlands are still living some of the best lives ever lived in the history of mankind, so it stands to reason that we should share this luxury with people in need. Any failure to do so is more a sign of decadence than of legitimate political concern.

And the irony is that even closing the borders couldn’t make our feelings of uncertainty go away. Modern precarity is driven by social changes, globalization, ever faster automation, the internet economy, and so on—large-scale trends that are almost impossible to keep track of and even harder to control. So while it might seem rational in the short term to focus on immigration as a zero-sum game, we actually need to deal with the larger, more existential crises that cause many to feel a loss of control over their own lives.

To my mind, this is the great oversight of the political left in recent years. We are so focused on avoiding economic uncertainty that we forget to paint a picture of what we’re progressing towards. In the wake of Piketty’s Capital in the twenty-first century (which was hugely popular in the Netherlands too), GreenLeft leader Jesse Klaver even published his own monograph called The myth of economism, begging for an ideological revival. But in the last election campaign, his party (now teamed up with Labor) mostly emphasized economic issues such as the minimum wage. While these are critically important policy points, a sole focus on the economy can make even a very wealthy and equal populace feel slighted. Economic issues must be embedded in an overarching vision for what our society ought to strive toward.

Nietzsche wrote: “He who has a why to live for, can bear almost any how.” Conversely, those who can’t stand even an excellent how might be lacking a why in their life. Meaning, in this case, is an antidote to precarity.

So here’s my last attempt at a good-faith understanding of the PVV voter: their grief over a changing, meaning-deprived society. It’s true that societies change in terms of their language, customs, and beliefs, and that immigration plays a role in this; it’s also true that people are less connected to one another than before and partake less in meaning-making through community or church¹. Co-opting economic lingo, we live in a time of great “social churn”: an increasingly speedy turnover of the connections and experiences of everyday life.

But you cannot solve this by freezing a country in time; you can only regain culture by defining it for yourself. What do you want the country to look like, in a reasonably forward-looking way? Religion was never able to embrace change in the twentieth century, causing the Netherlands to become largely disinterested in faith-based templates for life. Nativist nostalgia isn’t a viable vision either. Who will take up the mantle?

A precarious balance. Photo by RollingSpoke

1. I’ve linked to this before, but if you haven’t seen it, read the

Novum

piece on the social recession—it’s what got me into writing on Substack.