On the website where Dutch people can lodge complaints about central and eastern European immigrants, the disgruntled can tick various boxes. They can report “noise nuisance”, “parking nuisance”, “drunkenness” or “depravation”. They can also claim they lost their jobs to immigrants. The website’s creator, Geert Wilders, isn’t just any old populist politician. His PVV party keeps the Dutch minority government in power.
Everything Wilders does is a cry for attention, and yet his website is worth noting because it heralds a new trend. Wilders sells xenophobia. His main product line, Muslim-bashing, is going out of fashion. He has spotted the next trend in western European xenophobia: bashing of eastern and southern Europeans. That hostility is now passing from newspaper headlines into daily life, and looks set to worsen.
I grew up in the Netherlands, and have seen the country’s fads in xenophobia change over time. After Liberation in 1945, for complex psychological reasons, anti-Semitism flowered. “The Jews emerging from hiding should thank God for the help they were given, and should feel small. Perhaps many better people were lost,” wrote the former Resistance newspaper De Patriot that year. Several similar rants appeared in print then.