Netherlands general election: Anti-Islam populist Wilders seeks coalition partners after shock win

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00:00 on that story. I'm now joined in the studio by our Europe editor Armin

00:03 Georgian. Hi Armin. We'll take a look at the impact on Europe in a minute but

00:09 first of all you know maybe you can tell us he's one but Dutch politics is

00:14 usually about coalitions. Is he going to find coalition partners? Will he be able

00:17 to form a government? Well other political forces are hinting that

00:21 they're open to working with him. The mainstream conservatives are certainly

00:27 not ruling that out but party leader Dilan Yesil Göz is saying that she

00:31 wouldn't want Wilders to be Prime Minister but perhaps she'd be okay with

00:36 some other deal where he perhaps has an important job in government but where

00:42 she can keep him in check in some way. That's certainly one possibility and

00:49 then we've also got the new Social Contract Party whose leader Pieter

00:52 Omtzigt is also not ruling out working with Geert Wilders while also saying

00:59 that any such talks would be difficult. So it's obvious that such a

01:05 right-wing coalition would be a very difficult thing to negotiate. That would

01:10 be a coalition of the VVD, the NSC and the PVV but that's not the only scenario

01:18 that there's also another coalition scenario that's been talked about of a

01:22 centrist coalition led by Frans Timmermans. So there are lots of options

01:28 at least on paper now but the actual negotiations are clearly going to be

01:33 very tricky and could last quite some time. So I mean he might not end up

01:39 leading a government but however you look at it he has won an election very

01:43 convincingly. Incidentally the European Union a spokesperson has said they

01:48 continue to count on Dutch participation but this is a bit of a trend in Europe

01:55 now. These far-right leaders doing extremely well in elections. Is there a

02:00 message Europe should be heeding there? Well what's happened is you know

02:06 the old sort of cordon sanitaire around far-right parties has dissolved

02:12 basically so there's now quite a few precedents for a right-wing far-right

02:17 coalition. In Italy the Brothers of Italy are in an alliance with the League

02:23 Party which is essentially a far-right party often thought to be one. In Finland

02:29 you've got the conservatives that are in a government with the Party of the Finns

02:34 which is also considered to be a far-right party. In Spain the right and

02:38 the far-right were only seven seats short of being able to form a majority

02:43 after the last elections in September and they actually do have some alliances

02:47 at the regional level already between the PP and Vox. So this whole thing is

02:51 is well on the way across Europe. Why is it happening? Partly because of electoral

02:56 maths. So you've got the traditional big parties you know like the sort of

03:01 mainstream conservatives and socialists in France, Spain and Germany for example.

03:05 They've seen their share of the vote decline over the years so it's been

03:09 shrinking. That means a fragmentation of the political scene so coalitions are

03:14 becoming much more necessary. And the other thing that's happened is the some

03:20 of these far-right parties they've toned down their rhetoric. So just before an

03:24 election they will go easy on the culture wars if you will. So we saw this

03:29 with Herth Wilders as well. He was suddenly not talking so much about ending

03:34 mosques and things like that which he'd previously talked about. He was trying to

03:38 pivot to more conservative voters who worried about immigration. In Slovakia we

03:43 saw the return of a populist strongman Robert Fico a few weeks ago. He also did

03:49 a similar kind of pivot but to pocketbook issues you know inflation,

03:53 cost of living away from the more culture war type things. So it's a

03:59 combination of all that which I think has led to these coalitions which

04:03 include far-right parties. But when you say a trend Angela we have to bear in

04:08 mind that it's not a completely linear process because there's one very

04:11 important counter example which just happened in Poland where after nearly

04:15 10 years in power of the Law and Justice Party we suddenly saw a surge in the

04:21 pro-european electorate with parties that could still in theory form a

04:25 coalition of the opposition pro-european coalition. They clearly had

04:33 a lot of support in the Polish election so it's not a

04:37 one-way process, a one-way direction in Europe let's say.

04:41 Okay thanks for that Armen and of course as you say could take months before

04:46 there is a government formed in the Netherlands.

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