The elections to the European Parliament in June 2009 were the first chance many Europeans had to express any kind of democratic opinion during the worst financial meltdown since the 1930s. Less than half bothered to do so. Of those who did, some chose to vote for parties that had nothing to say about the meltdown at all and thought there should be no European Parliament anyway.
Among the oddest and nastiest of these was the personal creation of ‘Captain Peroxide’, one Geert Wilders, in the Netherlands. First elected as a city councillor in Utrecht, then as a member of parliament for the conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy in 1998, Wilders quit the party on the issue of Turkish accession to the European Union and set up his own Groep Wilders – later renamed the Party for Freedom – in 2004. It gained nine seats in the 2006 parliamentary elections and notched up 17 per cent of the vote in the 2009 European elections, coming in a close second behind the Christian Democrats of Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende. In the tangle of Dutch coalition politics, speculation mounted that Wilders might soon become Prime Minister, on the back of just one policy – Islamophobia and its discontents.
