All across Europe, right-wing populist parties are enjoying significant popular support. Led by charismatic politicians like Geert Wilders, they are exploiting fear of Muslim immigration and frustration with the political establishment — and are forcing mainstream parties to shift to the right. By SPIEGEL Staff.
He is a politician who claims to have nothing against Muslims, and that he only hates Islam. He is a charismatic man with peroxide-blonde hair, elegant, eloquent and precisely the type of politician that has put fear into the hearts of Germany’s mainstream political parties in recent weeks.
He is Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician of a stripe that doesn’t yet exist in Germany: a populist who stirs up hatred against Islam and the establishment, and who has taken away many votes from the traditional parties in his native Netherlands. So many, in fact, that they can hardly form a government without giving him a share of power.
Wilders is the central figure of a movement that has been expanding its following in Europe for years, entering parliaments and governments, and ensuring that minarets were banned in Switzerland and burqas in Belgium. It is a sort of popular uprising against Islam, spearheaded by right-wing politicians and journalists throughout Europe. They portray themselves as people who are willing to express a sentiment they claim no one else dares to express: that Muslims have infiltrated Europe and that the West must be saved. And the approach has been successful.
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”Muslims have infiltrated Europe and that the West must be saved” – Exactly.