Orange alert | 26 January 2017

That the US should have elected as president someone like Donald Trump came as a shock. But the US is a strange country, given to periodic outbursts of political madness — though perhaps never quite as mad as this. That the Dutch, often caricatured as pragmatic, bourgeois, phlegmatic, business-minded, tolerant and perhaps a little boring, might in March pick a party led by a vulgar rabble-rouser with dyed blond hair to be the biggest in the land is more surprising. But the rise of Geert Wilders, leader (and only official member) of the Freedom party, shows how populism is sweeping across the Netherlands too. Wilders was one of the main attractions at the recent far-right jamboree in Koblenz, where he hailed Brexit, Donald Trump and what he called the Patriotic Spring in Europe.

The old business-minded Netherlands, always seeking middle-of-the road consensus, still exists, of course, epitomised by the conservative prime minister, Mark Rutte — but even he is trying to adapt to the popular mood. This week, as part of his election campaign, he took out a full-page ad saying that people who ‘refuse to adapt, and criticise our values’ should ‘behave normally or go away’.

Douglas Murray and Melle Garschagen discuss the turbulence in Dutch politics:

It was the panic of a politician realising, perhaps too late, that he had not done enough to stop a populist challenger. Wilders’s party has a one-page manifesto that proposes clos- ing mosques, banning the Quran and turning asylum-seekers away. Polls suggest that at the election in seven weeks’ time, it could well finish first. Under the Dutch system, this might not make him prime minister — but PM or not, he will dominate the national conversation.

To understand how and why, and what is stirring in the Netherlands, you need to understand Geert Wilders’s background.