Do we like Geert Wilders?
Our score: 1 out of 10. Years of campaigning against Muslims and asylum seekers in his own words and party programmes, plus a group-insult conviction, with no real good to set against it.
Wilders has been in Dutch politics for decades and built the PVV into the biggest party in the 2023 election. His coalition lasted about a year before he pulled the PVV out in June 2025 because partners wouldn’t sign his asylum plan. The October 2025 election then cut his seats from 37 to 26, and the other main parties had ruled out working with him.
The scandal he is best known for is the “fewer Moroccans” moment. At a 2014 rally he asked supporters whether they wanted more or fewer Moroccans, and the crowd chanted “Fewer! Fewer!”. He was convicted of group insult in 2016 with no penalty. The appeal court upheld that conviction in 2020, and the Supreme Court did the same in 2021, calling his remarks unnecessarily offensive. He called the ruling corrupt and said he wouldn’t take his words back.
On the harm check, his 2025 campaign made a total freeze on asylum the top priority and promised to revoke the status of all 70,000 Syrian refugees. Wilders called refugees “fortune hunters who are coming mainly for our houses, our benefits and our women.” The same programme would strip Islamic schools of their constitutional right to religious instruction and pull the Netherlands out of the Paris Agreement. In January 2026 he wrote on X about Syrians that “the rest must be returned by force.” Greenpeace Netherlands’ director calls him a climate denier.
Accuracy is another soft spot. In 2017 he told German TV that Pim Fortuyn was killed by a radical Muslim, but the killer was a radical environmentalist. Wilders said he had meant Theo van Gogh. Lately the PVV has been bleeding support to Forum for Democracy, and of the incoming cabinet he said “We will fight them mercilessly from day one.”
Fairness matters here. Dutch prosecutors sought 14-year sentences against two Pakistani men tried over calls to kill him, and the judge said he had received hundreds, if not thousands, of death threats. That is a serious crime against him and nobody deserves it. He told the court he had been “robbed of my freedom” for two decades. He has lived with that pressure for a very long time.
So where does that leave a family page that wants to like people and be nice? We read no charity, no kind acts and no cause taken up at a personal cost beyond his own stubbornness, and that’s honestly the whole list. He says the voter is in charge, but his programmes go after Muslims and asylum seekers as groups. For an LGBTQ+ reader, a record of delaying anti-discrimination law and backing the rollback of trans rights settles it.