Holland's Challenge to Tolerance
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 March 2017
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why is liberal, tolerant Netherlands home to one of Europe's most successful anti-immigration, anti-Islamic parties?
Geert Wilders' radical right-wing Party For Freedom (PVV) - which wants to close mosques and ban the Qur'an - will be one of the biggest in the new Dutch parliament. So have its voters - whom Wilders once described as "Henk and Ingrid", Holland's Mr and Mrs Average - turned their backs on centuries-old Dutch values? Or do they just understand those values in a different way?
Unlike some far-right parties elsewhere in Europe, the PVV has no neo-Nazi roots. It's loud in its support for gay and women's rights. It promotes itself as a strong defender of Holland's Jewish community. Is its ideology just an opportunistic mishmash? Or does it make some sense in a Dutch context? Searching for Henk and Ingrid, Tim Whewell sets off through Dutch "flyover country" - the totally un-photogenic satellite towns and modern villages that tourists, and Holland's own elite, rarely see.
He asks if the PVV's platform is just thinly disguised racism. Or has it raised important questions about immigration and multiculturalism that other European countries, including the UK, have been scared to ask?
Producer: Helen Grady.
Transcript
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| 0:36.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:40.0 | Thanks for downloading analysis. We've got a twofer for you, a pair of programs looking |
| 0:45.4 | at radical parties across Europe. In the first, Team Hewell travels to the Netherlands |
| 0:50.5 | ahead of elections there. He asks why one of Europe's most |
| 0:53.6 | stridently anti-immigration, anti-Islamic parties has been so successful in one of |
| 0:58.8 | its most tolerant and progressive countries. |
| 1:01.2 | Is he here? |
| 1:05.0 | Oh, so he is. |
| 1:07.0 | I can just see him in the crowd now. |
| 1:09.0 | Trademark swept back, silver hair above the people completely surrounded by cameras. |
| 1:15.1 | And they say he's chosen to start his campaign here because this is one of the very few places |
| 1:19.4 | in Holland where he actually feels safe. |
| 1:21.0 | He's a man who hasn't lived in his own home for 12 years because he's |
| 1:23.8 | under death threats. But here he feels is among his own people. |
| 1:28.1 | It's not easy to get close to Khert builders, one of the most divisive, some would say extreme politicians in Europe, but I'm doing my best |
... |
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