Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau, and with me are Zasanne Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we would like to talk about the far right in Europe. We saw in Portugal that the far right has gained a substantial amount of votes and this now prevents the formation of a classic government of the center left and the center right. And we also

noted that this week in the Netherlands, that Gert Wilders has staged what we think is a tactical

retreat from becoming prime minister. And there will now be negotiations going on that will not

have him in that role. And we would like to sort of look behind these

two developments and maybe add some further thoughts on the status of the far right in Europe.

Jack, you wrote about Wilders. What happened there and what's going to be the consequence?

For people who are not very familiar with how the negotiations in the Netherlands have gone since last November's

election. There have been four parties from that election that have been in talks to try and

form a new government. Herald is in the PVV. His party came in first placed in the November

elections. They've been negotiating with three other parties. So there's the VBD, which is Mark Rittes Party, kind of liberal conservative.

There is a party called the BBB, the Farmer Citizens Movement, which is a kind of pro-agrarian sort of populist party.

And then there is another party, the new social contract party led by a man called Peter Romzic, which is kind of center,

center, right, and rhetorically at least a little bit populist. These four parties have been

in talks with each other, but the difficulty has always been that neither the VVD nor the NSC,

Peter Olmzig's party, really wanted to fully enter government with Wilders and the PV.

There were several different reasons for this.

The most important ones were that they considered many of Wilders' policies to be basically unconstitutional.

So things like at one point Wilders had talked about banning the Quran and stuff like that,

which is probably what he's best known for outside of the Netherlands.

That obviously abrogates the Dutch constitution's provisions for freedom of religion.

And probably quite a few more provisions as well.

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