Gurgen Obviously the "exit" parties don't regulate migration and don't fix the economy. But neither does anyone else. The exit parties are here to stay because mainstream politics is broken beyond repair.
You may well not be saying migration is to blame, but you are saying the election of a virulently anti-migrant "extremist" politician is an inevitability brought about by state capture and the inefficacy of both sides of "normal" politics when it comes to reigning in capital. Well why so inevitable?
I first heard of Geert Wilders well over a decade ago because he was an overseas figure who declared himself inspired by the Australian politician Pauline Hanson. Hanson appeared in the 1990s and triggered a "lurch to the right" in our national politics, via first anti-Asian, then Islamophobic rhetoric, which was sharpened by the furore around 9/11 and the increasing arrival of POC asylum seekers in Australian territorial waters.
Wilders has visited Australia several times. He is intermittently bankrolled for junkets here by people like mining billionaire Gina Rinehart, whose father publicly advocated the forced sterilisation of First Nations people in the 1980s. Wilders has always been a fucking racist clown. He has always had Dracula's haircut.
Wilders' rise, versus the rise of any party more narrowly focused on the economic issues you mention correctly as the root cause of widespread resentment, is not at all inevitable. People like Wilders come to the fore because of the relentless propagation of racist, anti-migrant ideology by the rotten "fourth estate", and by the sort of person who is happy to receive the common-or-garden "but they don't integrate" Islamophobia of this apparatus at face value.
If advocacy for hijabi in the police force is "woke nonsense"—some sort of distraction—then bruiting a plan (however abandoned it may now be) to ban the scripture of a major religion is far, far more than merely "unconstitutional". Where's the proportionality?
A braying demagogue like Wilders should be recognised, contra his obvious subterfuges now he's in line for power, as what he is—a white supremacist, nationalist fascist. Just as Pauline Hanson always has been in Australia. Wilders is not inevitable, any more than the deranged ramping-up of Macronist Islamophobia under the mealy-mouthed rubric of "laïcité" in France is inevitable. Raise the fucking bar I say, it's up to Europeans, and Australians, to do better and stop letting these fascists thrive.
