How “Israel” Won the Dutch Elections

The PVV, the anti-Islam party of parliamentary veteran and avid Israel supporter Geert Wilders, overran the Dutch general election. Wilders’s mega victory, which the polls had not predicted, sent Dutch polite society into turmoil. Still, it has a certain logic, at least in retrospect. The last six weeks of the Dutch election season overlapped with the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and attendant Muslim and leftist protests in Europe and the Netherlands. The public focus on Islamist violence and Islamic culture war issues played into Wilders’s hands.