Have Populist Politics Reached 'Peak Trump'?
Whew! That was close.
I wasn't expecting to be waiting on the edge of my seat for the outcome of this year's Dutch parliamentary elections. But I wasn't expecting Donald Trump to be America's president, either.
After "Brexit," Great Britain's vote last year to leave the European Union, and Trump's upset election victory, the whole world has been watching to see whether a wave of anti-immigrant populist upsets would win a trifecta in the Netherlands and keep rolling through upcoming elections in France, Germany and other European elections.
In the Netherlands, that movement's champion in Wednesday's parliamentary elections was anti-Muslim firebrand Geert Wilders, a Trump fan with similarly interesting hair (You might even say it glows!) and xenophobic attitudes toward immigrants and refugees.
To give you an idea of where he stands politically by American standards, one of our own prominent xenophobes, Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican, gave Wilders a shout-out on Twitter last weekend as one who "understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies."
The backlash against King's remarks was bipartisan. Among King's Republican critics, for example, Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida, a child of Cuban immigrants, immediately tweeted back, "Do I qualify as 'somebody else's baby'?"
But King also won praise -- from David Duke. The former KKK leader and former Republican Louisiana gubernatorial nominee praised King's tweet as proof that "sanity reigns supreme" in King's northwest Iowa congressional district.
And King doesn't sound far removed from Wilders, who is known for such comments as: "I don't hate Muslims. I hate Islam," and "Islam is not a religion; it's an ideology, the ideology of a retarded culture."
And Wilders sounds mightily close to the sentiments of long-experienced French anti-immigrant leader Marine Le Pen. She has been showing higher approval numbers than ever in in the run-up to presidential elections in May, in which she is campaigning for a French exit from the EU.
And Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel faces tough challenges in September elections from the right over her generous policies toward refugees.
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