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On the morning of June 3, Geert Wilders, member of the Dutch House of Representatives and head of the Party for Freedom (PVV), tweeted that the PVV would be leaving the Dutch ruling coalition. This move at once brought down the Dutch government and began a new chapter in an extraordinary personal – and national – saga. It was a generation ago, in 2002, on the verge of an election that would likely have made him prime minister, that Pim Fortuyn, an outspoken gay sociologist, was gunned down in a parking lot in Hilversum as punishment for his outspoken recognition of the existential nature of the Islamic threat. Two years later, Theo van Gogh, an iconoclastic columnist and raconteur, was murdered on an Amsterdam street in retribution for his own forthright criticism of Islam. For a brief period, the Somali-born Dutch legislator Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was the country’s leading critic of the religion under which she’d grown up, but she was soon forced to leave for America. That left Wilders to take to the pulpit – or, if you will, to put on the boxing gloves.

And what a remarkable job he’s done – and in the face of impossible pressure. Not only have death threats from the adherents of the Religion of Peace obliged him to live under police protection since 2004; as punishment for telling the truth about that execrable ideology, he’s been denounced by corporate leaders, by academics, by clergy, by his fellow politicians, and, not least, by his country’s (and, often, the world’s) legacy media. He’s been called in on the carpet more than once by security and justice officials, and in 2007 no less august a personage than Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, who is now king, rebuked Wilders (although without mentioning his name) with the remark, “Not for nothing do we have the saying, ‘Speech is silver, silence is golden.’” (Obey your own advice, dude.) In 2008, a who’s-who of the Dutch cultural elite signed a statement, published on the front page of the newspaper Trouw, that condemned Wilders’s “intolerance” and urged “a new balance between the values of then and those of now” – in short, rank and cowering appeasement of Islam. In 2009 he was denied entry into the U.K. on the grounds that he might introduce unseemly ideas into a country awash in jihad-happy imams; in 2010, he was put on trial for insulting Islam. As Wilders explained to me that year in an interview in The Hague, “The political elite today is not very successful in beating my party in a political way, so  they are looking for a different way…..The more popular I get with the people, the more people want to shut me up.” Sound familiar?

In 2012, after several years of electoral advancement, the PVV suffered a serious setback at the polls, with its number of seats in the House of Representatives cut in half from 24 to 12. Over coffee in Amsterdam, Wilders’s PVV colleague Martin Bosma told me, “Rumors of our death are greatly exaggerated.” He would be proven right – eventually. In the meantime, however, successive Dutch governments would oversee (and, mostly, overlook) the very process of major social transformation that Fortuyn, Van Gogh, Hirsi Ali, and Wilders had all warned about. Yes, most of the countries of Western Europe have undergone similar changes, but in none has the metamorphosis seemed quite as dramatic as in the Netherlands. It’s a land of tall, lanky, easygoing blonds who have welcomed into their midst an ever-growing cohort of small, swarthy, steely-eyed foreigners; a land with a longstanding devotion to individual freedom that now has a sizable minority of inhabitants for whom the most important word in life is submission; a country known since the days of Erasmus for the independent-mindedness of its women that has become the home to God knows how many housewives who aren’t allowed in public except in the company of male relatives; a country that was the first to enact same-sex marriage that now boasts more and more residents whose faith instructs them to toss gay men off roofs.

Eleven years after I met Martin Bosma for coffee came the elections of 2023. They took place, specifically, on November 22, when Hamas’s shocking butchery in Israel was still fresh in the memory, and every sensible soul in the Netherlands was aware of the very real possibility that such jihadist carnage could take place on their own turf. On that day the PVV pulled off what was widely viewed as one of the most colossal upsets in modern European electoral history: doubling its number of seats in the House, it became the largest of the Netherlands’ many parties. Under ordinary circumstances, the head of a party scoring such a success would almost certainly have been installed as prime minister; but even though members of Wilders’s party now made up a full quarter of the House, he knew that as a longtime thorn in the side of the elite he’d be unacceptable to his fellow party bosses as the head of government. And so, as he formed a coalition with the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the New Social Contract (NSC), and the Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) – a coalition that took months to put together – Wilders stood aside and allowed longtime Labor Party (PvdA) apparatchik Dick Schoof to become prime minister. And who was named Speaker of the House? The PVV’s own Martin Bosma.

In one respect, the new government marked a departure from the Dutch norm: many of its members would be non-politicians, mostly business people and experts from the private sector. (Trump’s second-term cabinet comes to mind.) Announcing its formation, Wilders promised that it would “set a new course for our country” and make Dutch citizens “proud of this country again.” Among the agenda items: stricter policies for refugees and “family reunification,” the swift deportation of criminal aliens and immigrants without valid residence permits, and a more aggressive approach to integration initiatives. The Dutch media gave the new government a failing grade even before it took office, because it was, as I wrote at the time, “to all intents and purposes, a Dutch variation on Trumpism – favoring natives over illegal immigrants, national sovereignty over subordination to international organizations (the UN) or superstates (the EU), the voting power of ‘deplorables’ over the tyranny of a small unelected elite, and common-sense environmentalism over radical climate ideology.”

The plan made sense. But instead of following it, the new coalition soon joined the governments of other Western European countries in condemning Israeli actions in Gaza. Eventually, Wilders decided he’d had enough. On June 3, as noted, he brought down the government, explaining: “I signed up for the strictest asylum policy, not for the downfall of the Netherlands.” The next day – and this, mind you, in a nation where the legislators tend to be colorless technocrats who are disinclined to engage in displays of eloquence – he unleashed on the House of Representatives an impromptu speech of rare power. It was provoked by Labor Party chief and EU macher Frans Timmermans, who, as reported by the RAIR Foundation, stood up in the House to accuse Israel of “war crimes,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “genocidal violence” – and, in addition, to charge Wilders, in the words of the Jewish News Syndicate, with “cozying up to the ‘far right’ Israeli government.” To which Wilders retorted, in part, as follows:

I’m proud as a peacock that I support Israel. I’m proud of that. It’s not a disgrace. You’re a disgrace, making well-nigh anti-Semitic statements about a country that’s fighting for its existence.

Because that’s what it’s doing. Israel is fighting an existential battle….

And now I’m telling you, Mr. Timmermans, via you, Mr. Chairman: Israel is fighting our battle…If Jerusalem falls, then Athens, Paris, and Amsterdam are next.

They are fighting our battle. And if our mothers, in the West, can sleep peacefully, it is because the mothers of Israeli soldiers are awake, wondering whether their children will come out of the battle alive.

And that was just part of it. Again, Dutch politicians don’t often talk this way. Yes, the Dutch are famously good at speaking their minds, even if it means being exceedingly blunt and offensive. But rarely if ever do they do it with the flair and fire and fury, and the tough, bold, uncompromising spirit, that Wilders displayed at that lectern. After all, compromise, not courage, is the time-honored watchword for Dutch politicians – and, for that matter, for Dutch businessmen and other Dutchmen engaged in give-or-take with one another. Compromise! But on his convictions about Islam and on his devotion to Israel – and, above all, on the paramount question of human liberty – Wilders has stubbornly refused, year in and year out, to yield an inch. To be sure, when he agreed to be part of the coalition government a year and a half ago, he made what you might characterize as a sort of compromise, accepting the promises of his coalition partners. But when it became clear that they had betrayed him and were not about to change their tune, he brought down (to shift metaphors) the whole house of cards.

Now what? In the 2023 election, Wilders more than earned the right to be named prime minister. He deserves that prize now. No one else can or will do what needs to be done to save the Netherlands. If the powers that be persist in withholding that post from him – and that includes the cowardly constitutional monarch, King Willem-Alexander, whose haughty disdain for Wilders (his inferior, but his better) has been public knowledge since long before he assumed the throne – then it will be a bad joke to speak of the Netherlands as a democracy.