Anti-Islam campaigner Geert Wilders is looking to form an alliance with other similarly-minded parties, including France’s Front National, to fight next year’s European elections, the Volkskrant reports on Saturday.
Wilders, who leads the PVV in parliament, recently met Front National leader Marine Le Pen for lunch to discuss his ideas for a pan-European approach. “We think the same about 90% of things, perhaps more,” Wilders said in the Volkskrant interview. “We also have a lot of points of agreement in terms of immigration.”
Wilders said the meeting with Le Pen is the first of “many” he plans to have with other European party leaders in an effort of forge an alliance. “Next year we can make an enormous advance,” he told the Volkskrant. “Parties which are against what we call elite are growing in popularity. These are parties which support the national interest, the national identity.”
Wilders declined to say which other parties he is in talks with and would not comment on whether he would visit new German party Alternative fur Deutschland. “Some don’t want it to be public,” Wilders said. He said he did plan to hold talks with the Flemish nationalists Vlaams Belang “but they do not know this yet”.
A political revolution is under way “from England to Germany, from France to the Netherlands and Italy”, Wilders told the paper.
“We are going to judge people by what they are, without fear for the electoral consquences,” Wilders said. “I have more in common with those parties abroad than with the entire [Dutch] parliament.”
The PVV took four of the 25 Dutch seats in the European parliament at the last elections in 2009 with 17% of the vote. As well as wanting a freeze on non-western immigration, the party says the European parliament should be abolished and wants the Netherlands to leave the euro.