PVV-leader Geert Wilders has come under fire from politicians after a comment he made on the campaign trail at a market in The Hague on Wednesday. Wilders said that voters want “a city with less problems and, if possible less Moroccans.”
Geert Wilders was on a market in Loosduinen with frontrunner for the PVV, Leon de Jong, campaigning for municipal council elections which are set for the 19th of March. They were handing out guilders in protest of the euro. During the visit, Wilders was questioned by NOS reporter Michiel Breedveld.
“Most important are the people here on the market, the Hagenaars, Hagenezen and Scheveningers”, Wilders said. “We are doing it for those people. They are voting for a safer and more social city with less problems and, if possible also less Moroccans.”
In reaction to this statement from Wilders, who is now picking fault with Moroccans as well as the religion of Islam, politicians took to tv-programme Pauw en Witteman.
SP-leader Emile Roemer said these kinds of comments scare him. He says Wilders is now going further than he did before. First he aimed at a religion, and now an entire population. “He is now clearly crossing a line”, Roemer said. The SP-leader concluded that he doesn’t want to share a government with “such a party.”
Halbe Zijlstra, from the liberal VVD, said that you shouldn’t look at peoples’ origins, but to their contributions to society. He did not refuse a possible new coalition with the PVV, however.
Hans Spekman from the social-democratic PvdA wrote on Twitter that “Wilders idiotic judgement about a city with fewer Moroccans shows what’s at stake. Terrible.”
This isn’t exactly the first time that Wilders’ anti-Islam rhetoric has taken on a more conventionally racist tone. In a court case (which resulted in his acquittal) Wilders was charged not only with criminally insulting Muslims on the basis of their religion but also with incitement of hatred and discrimination against Moroccans and other immigrants of non-Western origin on the basisi of their race or ethnicity. Only a few months ago, Wilders’ PVV initiated a parliamentary debate on the Netherlands’ so-called “Moroccan problem”.