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Nile Gardiner, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, joins ‘FOX News Live’ to discuss the ‘No. 1 issue’ across Western Europe.
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Firebrand politician Geert Wilders’ surprising late November election victory in the Netherlands has prompted a political sea-change and could alter the European political landscape.
Wilders, the so-called Dutch Donald Trump, seeks to cobble together a coalition to govern the northern European country of nearly 18 million people.
Fox News Digital spoke to a number of experts who note that the 60-year-old Wilders’ election triumph has catapulted hot-button issues of unfettered mass migration, open borders, crime and terrorism into the larger U.S. and European conversations.
“It is very clear on both sides of the Atlantic, the issue of mass migration is a huge electoral issue. And I would say the political developments in Europe and the overwhelming rejection of open doors approach is a clear warning sign for Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 presidential election,” Nile Gardiner, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, told Fox News Digital.
HARD-RIGHT FIREBRAND GEERT WILDERS WINS ELECTION IN NETHERLANDS: ‘DUTCH DONALD TRUMP’
Anti-Islam firebrand politician Geert Wilders, center, could alter the American and European political landscape. Wilders’ views on open borders are different from the Biden administration’s. Immigration is a top issue among American voters and European voters. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File; Emannuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images; Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Gardiner said while “the No. 1 issue for the U.S. election is inflation and the cost of living, immigration is high up there for the voters. The European election will make Biden very nervous.”
“As we saw with Geert Wilders’ stunning election victory in the Netherlands, there is taking place right now a political earthquake across Western Europe,” Gardiner noted. “Wilders’ win is a real game changer. The election was overwhelmingly about mass migration into one of Europe’s most important countries.
“Wilders stands on a platform of opposing mass migration into the Netherlands, and at the same time he stands against the increasing Islamization of Europe. Voters are increasingly rejecting open borders, mass migration and the rise of Islamist ideology in their societies.”
Migrants at the front of a line are processed for entry by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. (Jon Michael Raasch/Fox News Digital)
Prior to Wilders’ victory, Fox News Digital reported some European politicians expressed shock and growing concern about the widespread presence of radical Islamists at anti-Israel rallies.
In 2017, Wilders argued he wanted to “de-Islamisize” the Netherlands. With the Islamist Hamas organization’s massacre of 1,200 people, including over 30 Americans, Oct. 7 in Israel, attitudes in the Netherlands toward Wilders and his People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) ostensibly improved in dramatic terms.
SWEDISH PM LOOKS TO MILITARY FOR HELP AMID GANG VIOLENCE SPIKE
Writing in the conservative British Spectator magazine, Freddy Gray noted, “But on October 7, the day Hamas struck, his VVD party was polling at 12 percent. Throughout the month of October, that support more than doubled.
“What changed? Well, vast pro-Palestine protests took place in Holland. On October 14, 20,000 people marched in Amsterdam. The biggest news story in Holland in the past month, as in Britain, was the sheer numbers of people willing to take to the streets to wave flags in solidarity with Palestine and berate their government for its unwillingness to condemn Israeli aggression.”
An anti-Israel protest in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Protesters hold flags while listening to speeches during the demonstration. October 2023 (Photo by Ana Fernandez/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Gardiner’s analysis mirrored Gray’s points by noting, “The horrific horrible evil massacre in Israel hit very hard in Europe. The barbaric terrorist attack in Israel could take place on European soil if European governments do not act. There is growing awareness of this in Europe.
“If Israel does not defeat Hamas, Hamas will repeat what it did in Israel all over Europe. Not only does Hamas hate Israel, but it also hates Western civilization. … Wilders’ victory is the shape of things to come in Europe.”
There have been some significant telltale signs that parts of Europe are shifting to a more conservative political culture. Italian right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni shocked many with her election win last year.
Meloni has called on the European Union to establish a naval blockade in the Mediterranean Sea to stop the influx of migrants. She warned that the “future of Europe” is at stake.
After eight years of a socialist government in Sweden and amid reports of rising crime and failed integration among Muslim immigrants, Swedish voters opted for a shift to a right-wing coalition government.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni delivers a speech during a two-day “General States of Birth” conference in Rome May 12, 2023. (Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images)
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson secured the parliamentary backing of the anti-immigration party, Sweden Democrats, to form the coalition.
“Unfettered immigration, particularly from Muslim countries, but from non-Western states more broadly, is viewed by an ever-increasing proportion of voters as the cause of the deterioration of their societies,” said American-Israeli commentator Caroline Glick, a former assistant foreign adviser to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Immigrants carry out the vast majority of violent crimes. They are well on their way to bankrupting welfare agencies and are seen increasingly as destroying public education for children of native European families.”
Migrants gather inside the so-called “Hotspot” operational facility containing over 1,500 people Aug. 4, 2022, in Lampedusa, Italy. (Antonio Masiello/Getty Images)
She added that the political movement to the conservative right in Europe “is informed by a sense that governments of the left who are largely animated by a post-nationalist worldview have proven incapable of providing for the basic needs of their societies, first and foremost personal security, but also including adequate education and economic opportunity.”
Both Gardiner and Glick noted that the largely Muslim mass protests against the Jewish state, which have blanketed many European capitals from London to Paris to Berlin, are stoking antisemitism.
“This has led to rising antisemitism in Europe and created a culture of fear. It further underscores the failure of multiculturalism that was also pushed in the Netherlands,” Gardiner said.
ANTISEMITISM EXPOSED
A protester is detained by French police during an unauthorized demonstration in support of Palestinians at Place de la Republique in Paris Oct. 12, 2023. (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)
“Hamas’s invasion of Israel and its mass slaughter of Israeli Jews emboldened Muslim communities in Europe, the U.S. and throughout the Western world to riot and terrorize and threaten the ways of life of their host societies,” Glick said.
“The decision by Hamas supporters in England to stage a massive demonstration on Remembrance Day and similar efforts in Europe and the U.S. to prevent public Christmas tree lighting celebrations by Hamas supporters are testaments to their sense of empowerment on the heels of the invasion and slaughter that Hamas jihadists carried out in Israel.”
A police officer stands guard at a stabbing in Paris Dec. 2, 2023. (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)
The recent murder of a German tourist in Paris prompted French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin to declare France was “durably under threat from Islamist terrorism.” A 26-year-old French man, Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, who was born to Iranian parents, was accused of stabbing the tourist and injuring two other people.
Rajabpour-Miyandoab pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and said he was motivated to murder by the war in Gaza.
SUSPECT IN ATTACK THAT KILLED TOURIST IN PARIS REPORTEDLY SHOUTED ‘ALLAHU AKBAR’
A group of people thought to be migrants are brought to Dover, Kent, onboard a Border Force vessel following a small boat incident in the Channel, April 13, 2022. (Gareth Fuller/PA via AP)
“Everything is done to ensure that the conflict between Hamas and Israel does not weigh on communities in France,” Marc Eichinger, a former French intelligence agent, told Fox News Digital. “But it’s clear that the small French Jewish community is moving closer to the hard right. They have no illusions, no magic formula. The French have been shocked by the reaction of certain leaders on the left who, as we can also see with Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., are clearly antisemitic.”
The former head of the British Labour Party, Corbyn has been engulfed in antisemitism scandals and termed members of the Islamist terrorist movements of Hamas and Hezbollah his “friends.”
Last month, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, head of the far-left French party France Unbowed (LFI), refused to join a large mainstream march against antisemitism and support for French “Republican” values. The anti-immigrant far-right party National Rally, and its three-time presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, was also there to join the protest against the world’s oldest hatred.
LAMPEDUSA, ITALY – Migrants wait to board the Coast Guard ship “Diciotti” before being transferred to Porto Empedocle from the so-called “Hotspot” operational facility, containing over 1,700 people, on August 3, 2022 in Lampedusa, Italy. The Italian island of Lampedusa reached 500 percent over capacity in migrant reception centres with the recent uptick in sea rescues. (Photo by Antonio Masiello/Getty Images)
Just days after the Oct. 7 massacre, Le Pen said, “The very worst is happening. We see pogroms on Israeli soil inflicted by a terrorist group with an indescribable bestiality. … Israel must be allowed to eradicate Hamas.”
According to polls in 2023, Le Pen’s popularity and credibility as a problem-solver are growing among French voters.
PARIS, FRANCE – NOVEMBER 12: Marine Le Pen (C) and deputies including Sebastien Chenu to her left and Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally to her right participate in a march against antisemitism from the Esplanade des Invalides to the Senate November 12, 2023 in Paris, France. More than 100,000 people marched in the capital to protest against rising antisemitism in the wake of Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza. (Photo by Antoine Gyori – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)
France’s neighbor, Germany, has experienced ubiquitous pro-Hamas demonstrations across the country. Social Democratic Party Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has pledged to crack down on the 450 active Hamas operatives and other Palestinian security threats in the country.
People gather for a pro-Palestinian rally in Berlin, Germany, Nov. 4, 2023. (Joerg Carstensen/dpa via AP)
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Michael Wolffsohn, a German-Jewish historian and commentator on modern antisemitism and Islamism, is weary of Europe’s recent shift to the right.
“The deplorable right-wing trend in Europe is, if at all, very indirectly related to 10/7,” Wolffsohn said. “The concerns and fears of many Europeans about Islam and Islamism are not the real reason for the rise of the New Right, because the AfD [Alternative for Germany party], for example, is currently courting both Iran and the Turkish Gray Wolves. “
The Turkish Gray Wolves is a fascist Turkish international movement banned by France in 2020.
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A man enters the Lower Saxony Reception Authority at the Braunschweig site next to a sign from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees Oct. 18, 2023, Lower Saxony, Brunswick. (Julian Stratenschulte/picture alliance via Getty Images)
While the AfD purports to oppose Islamism, a group of its MPs courted the Islamic Republic of Iran, according to a 2022 article in the German paper Die Welt. The U.S. State Department has classified Iran’s regime as the world’s worst state-sponsor of terrorism.
The vice chairwoman of the AfD faction in the German parliament, Beatrix von Storch, told the Welt, “The Islamic terror state Iran stands for everything that we are fighting.”
She claimed that is the “consensus in the AfD.”
Emily Robertson contributed to this report.
Benjamin Weinthal reports on Israel, Iran, Syria, Turkey and Europe. You can follow Benjamin on Twitter @BenWeinthal.
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