Wilders’ time is up, says rebel Gidi Markuszower, who last week walked out of the Party of Freedom’s group in the Dutch House of Representatives with six other party members. “You can’t flog a dead horse,” Markuszower told Brussels Signal.
The departing member was vilified by former colleague Dion Gaus. “For me, this is not a black day,” Gaus said on broadcaster Powned. “Because I’m always happy when backstabbers have fucked off. And then we can move on with the country. Because for those people, the national interest doesn’t count.”
According to Markuszower, though, the rebellion is the best thing his group could have done for voters.
Under Wilders’ leadership, he argues, the Party of Freedom (PVV) is heading toward destruction. New legislation currently being drafted in the Netherlands would require political parties to admit members and grant them influence over the election manifesto and candidates list.
Parties that fail to comply risk being banned — a scenario that would spell the end of the PVV.
At present, Geert Wilders is the PVV’s sole member and has made clear that he is fundamentally opposed to such legislation. “It is a totalitarian reflex when the government starts determining what a party should look like,” he said in December on broadcaster NOS, when the debate gained momentum.
“We are supposed to control the government, not the other way around. It’s North Korean — not something that belongs in the Netherlands.”
At the time, Markuszower was also sceptical of the proposed law. “Becoming a member — how much would that cost me?” he joked.
Fellow rebel Hidde Heutink, who also left the party, added: “I’m a member of the parliamentary group; members don’t add anything for me.”
The breaking point came during the final faction meeting last week, when the seven suddenly demanded that the PVV reform itself into a membership-based party in order to avoid exclusion from the next elections.
“I don’t know whether Wilders would mind if the PVV evaporates,” Markuszower says. Unlike Wilders, he says he is willing to co-operate constructively with the new minority cabinet of D66, CDA, and VVD.
“The Netherlands needs solutions,” he told Brussels Signal. “Let’s see what kind of plans they come up with.”
Markuszower now says Wilders has done many good things but that the energy has been missing for some time. The seven rebels blame Wilders for last year’s election defeat, arguing that he was insufficiently visible during the campaign. They also accuse him of making the party revolve too heavily around his own persona.
Markuszower was slated to be minister for asylum and migration and deputy prime minister in the previous cabinet but he did not get the positions because he failed the screening by the Dutch intelligence and security service, the AIVD.
He cites several pressing current concerns. “There is a housing crisis. We are chasing companies away. Too little attention is paid to the fact that good people are leaving and the wrong people are coming in,” he says.
Multicultural coexistence can be enjoyable, he adds. “That’s exciting. That’s fun: the Turkish baker on the corner, the Moroccan barber. That’s all nice. But a country only functions if there is some sense of connectedness.”
That sense is lacking, Markuszower argues, because men are now entering the country who are contemptuous of women and homosexuals. “That makes the Netherlands unsafe. It’s not going well,” he says.
He says he fears good people and companies are leaving the Netherlands and relocating elsewhere.
“The country is turning into a third-world nation. The Netherlands is impoverishing itself,” he says.
Markuszower is also highly critical of the judiciary. Internationally, he finds it “disgusting” and claims it barely exists anymore.
“Those crazy judges have completely stretched the meaning of international treaties, such as the European Convention on Human Rights,” he says. “Those judges should be sent to a forensic psychiatric clinic. Maybe we should start appointing different judges.”
Wilders, he reiterates, “has done many good things” but has lost the drive. “There’s no point in flogging a dead horse. He had lost the drive during the campaign. He wasn’t present.”
Markuszower’s broader frustration, he says, already began under the previous coalition cabinet comprising PVV, BBB, VVD, and NSC. “It was a sham cabinet,” he says.
“The PVV was governing with GroenLinks/PvdA — the party of Frans Timmermans — disguised as NSC. It was camouflage.”
The BBB, he adds, acted in good faith but never received credit for it. The VVD, he says, has once again shown itself to be unreliable.
The PVV was the big winner in the 2023/2024 election but completely failed to deliver in government, Markuszower says.
In June, Wilders caused the collapse of the cabinet. “My view was that it would be best to walk away, because we weren’t really in government at all. I couldn’t see that our ministers were PVV members,” Markuszower says. “And the Netherlands couldn’t see it either. In the end, you have to blame yourself for that.”
Born in Tel Aviv, Markuszower has been a PVV MP since 2017. He had a long-standing relationship of trust with Wilders and had been personally close to him for many years. The “friendship” with Wilders has now evaporated, he says, while PVV members who remained in the party branded him a “Judas”.
“Are some people angry with me? Yes. Will the friendship be repaired? I don’t know,” Markuszower says.
“I didn’t feel effective,” he says about the frustration that had been building up. “I didn’t feel it was yielding results.”
According to Markuszower, rebellion is ultimately in the interest of the voter. New legislation banning parties without members would effectively end the PVV, he argues, since Wilders refuses to establish a membership-based structure.
“The fact is, he’s simply not going to do it. He just doesn’t want to,” Markuszower states.
Last week, shortly after the coup, he still said he expected more PVV members to defect to Group Markuszower. He no longer expects that, he told Brussels Signal.
“The chances of them still coming over are getting smaller and smaller. The pressure to remain with the PVV is now very high. They are trying with all their might to prevent it within the PVV. And rightly so,” he says.
Former MEP Sebastiaan Stöteler, the PVV’s second-in-command in The Hague, described what he called the betrayal of Wilders as “horrible”.
The PVV will certainly return strongly, predicts Wilders but warns of a leftward shift in the new minority cabinet (D66, CDA, VVD).
“On climate issues and, frankly, all sorts of other nonsense. People didn’t vote for that,” he says, adding that the PVV will campaign vigorously. “And we will fight.”
