The Road and the Landscape (2)
or: Can Green Be Right?
Q. What is the first thing you would do once you are free to go outside?
A. I think I would take my own car which I haven’t been able to use for a very long time and would take a ride all by myself and enjoy it.
A child interviewing PVV party leader Geert Wilders, who has been living under close protection for twelve years. Jeugdjournaal (Kids News), Dutch NOS television, 3 March 2017
This is a man who watches the landscape from the road. Freedom equals driving a car. Unsurprisingly, a vehicle tax reduction of 50% is the crowning point nr. 11 of his one-page election ‘programme‘.
The position of this man’s Freedom Party (PVV) in the political spectrum is clear (even though its basic neoliberal austerity is sweetened with welfare goodies). Islam should be banned; the Netherlands should leave the EU; and human-induced climate change is a hoax.
If there seems to be a consistency between these principles, it is largely an effect of habituation. In fact, there is no logical contradiction between concerns about the rise of islamic militancy and oppression, about the social and environmental effects of immigration and overpopulation, and about global warming. One may consistently be anti-islamic and anti-fossil.
How green can the right be?
‘Green-right’ is a small niche that in the Netherlands has for some time been filled by fringe parties, unable to overcome the electoral threshold (Groen-Rechts, Partij voor Milieu en Recht, both defunct; Groen Liberale Partij, Nederland Duurzaam, and the cutely named Partij Bonte Koe or Spotted Cow Party). A few dropouts have found an unlikely refuge in Wilders’ PVV. It is a pale shade of green. Pro animal welfare, pro open landscapes, but anti wind energy — which counts as landscape ‘pollution’.
Undeniably, a nostalgic regret for disappearing landscapes may be one of the causes of feeling ‘green’. But though this nostalgia may easily take a nationalist tinge, it is totally at odds with the PVV’s fiercely automobilistic fossil freedom ideology.
A more prominent, but wishful liberal ‘green’ initiative (trusting the market to clean things up) has died as ingloriously in the Netherlands as it has in the UK. There is a fundamental contradiction between environmentalism and capitalism/(neo-)liberalism. Green politics calls for radical changes in production and consumption patterns. Which in turn call for government initiative.
But with an election outcome that favours a coalition encompassing the leftist green and the moderate right it has become an urgent question how far the right can be pulled toward the green side.