Geert Wilders

The Netherlands currently has 43 Islamic primary schools. Each is fully
subsidised by the government. Yet since the first school was established
in 1988 Islamic schools have been confronted with obstacles by the
Ministry of Education, bad press and increasingly strict state supervision.
Under pressure to improve their image, since 2008 Dutch Islamic
primary schools have turned their attention away from expanding their
numbers and instead focused on improving school quality. In this article
we describe the various developments and draw upon large scale
empirical research to demonstrate the present state of affairs both in
terms of cognitive and non-cognitive pupil achievements. We argue that
the present results offer reasons to be cautiously optimistic.

Geert Wilders is internationally the most iconic politician of the Netherlands and one of the most mediagenic flag bearers of Europe’s new right. This paper presents an analysis of a fundamental aspect of Wilders’ claims, namely their apparently factual basis, by employing framing theory and contentious politics theory, and taking a mixed method approach of quantitative data analysis and qualitative critical reading of Wilders’ Twitter timeline. Our main research question is: How did Geert Wilders frame his political claims, specifically about race and ethnicity, through statistics, numbers, and ‘facts’ on Twitter in the three months leading up to the Dutch elections on 15 March 2017? Our aim is to take Geert Wilders as a case study to closely examine how politicians can frame a particular topic to suit their own purposes, and manifests itself when politicians move to the new media sphere where their views seem to be less frequently challenged and their statements less verified by the media. We will conceptualize Wilders’ Twitter practice as ‘information bricolage’ which is a consequence of the new media reality where, on his own Twitter feed, a politician appears to be the editor of his own news. We show how the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) campaign is almost in its entirety Wilders’ media performance, and how this is, both online and offline, largely devoid of conversation but consists of one-way broadcasting instead. In addition, Wilders shows a paradoxical attitude towards statistics. On the one hand, he challenges the objectivity of numbers or the institutes that produce them, while at the times he uses these ‘facts’ to validate his statements. By way of these practices, Geert Wilders rationalizes and legitimizes discriminating claims about Dutch immigrant populations.