ABSTRACT
Politics is not just about propounding ideas, but also about achieving concrete results. Not all parties are after the same kind of result, however. For example, political scientists Kaare Strøm and Wolfgang C. Müller distinguish between parties who prioritise votes (vote-seeking), those more focused on influencing policy (policy-seeking) and those that put positions of power first (officeseeking).1 These three positions are, of course, model types: in practice, every party moves between these three extremes. Where should we place the PVV? What result do they aim for and to what extent are they successful? In order to answer this we can look at the party’s practical political activities. As we will see, the most significant of these play out at the Binnenhof in The Hague. There the party has fiercely opposed the government since 2006, with the exception of a short period between October 2010 and April 2012 in which the party supported a minority government. The PVV’s extra-parliamentary activities in the Netherlands have been limited to a few small demonstrations or support to citizens’ initiatives against the construction of windmills or mosques. Beyond the Dutch borders, however, Wilders has been particularly active as a speaker at a number of conferences and party events, as well as acting as an architect of a collaboration of several national populist parties.
