Geert Wilders

Geert Wilders (born 6 September 1963) is a Dutch politician who has led the Party for Freedom (PVV) since he founded it in 2006.

Wilders was born on 6 September 1963 in the city of Venlo, in the province of Limburg.

He is the son of Johannes Henricus Andreas Wilders and Anne Maria (Ording) Wilders.

He is the youngest of four children, and was raised Catholic.

His father was Dutch; his mother Maria Anne Ourding was born at Sukabumi, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) with a mixed Dutch and Indonesian background.

His father worked as a manager for the printing and copying manufacturing company Océ, and had hidden from the Germans during the Second World War, an experience so traumatizing that he refused to physically enter Germany even forty years later.

Wilders received his secondary education at the Mavo and Havo middle school and high school in Venlo.

Reflecting passions that came to the fore later in his career, Wilders took a course in health insurance at the Stichting Opleiding Sociale Verzekeringen in Amsterdam and earned several law certificates at the Dutch Open University.

Wilders' goal after he graduated from secondary school was to see the world.

Because he did not have enough money to travel to Australia, his preferred destination, he went to Israel instead and volunteered for a year in a moshav, Tomer, on the West Bank.

With the money he saved, he travelled to the neighbouring Arab countries, and was moved by the lack of democracy in the region.

When he returned to the Netherlands, he retained Israeli ideas about counter-terrorism and a "special feeling of solidarity" for the country.

Living in Utrecht, Wilders initially worked in the health insurance industry.

His interest in the subject led him into politics as a speech-writer for the Netherlands' People's Party for Freedom and Democracy.

He started his formal political career as a parliamentary assistant to the party leader Frits Bolkestein, specialising in foreign policy.

Wilders worked as a speechwriter for the conservative-liberal VVD; he later served as parliamentary assistant to party leader Frits Bolkestein from 1990 to 1998.

He held this job from 1990 to 1998.

He entered the municipal council of Utrecht in 1997.

The following year he entered the House of Representatives.

He is also the party's leader in the House of Representatives, having held a parliamentary seat since 1998.

Since 2004, he has been protected at all times by armed police.

Raised a Roman Catholic, Wilders left the church at his coming of age.

His travels to Israel and the Arab world as a young adult significantly helped form his political views.

Citing irreconcilable differences over the party's position on the accession of Turkey to the European Union, he left the VVD in 2004 to form his own party, the Party for Freedom.

Wilders has campaigned to stop what he views as the "Islamisation of the Netherlands".

He has compared the Quran to Mein Kampf and has campaigned to have the book banned in the Netherlands.

He advocates ending immigration from Muslim countries, and banning the construction of new mosques.

Wilders was a speaker at the Facing Jihad Conference in Israel in 2008, which discussed the dangers of jihad, and has called for a hard line against what he called "street terror" exerted by minorities in Dutch cities.

His controversial 2008 film featuring his views on Islam, Fitna, received international attention and extreme criticism.

His party was also sued because content was used in his film without permission.

He has been described in the media as populist and labeled far-right.

He was also described by the media as an Islamophobe.

Wilders rejects being labeled as far-right and views himself as a right-wing liberal, while saying he does not want to be "linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups".

More recently, Wilders has worked together with Marine Le Pen of the French National Front, as well as Austria's Freedom Party, Italy's Lega Nord and Belgium's Vlaams Belang.

In the 2010 formation of the first Rutte cabinet, a minority government of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) – which he left in 2004 – and Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), Wilders actively participated in the negotiations, resulting in a "tolerance agreement" between the PVV and these parties.

He withdrew his party's parliamentary support in 2012, citing disagreements with the cabinet over proposed budget cuts.

Wilders is best known for his populist, anti-immigration and criticism of Islam and Euroscepticism (EU), and for his relations to the Kremlin.

His views have made him a controversial figure in the Netherlands and abroad.

From February 24 to March 3, 2018, Wilders was invited by the cover organization Russian Peace Foundation of Slutsky and traveled to Russia.

On Friday, September 4, 2020, the Dutch court convicted Wilders for group insults.