Bulwark Takes - Tim Falls For New Dutch PM? (w/ Stan Veuger)

Episode Date: November 8, 2025

Tim Miller brings on Dutch economist Stan Veuger for some good news. The Netherlands just elected a young, upbeat, openly gay prime minister who’s talking optimism, growth, and even building new cities, and somehow, it’s working.

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everybody. It's Tim Miller at the Bullwork. Welcome back to our page. I couldn't be happier to be bringing on my buddy, Stan Boyger from over at AEI. He's a senior fellow. He is a native Dutchman. We have great news for the people of our YouTube feed, which is so rare. We have to do this together. The good news is in the Netherlands, not in America, but, you know, that's okay, right? I think so. Are we calling you Dutch? What do you call yourselves? What do we call the people of the Netherlands? Well, we call ourselves Netherlands. Netherlands. Yeah, but Dutch, that's just good. That's America.

That's good. Okay. Well, this is going to be a big change for me because for me, I always abided by the old, you know, Austin Powers line. That there are only two things in the world. I can't stand people who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch, which will put on the screen for people, a little gold finger. But maybe that's not true. It just turned out is not true.

And I want to tell you why, Stan, because I read this article, and it's like, it's almost too good to be true. The Dutch, you're going to have a new prime minute. or Rob Jettan. He's a gay man. All the good things are gay. He's married to Nicholas Keenan an Argentine field hockey player who I have to admit is kind of handsome. He ran for office as like a quasi, I guess a central leftist. You can tell me. I'm reading this article. He is positive. He has a lot of positivity. He is an abundance liberal. He is patriotic. He says he wants to attack the far right aggressively when you need to. He also is pretty left on economics.

But he's for a big tent. I mean, pinch me. Is this true? Is this what's happening? Well, that's mostly true. You know, he wants to build new cities, he says, you know, like real abundance, liberalism there. New cities. I'm for new cities.

Yeah, you know. So that all sounds okay, a little, you know, a little more lefty on economics than I would like to see. And so I think, you know, he's been reasonably inspirational as those things go. Heid Wilders, who is our sort of famous right-wing politician, you know, predates Trump even. He's our longest serving member of parliament by an eight-year margin now. Like, he's never going to go away. Really?

His party used to be. The most famous moment about Keith Wilders, where I learned about him, was he showed up at a Twinks for Trump event in New York in, like, 2015. So he's been a far-right ideologue, you know, kind of a nationalist populist, like, even... And they're very anti-Muslim, very anti-immigration. You can kind of tell he is like a far-right populism like 20 years ago.

Those are his issues. So his party, after our previous election, two years ago, had become the largest party. But last week, he lost a third of his seats. So I think that is definitely good news. You know, to go back to your hatred of the Dutch a little bit, the bad news is that all those seats that Wilders lost have gone to other heinous parties. And so the populist, right, so to speak, has remained of the same size. Just their seats have gotten redistributed. So Willa's lost a bunch of seats to a party that, I don't know,

sort of the Kevin Roberts faction, you know, fashion-friendly, but does some respectability politics. And he also lost some seeds to what you might think of as the Nick Fuentes faction. You know, very comfortable with conspiracy theories, lost a bunch of MPs over a fight around anti-semitism, that kind of stuff. But so the far right as a whole, I think, has maintained its place in Dutch politics, which is not good news. Though there's something that can be learned from this, it's all this. And obviously, there's a lot of differences in the Netherlands and America, but you can get to, and the system is different, right?

Like, the Republican Party is not going to fragment out into three different parts. That's right. It's pure proportional representation. Yeah. Yeah. That said, though, wedging the right, I kind of learning that, look, this is possible to wedge the right. Like that they can be wedged between kind of a far right, more openly anti-Semitic party, you know, more whatever, whatever you want to call it, like nationalist, populist party and then kind of like a conservative Christian conservative, right? Like there's a way to get Flentes and Mike Pence and the major body of MAGA and kind of, you know, cleave them off from each other to weaken the political powers of the right.

I think there are probably some lessons to learn from that. Did the dissent of the left parties do that intentionally or just kind of the day? light their own house on fire on the wilderness. I'd say they mostly lit their house on fire themselves, especially that Fuentes-esque party to form for democracy. They had people leave over just really self-inflicted wounds. I would also say it's not really the left here that's been successful. It's really sort of the broad center.

The Dutch left, I would say, I would describe as being in, in just complete despair. There are two large parties, the Green Left and the Labor Party. The Labor Party used to be one of our two large parties, right? We had a Christian Democratic Party and a Labor Party. The Labor Party is in the middle of merging with the Green Left, and their goal was really to unite the left. Instead, what they've done is they lost seats. So they're now down to 20 out of 150 seats.

You have a few other more fringy left-wing parties to their left, but if you take the left as a whole, they got smaller. So you have an animal rights party, you have a Turkish Nationalist Party. You know, you have all sorts of flavor. That's more fun over there. That's cute. No, no, it's good. In fact, the Animal Rights Party, the Party for the Animals, it's been around for a while.

They got into a fight during this election campaign where a bunch of their founders quit because they were upset that the Party for the Animals was supportive of increased defense spending under the NATO banner. So they started their own separate Animal Rights Party called Peace for Animals, which is four animal rights and against increased defense men. So, you know, we have all of our flavors. But even if you add up all the different, you know, Judean popular front parties, it still adds up to very little. And so that really, that's important to keep in mind, too, which it's a resurge of the center more than the resurgence of the left. Well, sure. And again, there's something to be

learned for this because this goes to what we're talking about on the center left and the resistance in America. You know, we don't have to navigate a pro-war animal rights faction, really, but There are factions you're going to deal with. And so this, the centrist party that won, the D66 with Rob Jettin, the Pierce win that he's poised to be the prime minister. You know, as I mentioned at the top, and he went with what we, what they describe as kind of a progressive patriotism type message. You know, proudly kind of pro pro-Dutch wearing orange, you know, doing that sort of stuff. Yeah, not being a left party that like down talks, everything that is happening about, you know, societal progress.

In addition to that, as we kind of mentioned a little bit at the top, I want to go through all this, kind of what they wanted to do on the economic side, possibly the center left was strengthened because they kind of co-opted some of the left messaging or some of the left policies on economics. They proposed a millionaire's tax, networked, more progressive inheritance and gift tax. the abolition of a regressive mortgage interest deduction. And so they do kind of co-op some of these left, you know, redistributionist economic policies.

But at least in this article, you tell me if you agree with this. There's not, there's no like degrowth talk, none of like kind of the anti-capital. And I think, I also think, I mean, they're going to, because we have so many different small parties, they're going to have to end up following a, farming a coalition with at least two parties that are to their right. And so a lot of those more lefty economic policies are not actually going to happen, which I think also made people a little more comfortable voting for them. But, you know, you may see the mortgage interest deduction getting phased out, right? So some of that will survive. But I think more important that that was really the upbeat tone, positivism, you know, the Dutch flags everywhere, EU flags as well, by the way.

It's a little more of a cosmopolitan nationalism, you might call it. it's so i do i do agree with that that tone is important that it's not all oh everything is bad capitalism is horrible you know that it definitely did not have that tone and then as you mentioned yet and himself he's very young he's 38 uh you know a good looking gay guy you know that that all helps i think with yeah let's go ahead and put him up on the screen i don't want to make you uncomfortable here's plan but let's look at him in here and his husband not a bad not bad to look at i mean this stuff matters in politics um but uh what else besides just the superficial, did you think was he, did he succeed in messaging wise strategically?

Yeah, just staying upbeat talking about, you know, a positive agenda, you know, new cities, growth, you know, that kind of stuff, not complaining about, you know, not complaining about inequality, you know, obviously, you know, talking about where he might get some revenue, but the goal is not to eradicate millionaires as a class or something like that, right? It's to have a, you know, to collect revenue from different sources. Yeah, very comfortable with free trade, all those things, you know, but it's a little more, it's a lot more neoliberal than sort of an American

left-wing agenda. Yeah. It's interesting. And again, obviously, you don't want to over-interpret all the stuff that, you know, we're taping this right now on election day and presumably Zora Mandani will win the New York mayor's race.

And I think that like, you know, after, when somebody has political success comes out from nowhere, everybody's trying to co-opt what it means to, like, match their own, prior ideological interests and I think all the stuff is complicated and I think that Zara's success is surely at least in New York City you know in his progressive economic views his views against Israel like surely helps like gain excitement in the left side of his party also though his affect is what you're saying he's very positive he's he's smiling he's

uplifting he's talking about giving people opportunity like it is not dower um it is you know it is not downbeat and um and he's he's good at that part of politics. And there's kind of been this question among whatever you want to call it, the neoliberal abundance faction is like, can we have our zon? Like, is that possible? And who knows whether that's possible in America?

But it sounds like, yet in like basically, like at least at the superficial level, not at the policy level, it's kind of offering that. Like, can I be a positive person that's focused on, on economic opportunity and the things that are people are worried about

and do it from a more center position. Yeah, and it's a little easier too in the Netherlands to rely on so pure campaign tactics because there are so many different parties and really if you if you gain a few percentage points here and there you can jump from being relatively small to relatively big you don't have to unite 50% of the country under one banner and so I think that also makes those tactical moves a little more deterministic than they are in the U.S. where you have these broad underlying ideological divides that you have to navigate carefully

What about where do you land on immigration? And obviously, immigration was such a flashpoint there for Wilders and across Europe, really, and it's driven a big part of the rise of the populist right. Like, how did he navigate the immigration? The main's major issues. Our two most recent governments fell over disputes over asylum policy, which, of course, in immigration politics in Europe is more important because there's a lot of immigration that takes place within the European Union.

A lot of labor migration is, you know, is, you know, operates on the open borders because there's free movement within the European Union. So you cannot really control that part. And so a lot more of the focus is on refugee policy, asylum policy. What Jetsen did there is he sounded a little more restrictionist than D66 had done before. And that was true in general for parties, I think, on the sort of center left in the Netherlands. You had the labor green left combination and even the formerly Maoist socialist party. They both announced, like, numerical targets, which they'd never done before.

Numerical targets that are comparable, sort of once you've correct the size of a country, with what we had in the U.S. pre-Biden. So, you know, like net million a year migration or so, that scaled down for the Netherlands. And so that was, I think, really a move that they, but that showed they realized that it's one issue where I think the sort of elite in the Netherlands had gotten out of line with the voting public. you know, a bit like in the U.S. I think you see that in quite a few countries where public opinion is just clearly

more conservative than elite opinion. And so, you know, they adjusted a little bit to that, and I think it's worked. We'll see what they do with it when they're in government. One thing that really helped there is, of course, Wilders was in government or his party was in government before the election, and they didn't really

accomplish anything on that front or on any other front. Well, we'll do one more picture here of Rob yet, and just in case people were wondering, And then my final question for you is we've got a whole new generation of elderly millennials, by the way, now in control. Everyone's 40. Yeah, things are going to turn around. You know, we're the only sane generation, okay? The elder millennials, we came up, we weren't, our brains weren't broken by the phones, you know, because during our childhood and teen years, we did not have phones, right?

But then we're early enough to adopters that we can understand how to navigate. the phones so everyone above us is insane because they didn't understand how to navigate it their brains were broken by fox everyone below us is addicted to phones jonathan hate the anxious generation we're the sweet spot so as long as you as long as you put gay elder millennials in charge your country things might be looking up or even straight or even straight sure whatever i'll let us straight one happened to final question then stand any thoughts on remigration i don't know things D66 sounding a little better than what we're putting forth here in America. So, jokes aside, one thing that I think is going to really help D66 on the migration front

is that the Assad regime, of course, was toppled about a year ago. And so inflows of Syrians have gone down by, Syrian refugees have gone down by a lot and quite a few Syrians and I want to go back. And so I think that will be something for them to point to. And, of course, it's a, you know, a positive development across the board. And hopefully, you know, that will help them. Felt like a duck of my question about you, though. Are you going to be replacing a Syrian moving back?

I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here for now. I'll see how the nature of the regime evolved. Yeah, I had a great two days of Amsterdam this summer. Okay. The bikes are scary. Bikes are coming at you.

They come from everywhere. But it is a beautiful country. Stan Boyger, we'll be checking back in with you on all things, economics and Netherlands as the thing as we move forward in the coming months. Thanks so much, man. Thanks, Tim.