Geert Wilders’s Dutch election win is a headache for Europe

SINCE EUFPÖ surprise triumph in the Dutch election on November 22nd, plaudits have poured in from across Europe—but overwhelmingly from his political family on the hard right of the spectrum. Marine Le Pen of France and Viktor Orban of Hungary are thrilled; but not many others relish the with the anti-immigrant firebrand. Mr Wilders presents a political headache for the , a club used to moving forward by helping centrists of the left and right politely thrash out their differences. But in many ways the populists are melding the consensus rather than threatening to overthrow it.A generation ago, merely including the hard right in a ruling coalition was enough to result in ostracism, as Austria discovered when its centre-right allied with the xenophobic Freedom Party of Austria () in 2000. No longer. The idea of a “cordon sanitaire”—centrist parties essentially pretending populist foes don’t exist when it comes to forming coalitions—is breached routinely. In the Netherlands it may prove all but impossible to cobble together a coalition without the 37 seats (out of 150) of the Party for Freedom, the party Mr Wilders leads.