RUTHFULLY YOURS

Fifteen years later, Mr. Wilders, 60, sings a softer tune. “If people and other parties really believe that banning the Quran and closing down mosques or Islamic schools is a problem because they find it’s unconstitutional, then I can put those points aside, whatever I may think of them,” he says. He pauses and repeats the point: “If other parties say, ‘This is unacceptable for us,’ I’ll put them aside.”

Mr. Wilders’s conciliative attitude is a product of political success. There’s a real chance he’ll be the Netherlands’ next prime minister. Last month his Party for Freedom, known by the Dutch acronym PVV, won 37 of the 150 seats in snap elections for the Dutch House of Representatives, beating 14 other parties and expanding its representation by 20 seats.

“You can call my party what you want, but to call it ‘extreme’ is an insult to the voters,” he says. Can the PVV form a governing coalition? “We are not there yet,” he says with a cavalier shrug. But he’s bracing himself for several rounds of hardball haggling in the parliamentary souk—negotiations that could drag on into the spring. Dutch politics is inefficient: After the previous elections in March 2021, it took 271 days to form a government, which collapsed 18 months later over immigration.

International media sometimes liken Mr. Wilders to Donald Trump, whom he’s never met, and to the French nativist Marine Le Pen. In addition to the proposals to ban the Quran and shutter Islamic schools, his election manifesto called for a referendum on “Nexit”—Dutch withdrawal from the European Union. He acknowledges, though, that ardor for that proposal has cooled as a result of post-Brexit chaos in the U.K.: “When Brexit won, in 2016, something like 45% of the Dutch were in favor of Nexit. Now it’s between 25% and 30%.”

More pertinent is his stand against Dutch generosity on political asylum, which he believes economic migrants abuse. He’d like the number of asylum-seekers admitted to the Netherlands to be “zero”—“as a temporary measure” of indefinite duration. In 2022 the Netherlands, population 17.7 million, recorded 46,400 asylum seekers. The number in 2023 will be close to double that.

Mr. Wilders is a canny politician. Finding himself in a realistic position to form a government after a political lifetime in opposition, he publicly pledged to be the prime minister of “all Dutch.” When asked if this means he has mellowed, Mr. Wilders says he knows the “difference between being the opposition leader and being a prime minister. I’d be prime minister for every Dutch citizen, whatever his background, whatever his religion, whatever his sex.” He says he’s “the same person, but it’s a different role.”

Mr. Wilders is the Parliament’s longest-serving member, a position known to the Dutch as the nestor, or doyen. Having scrapped his way almost to the pinnacle, he appears to know that ideological purity is no good if it keeps him out of office. Since he can’t govern without the support of other parties, he knows he needs to compromise to get to 76 seats.

He can count on the backing of the BBB, an agrarian populist party formed in 2019 in response to draconian new environmental restrictions on Dutch farmers. But the BBB has only seven seats. Mr. Wilders will also need support from the VVD, the moderate conservatives who headed the last coalition government and from the Christian Democratic NSC. These parties have 24 and 20 seats, respectively. Both are thus far balking at a deal with Mr. Wilders, about whom many Dutch are still squeamish.

Mr. Wilders is “optimistic” that his efforts to compromise will bear fruit, and the election on Thursday of a PVV House speaker is early and concrete proof that other parties will work with him. Mr. Wilders admits he’s “dependent” on those other parties but declines to spell out what concessions he’ll make: “It would weaken my hand if people read The Wall Street Journal and say, ‘Hey, this is what he’ll give us.’ ” Yet he does indicate there are issues that are “most important to us, like fewer asylum seekers and less immigration, on which we want to achieve the most.”

Every party “has to make concessions in a multiparty system like the Netherlands,” Mr. Wilders says. He’s stating the obvious, but that’s more than many expected from him. “We have 10 million people eligible to vote in this country, and we got 2½ million of them,” he says—including a plurality of those under 35. “Our voters have to see that we achieved something for them. Although nothing is off the table, ours has to be a government that the 2.5 million that voted for us can look at and say, ‘We recognize the DNA of the PVV.’ ”

Mr. Wilders appears immovable on the question of asylum. He wants a moratorium. But he concedes the difficulty. Not only does he lack the parliamentary numbers; he’d “also have to change international law,” including Dutch treaty obligations, which would make for messy diplomacy. In defense of his position, Mr. Wilders insists that most asylum-seekers in the Netherlands are “not refugees but migrants.” He says 95% of them come to the country overland, forgoing the opportunity to seek asylum in any of the “five or six safe countries” they traverse. “They come to us because they believe it’s more attractive for them here. We have a better economy, better housing, better social benefits.”

Resentment runs deep in the Netherlands over the material benefits the state gives to foreigners who claim asylum, Mr. Wilder says. Many PVV voters are the working-class Dutch—including pensioners—who must bear the burden of soaring medical costs and a housing shortage. Mr. Wilders would like to put more money in the pockets of the working class and the elderly. He jokes that Mark Rutte, the conservative prime minister who resigned in July, “calls me a socialist when he wants to tease me.”

The label isn’t wholly misplaced. Mr. Wilders says he believes in a welfare state that works “for the good of the common people who have been left out of liberal expenditure projects”—by which he means “wasted” environmental and foreign-aid efforts. His party is a combination that is “not very common, at least in Dutch politics,” of avowedly prudent social support that ensures citizens can live in “dignity” and “cultural conservatism when it comes to immigration and law and order.” Mr. Trump and some of his allies have tried to reinvent the Republican Party along similar lines.

Mr. Wilders says many of his voters live in neighborhoods that they no longer recognize as Dutch. “There’s an overrepresentation of nonindigenous people in the committing of crimes,” he says, “people from Morocco, Somalia, and also the Dutch Antilles.” His supporters are “normal folk, not xenophobic or racist.” But if they say anything critical about the way Dutch society has changed, “they are labeled racist by the left and liberal elites. Well, I stand up for them, I fight for them. They’re not racist. They’re fed up.”

Sensing a win in the runup to the elections, he toned down some of his rhetoric, giving rise to the joke that he had become “Geert Milders.” The Dutch public broadcaster, NOS, aired a segment for children two weeks before the elections titled “Cuddling Cats with Geert Wilders,” featuring the candidate in an animal shelter stroking a rescued kitten. His own two cats have a Twitter page. “They have more followers than most of the Dutch legislators,” Mr. Wilders says proudly.

Mr. Wilders’s personal life isn’t all benign domesticity. He has lived in safe houses under police protection since the first of many threats to his life, in 2004. “I lost my personal freedom 19 years ago,” he says. “I’ve lived in [repurposed] prison cells and army barracks.” There have been numerous fatwas calling for his assassination, “ordering Muslims, including those who live in the Netherlands, to come and find me, even in my home, and to cut my throat, and my wife’s throat.” (Mrs. Wilders is Jewish and Hungarian.) Those threats were especially menacing given the assassinations of politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and documentary filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004.

Of late, the issue on which Mr. Wilders has aroused the most disquiet abroad—particularly in Western chancelleries far removed from the ethnic quicksand of Dutch society—has been Ukraine. He said in his manifesto that he’d end Dutch military aid to Kyiv. While that contribution is small, such a policy change in a prominent EU country would be a propaganda gift to Vladimir Putin. Since Ukraine is likely to be a stumbling block on the path to a coalition government, would Mr. Wilders compromise?

He isn’t tempted to give a straight answer: “This is what we have to negotiate, but sorry, I cannot do that publicly.” He stresses that “Russia is the aggressor and that we support Ukraine politically.” But the Dutch “lack materiel ourselves. We even have to lease tanks from Germany because we don’t have any.” If other countries “with more materiel, and more money, like the United States,” want to help Ukraine, Mr. Wilders will “support them politically.” He also says he’s a firm believer in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and “more a trans-Atlanticist than a European when it comes to defense.”

Mr. Wilders attributes his party’s victory in part to the political aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. “People saw what happened in the weeks after this massacre,” he says. “People saw what happened on the streets of Europe—in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, London, Paris and Rome.” They saw tens of thousands of people “coming out of wherever they came from. Living in our nations. Waving not only Palestinian flags but flags of Hamas and the Taliban.”

“And people were shocked. They said, ‘Where do these people come from? What did we allow in our country?” It wasn’t only the flags: “It was Jew-hate.” He believes these displays of antisemitism were a vindication of his warnings. “It was an eye-opener for many, many people. They saw it, finally, with their own eyes.” Voters in other countries did too, with political effects that have yet to be tested.

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.