Novelist and broadcaster van den Brink wrote this extended essay during the run-up to the Dutch general election of March 2017, in which Geert Wilders and his right-wing populist PVV party were expecting to do well, surfing the same wave as Trump and Brexit. In the event the PVV was the second-largest party, but this placing was mostly an artefact due to the extreme fragmentation of traditional parties: it only obtained 13.1% of the vote. The election led to a record 225 days of negotiation before a coalition (not including the PVV) could be formed under the premiership of Mark Rutte.

Van den Brink uses Wilders’s well-known passion for visiting the fairy-tale theme park, De Efteling, as a hook to explore the way the new populism appeals to its supporters through storytelling rather than an objective discourse of facts and policies. In the process he reminds us that the idea of a canon of “traditional” folk-tales was largely a creation of nineteenth-century nationalists seeking to create a unifying culture for new nation-states like Germany, and that De Efteling, which carefully nurtures its own special commercial brand of folk-tale magic largely based on the work of Dutch illustrator Anton Pieck (1895-1987), was a mid-20th-century job-creation project for an impoverished part of North Brabant. The idealised version of national identity and social relations that Wilders and his colleagues promise to “restore” for the disenchanted people who vote for them is just as illusory, van den Brink argues, and the problem we face is not so much in the lies that the populists are telling, but more in the way that otherwise intelligent adults have suddenly started believing in fairy tales as though they could be literally true. And the only logical conclusion if they persist in that illusion is that we are going to end up with a King Wilders sitting in his fantasy palace in De Efteling with a gold-plated plastic crown on his implausible hair... ( )