Giddy Marksouwer of the Liberal Party looks on at a debate in the Dutch parliament in The Hague, Netherlands, on May 16, 2023. (Jeroen Meeuwsen/Defodi Images via Getty Images)
Phyllissa Kramer June 14, 2024
An Israeli-born Dutch politician who has long been a target of criticism in the Netherlands has passed security checks and will not be made immigration minister in the new far-right government.
Giddy Marksouwer is a longtime senior figure in Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom, which won a landslide victory in last December’s Dutch general election. Wilders announced earlier this week that he would nominate Marksouwer, who has a strong anti-immigration platform, to be minister for refugees and migration.
But after the Dutch National Security Agency carried out a background check, Wilders reversed course. “The contents of the report on Giddy Marksouwer were the reason I withdrew his candidacy,” the prime minister tweeted on Thursday.
The change of course is not the first political setback for Markus Sower, who grew up in the Netherlands and became a Dutch senator in 2017. In 2010, he was flagged as a possible security threat by the Dutch security service AIVD, forcing him to withdraw his candidacy in that year’s parliamentary elections. (He was also arrested in 2008 for possessing an unlicensed firearm while working as a volunteer security guard for the Jewish community.)
Then-Interior Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin, whose father was a Jewish Holocaust survivor, had warned Wilders that he would take action against his party if it ran Markus Sauer, whom he considered a national security threat, according to Dutch media reports. This week, Ballin, now retired, wrote to Wilders, warning him that the AIVD believed Markus Sauer was passing information to “foreign forces,” commonly assumed to be Israel.
Markuszower is one of several Jewish politicians who have made a name for themselves on the European far-right, and has been an open supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since he was a teenager in Amsterdam in the 1990s. His right-wing views were unusual at the Jewish school he attended. He began his career as a Dutch spokesman for Netanyahu’s Likud party. As a politician, he has made support for Israel and opposition to Muslim immigration to the Netherlands pillars of his policies.
Wilders is now under pressure to explain what the AIVD background check revealed and why Markus Sauer, who has access to national security information, should be allowed to stay in the Senate.
Wilders’ election in December triggered a surge in support for far-right nationalist parties across Europe, many of which performed better than expected in last week’s European Union parliamentary elections. The results lent further legitimacy to a French party founded by a convicted Holocaust denier and raised fears among many German Jews about resonances between the current political situation and the years leading up to the Holocaust.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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