A speech of Netherlands’ Party for Freedom or Freedom Party (PVV) leader Geert Wilders is being shared on social media with a claim that it his is first speech after he was elected as the Prime Minister of Netherlands. It is being claimed that he was warning Muslims when he said “If you want sharia law and don’t respect our law and freedom of expression go to any Islamic country.” Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Netherlands’ newly elected PM Geert Wilders warned Muslims in his first public speech.
Fact: This is an old video from November 2020. Geert Wilders’ political party Party for Freedom or Freedom Party (PVV) won in the Netherlands General Election 2023, but he was not elected as the Prime Minister since his party won only 24% of seats in the 150-seat Dutch parliament and it needs support from other parties to form a government. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
Firstly, a keyword search on the internet revealed (here, here, and here) that Geert Wilders had not been elected as the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. Although his party PVV won the General election, they have to get support from other parties to form a government as they won only 24% of seats in the Netherlands Parliament. His party PVV won 37 seats of the total 150 seats in the parliament.
To learn more details about the viral video, we performed a reverse image search on a few of its keyframes which led us to the original version of the viral video which is actually Geert Wilders’ speech given in the Dutch parliament. This video available on a verified YouTube channel named PVVpers was uploaded on 12 November 2020 with a title in Duch that translates to “Input from Geert Wilder’s terror debate (12-11-2020)”
The viral video has been clipped from this 16:44 seconds clip and the viral portion can be seen from 2:50. From the translation of the Auto-Generated subtitles on YouTube, we understood that Geert Wilder was speaking about the murder of the French teacher Samuel Paty, which happened in October 2020. Later in the speech, he goes on to speak about Muslims and Islam and makes a few proposals that are also seen in the viral video.
A further search also revealed that a translation for this speech was uploaded in November 2020 by an Investigative Journalist named Amy Mek on X, which seems like the video that has gone viral now.
Although, Factly could not independently verify the authenticity of the translation for his speech in this video (we relied on the translate feature on YouTube to understand the context of his speech), since the video predates the current election and contradicts the claim that this video shows Wilders’ first public speech after the election, it is safe to say that the viral claim is False.
To sum up, Geert Wilders has not been elected as the Prime Minister of the Netherlands yet. This video claiming to be his first speech after the 22 November 2023 election is actually from November 2020..
