In a new book published this month in the Netherlands, Bas Erlings, a former strategic advisor for the center-right liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), argues categorically against any formal collaboration with the far-right. To form a government with them “is the stupidest thing you can do,” Erlings writes the book, the title of which translates to The Populist’s Game: How They Plan It, How We Win It, because you find yourself constantly “crossing your own borders.”

When the four-party Dutch government—the first ever in which the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) took part—collapsed on June 3, Erlings received confirmation for his argument and a publicity boost with the Dutch public. But the book also deserves to be translated for international audiences. With the Trump administration actively supporting far-right parties across Europe, effectively pushing for regime change, Erlings’s message has become urgent for the entire continent.

Erlings was a longtime advisor to NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte while Rutte served as prime minister of the Netherlands between 2010 and 2024, leading four different governments in that time. The first government, which lasted two years, relied on outside support by the PVV, which is led by Geert Wilders. This setup allowed Wilders to attack the government while at the same time determining its red lines and boundaries on issues that he felt strongly about (or against), such as the European Union or immigration. If those boundaries were crossed, Wilders would threaten to withdraw parliamentary support for the governing coalition. This happened in 2012, so Rutte’s government collapsed.

After that experience, Rutte publicly swore never to govern with the PVV again. That declaration implied to Dutch voters that a vote for the PVV would become a wasted vote. The Dutch political landscape is highly fragmented, with the so-called large parties collecting little more than 20 percent of the vote, which means the winning party always needs two or three others to form a government with a majority in parliament.

As the American political scientist Larry Bartels wrote in his 2023 book Democracy Erodes from the Top, if voters know beforehand that a party will be excluded from government and that its program cannot be implemented, then many are inclined to vote for parties with better chances to govern. In this way, by excluding the PVV from his next three governments, Rutte kept the party down.

This strategy was jeopardized when Rutte blew up his fourth government in the summer of 2023, stepping back as party leader. Fresh elections were set for that November. His successor, Dilan Yesilgoz, immediately opened the door to collaboration with the PVV.

As a result of this move (which Rutte, informed sources have told me, was unhappy with, even though he publicly supported the decision), a vote for the PVV was no longer considered a lost vote. On the contrary, it became a strategic vote. Wilders, outsmarting his competitors with more than two decades of experience as a politician, seized his chance and made the best of it. As a result, the PVV surged in the polls and ended first with 23 percent of the vote, just ahead of a social-democratic coalition.

Erlings left the VVD on the day that a new four-party government, including the PVV, was formed in the summer of 2024. This followed months of haggling and drama between the four parties, which continued in broad daylight during the 11 months that it governed the country—until early June of this year, when Wilders pulled the plug. He quit because he had sent the other three parties a list of 10 drastic measures intended to stop immigration, which they refused to accept because some of the measures were unconstitutional.

This episode, as well as the 11 months of governmental inaction that preceded it, proves Erling’s main point about governing with the far right. Once in government, he writes, far-right parties take you in an “iron grip.” They drag coalition partners and even opposition parties into territory where, previously, no one wanted to go—with constant provocations, threats, and personal attacks on colleagues; rude language polluting parliamentary manners and discourse, and ever more extreme proposals becoming a sort of “new normal” in the end—one even gets used to extremism, to a certain extent.

By now, even previously courteous, mainstream politicians are constantly snapping at each other in the Dutch parliament, trying to get attention. Erlings is convinced that the far right’s ultimate goal is exactly that: turning democracy and the rule of law into “empty shells.”

The collapsed Dutch government, which is staying on in a caretaker position minus the PVV ministers, has not even begun to try to solve the Netherlands’s main problems, such as the severe housing shortage, the nitrate crisis caused by intense agriculture, or the rising cost of living. During its tenure in office, the PVV kept drawing attention to asylum-seekers sleeping on the street, comparing them to “criminals” and claiming that it wanted to “stop immigration” by closing borders and deporting people.

This is exactly the legacy of the far-right Austrian Freedom Party’s (FPO) three recent years in government as a junior partner of the conservative party between 2016 and 2019: lots of campaigning on supposed mass migration and foreign criminals, but no concrete results. That government was terminated by what became known as the Ibiza scandal: a video that appeared to show the FPO party leader being bribed by a woman posing as the niece of a rich Russian businessman.

The performance of the PVV and FPO resembles, to a certain extent, what the Trump administration is doing in the United States: coming to power on the promise of helping to solve the real socioeconomic problems that citizens have and then, once in power, forgetting the promises and just railing against foreigners and the so-called woke elite.

The difference is, of course, that the PVV and the FPO were more or less harnessed by other parties in their governing coalitions—plus, sometimes, a vocal opposition. Trump, however—like Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary and the recent Law and Justice party government in Poland—has a legislative majority. In a way, Trump is showing Europeans what their own far right would do in power if it had equally few restraints.

A White House official voiced tacit support for Wilders after the fall of the Dutch government, arguing that the Netherlands faced “serious threats” from migration. This is no surprise. The Trump administration is increasingly, openly supportive of far-right parties and politicians across Europe: the Alternative for Germany party; the Romanian far-right presidential candidate George Simion; Marine le Pen of the French National Rally party; and most recently President-elect Karol Nawrocki, the far-right candidate who narrowly won Poland’s recent presidential election. Not all of them benefit from Trump’s political embrace. But it is crystal clear what Washington’s ultimate intentions are: regime change in Europe.

Recently, a U.S. State Department official published a document arguing that “Europe’s democratic backsliding not only impacts European citizens but increasingly affects American security and economic ties.” This text—written by Samuel Samson, a senior advisor for the department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor—takes Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February (where he declared that the biggest danger facing the West is not Russia but Europe’s supposed wokeness and betrayal of “its most fundamental values”) a big step further. Europe is not just a problem for the West, as Vance argued. Samson writes that Europe is also a threat to the United States. His depiction of European governments is outright aggressive. He asserts they have “weaponized political institutions against their own citizens” and that Europe has thus “devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.”

The document shows that the time when Europe could afford naive governing experiments with the far right has come to an end. The mess in the Netherlands, the result of two years of infighting and stagnation, clearly shows that far-right parties often cannot be tamed by coalition partners—they only get more obnoxious, as Wilders has done, trying to create chaos and blaming every failure on other parties.

Apart from his plea to center-right parties not to govern with the far right anymore, Erlings has one other piece of advice to centrist parties: try to get as good as the populists are at “getting into the heads of people.” When working for Rutte, Erlings learned that reasoning against the far right never helps. Worse, it is counterproductive: Far-right voters want attention, not a well-documented lecture proving them wrong. Getting into the heads of voters comes down to intuition, Erlings writes, not reasoning. Having studied the work of Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and the American philosopher Frances Frei, he told a Dutch newspaper: “Citizens ask themselves three questions when choosing a political leader: ‘Do I like you?,’ ‘Do I think you can manage?,’ and ‘Do you care about me?’”

In Austria, the far right FPO was excluded from the past two governments. In the Netherlands, the center-right party leader seems to have learned her lesson, too. Yesilgoz recently called Wilders “an incredibly unreliable partner,” saying the VVD would “no longer work with him.”

Hopefully, in both these countries and elsewhere, they start mastering the three questions, too.