page_title: Party for Freedom
section_title: 2006–2010
hierarchical_section_title: Party for Freedom / History / 2006–2010
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Geert Wilders, zelf genomen foto
context_page_description: The Party for Freedom is a nationalist, right-wing populist political party in the Netherlands.
  Founded in 2006 as the successor to Geert Wilders' one-man faction in the House of Representatives, it won nine seats in the 2006 general election making it the fifth-largest party in parliament. In the 2010 general election it won 24 seats, making it the third-largest party. At that time the PVV agreed to support the minority government led by Prime Minister Mark Rutte without having PVV ministers in the cabinet. However, the PVV withdrew its support in April 2012 due to differences over budget cuts at the Catshuis. In the following 2012 Dutch general election it won 15 seats, having lost 9 seats in the elections, still being the third-largest party. Following the elections, the party returned to the opposition and in the 2017 election, the Party for Freedom won 20 seats, making it the second-largest party in Parliament.
  It came third in the 2014 European Parliament election, winning four out of 26 seats.
context_section_description: On 22 February 2006, the Party for Freedom was registered with the Electoral Council.
  Bart Jan Spruyt, director of the conservative Edmund Burke Foundation, joined Wilders in January 2006 in order to formulate a party programme and to train its prospective representatives for the forthcoming national election (then still scheduled for 2007).
  Spruyt left the party in the summer of 2006 after it proved unable to build broad conservative backing, and people like Joost Eerdmans and Marco Pastors proved unwilling to join. After the 2006 elections, Spruyt said he was not surprised that the Party for Freedom had gained seats but maintained that, if the Party for Freedom had sought cooperation with Eerdmans and Pastors, it would have won more, even enough to bring about a CDA-VVD majority government.
  Later, Spruyt commented that the PVV had a 'natural tendency' toward fascism. He later qualified the statement, though he didn't withdraw it. Former PVV candidate Lucas Hartong called Spruyt's claims 'a cheap insinuation'.
  In an HP/De Tijd profile dated December 2006, the party was described as a cult, with an extremely distrustful Wilders only accepting fellow candidates completely loyal to him, and compared the PVV to the Socialist Party led by Jan Marijnissen but without reaching that degree of organisational perfection.
  On 10 January 2007, the PVV announced it would not field candidates at the forthcoming Provincial elections. This meant it would be unrepresented in the Senate.
  On 13 January 2007, NRC Handelsblad reported that a PVV intern had solicited for signatures on the website forums Dutch Disease Report and Polinco, the latter a forum described as far-right by various organisations, among them the Dutch Complaints Bureau for Discrimination on the Internet. Any party participating in this election was required to collect at least 30 signatures from supporters in each of the 19 electoral districts; of the 1500 signatures the PVV received, the Dutch Antifascist group identified 34 known far-right supporters. In a response, Wilders said he regretted that far-right sympathisers had provided signatures, denied any personal responsibility for them and reasserted his dislike of far-right parties like National Front of France and Flemish Interest.
  Noted writer and columnist Leon de Winter later declared the affair to be the result of a campaign of demonisation against Geert Wilders led by NRC Handelsblad and de Volkskrant newspapers, as well as the broadcaster VARA.
  Former trade union leader and prominent Christian Democrat Doekle Terpstra proposed an initiative against Geert Wilders and the PVV on 30 November 2007, in the newspaper Trouw. Terpstra sees Wilders as promoting intolerance, and discrimination against Muslims. He is supported in his cause by the large Dutch trade unions and refugee organisations. Politicians and the public are divided on Terpstra's initiative. The newspaper De Pers reported the next day that much of Terpstra's claimed support did not materialise.
  In 2008, the Friends of the Party of Freedom commissioned a producer, who acted under the name of "Scarlet Pimpernel Productions", a pseudonym adopted out of fear of reprisal, to produce Fitna (Arabic: فِتْنَةٌ‎), a short film by Geert Wilders. Approximately 17 minutes in length, it shows selected excerpts from Suras of the Qur'an, interspersed with media clips and newspaper cuttings showing or describing acts of violence or hatred by Muslims. The film attempts to demonstrate that the Qur'an motivates its followers to hate all who violate Islamic teachings. Consequently, the film argues that Islam encourages acts of terrorism, antisemitism, violence against women and homosexuals, and Islamic universalism. A large part of the film deals with the influence of Islam on the Netherlands. The film's title, the Arabic word "fitna", means  either "disagreement and division among people" or a "test of faith in times of trial". Wilders described the film as "a call to shake off the creeping tyranny of Islamisation".
  Polling by Maurice de Hond published in March 2009 ind
caption: Geert Wilders in 2007
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