The Brief – Would you spend Christmas with Geert Wilders?

What is it like to face a far-right pariah and islamophobe at the other end of the Christmas dinner table?

Those who now worry about a mildly racist grandfather have nothing on Paul Wilders, the older brother of Dutch election winner Geert Wilders.

Six years ago, Paul gave an interview to the German magazine Spiegel, revealing what family meetings with Geert are like while speaking up against his divisive politics.

It serves as a reminder that even hate-mongers have a human side, known mostly just to their families and close friends – though it is rarely a pleasant one.

In Spiegel, Paul Wilders draws an image of his brother as a self-centred egoist who was a “terrible nuisance” as a teenager, to the extent that his parents considered kicking him out.

Working at an Israeli settlement after school made him “grow up”, but his encounters with Islamic culture brought back his unyielding radicalism, Paul said.

Geert still joins the family for festive occasions, but what Paul described hardly seems like a joyous affair, especially with Geert’s security detail always being around.

“If we were to start a discussion or even criticise him, he would leave, and we would never see him again, he would break off all contact,” Paul Wilders said.

To his brother, Geert has become an isolated, narrow-minded man, no longer able to accept opposition or criticism.

His supposedly dysfunctional personality falls in line with the traits that relatives of other far-right figures have spotted, such as the description that Donald Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, gave of her uncle.

Recalling icy family dinners in her tell-all memoir, the holder of a PhD in clinical psychology traced Trump’s amoral narcissism back to his father’s emotional distance as Fred Trump apparently had his children compete for his approval.

Meanwhile, swathes of relatives of AfD figureheads in Germany have echoed Paul Wilder’s feeling of moral estrangement.

“I find it horrible what he says,” the daughter of Alexander Gauland, the party’s silverback, said about her father in 2018 amidst the ebb and flow of the refugee crisis.

Gauland had made headlines with a string of questionable statements, including calling the Holocaust “bird shit in over 1,000 years of German history” – a marked contrast to his daughter, a Catholic minister, who ultimately went on to house an Eritrean refugee.

Who passes the Christmas table test?

Of course, this is hardly the material of insightful political analysis. But aside from making for juicy gossip, the deeper point of these episodes is that it can be useful to consider the human qualities of politicians now and then.

After all, most people would feel better knowing that leadership is in the hands of people with a familial sense of care and responsibility, as well as a working moral compass, rather than in those of self-centred narcissists.

Imagining oneself at a Christmas table with them might give one an idea of where a politician falls on that spectrum. Call it the Christmas table test. Are they the person who is the backbone of a happy get-together or more of a grinch who could derail it at any moment?

Arguably, many of the new far-right poster figures would struggle to pass the test if their relatives’ testimonies are to be believed, which have in common that most seem to have crossed the line into territory bordering on irrationality, where even their closest circles struggle to understand them.

Granted, it may seem tempting to celebrate Christmas with that cool aunt who wholeheartedly sings along to ‘I love Rock’N’Roll’, as Marine Le Pen did at the Front National after party of the 2017 presidential election.

However, here, too, family relations reveal problematic aspects: Le Pen is estranged from her father and niece following quarrels over the appropriate level of radicalism for the Front National, the family business.

Though in the spirit of Christmas, you might still want to spare a thought for the far-right pariahs that you just uninvited from your imaginary Christmas party.

If Paul Wilders’ account is anything to go by, they resent their lot of social isolation.

“I think [my brother] is unhappy,” Paul Wilders said. “That makes me unhappy too.”

The Roundup

EU institutions have reached a political agreement on five laws that, for the first time, will lay down a harmonised approach to migration management for Europe, though NGOs have criticised the deal as going against basic human rights.

The European Commission has proposed to lower the protection status of wolves in Europe based on new data, leading to outrage from environmentalists who accused the Commission president of instrumentalising the issue and questioned its scientific basis.

Three pornography websites will have to abide by strict EU rules after being included on the Digital Services Act’s (DSA) very large online platforms list, the EU Commission announced on Wednesday.

Much is at stake in the reform of EU debt rules, which could also threaten the very existence of the euro, Social Democrat MEP Joachim Schuster told Euractiv in an interview.

Eleven EU countries have called on the EU to take full account of “all fossil-free energy sources” when elaborating future energy and climate policies, according to a joint statement issued on Tuesday by the French-led Nuclear Alliance.

The Belgians have a packed in-tray as they take over at the helm of the EU Council Presidency in January, as they aim to cover a broad array of health topics and close key files before the European elections take over the agenda in June.

Banks and financial institutions see investment in scaling up bio-based technologies as “non-bankable” despite these initiatives offering clear paths to reaching government-set environment and climate targets.

The European Commission’s long-awaited telecom white paper is set to include market deregulation, cloudification, infrastructure resilience and spectrum, according to information given to Euractiv by sources closely following the document’s drafting.

Europe needs stronger policies for bio-based products in order to make it clear that virgin fossil products do not compete in the same category, Rob Beekers argues in an interview with Euractiv.

Last but not least, do not miss this year’s last Green Brief: Ploughing on with the Green Deal.