Wilders Exploits Lisa’s Murder: Political Opportunism at Its Ugliest

A brutal tragedy turned into a campaign slogan—proof the PVV playbook feeds on grief, not solutions.

Seventeen-year-old Lisa’s murder shocked the Netherlands. Her life was taken, her family shattered, and a community left reeling. Within hours, Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) converted her death into a political headline.

On X, Wilders wrote: “Suspect of Lisa’s disgusting murder and a woman’s rape is an asylum seeker.” That framing wasn’t about justice for Lisa. It was about cementing a blanket narrative: migrants are inherently dangerous—regardless of individual facts or due process.

When a Dutch-born perpetrator kills, Wilders doesn’t make ethnicity the story. When the suspect is a migrant, he does. That’s not consistency; it’s selective scapegoating. De Volkskrant called it “predictable and tasteless political opportunism.” WNL described it as “the filthy game of Mr. Wilders”: squeezing votes from grief. And yes—polls moved in PVV’s favor immediately after the controversy.

Here’s the core hypocrisy. When real, binding protections for women came to a vote, the PVV opposed them. In 2015, the Dutch House of Representatives approved the Istanbul Convention (the Council of Europe treaty on preventing and combating violence against women). The PVV did not support that approval in the House; and when the Senate passed the bill as a “hamerstuk” on 23 June 2015, the PVV formally registered opposition (“aantekening”). Those are public, official records.

D66 leader Rob Jetten put it plainly: Wilders exploits tragedy while opposing concrete protections. Behavioral expert Tom de Bruyne was blunter still: “Geert Wilders is the master of milking tragedy.” Neither line is hyperbole; it’s an evidence-backed description of a long-running tactic.

Exploiting Lisa’s death protects no one, fixes nothing, and honors nothing. It channels fear—and fear is the PVV’s chosen fuel.