But on October 7, the day Hamas struck, his VVD Party was polling at 12 percent. Throughout the month of October, that support more than doubled.

What changed? Well vast pro-Palestine protests took place in Holland. On October 14, 20,000 people marched in Amsterdam. The biggest news story in Holland in the past month was the sheer numbers of people willing to take to the streets to wave flags in solidarity with Palestine and berate their government for its unwillingness to condemn Israeli aggression.

It’s too early to say with certainty that those protests triggered an angry backlash at the ballot and propelled one of Europe’s most explicitly anti-Islam politicians to victory. The coincidence seems too remarkable to ignore, however. Will we see similar shocks in coming elections across the West?

[Was it the protests or the impossible-to-ignore grotesque barbarity by radical Islamists in southern Israel? I’d guess a mixture of both, although the anti-Semitic parades that close to home likely had a bigger impact, especially in a country where Nazi occupation is still close to living memory. The riots in Ireland have an even more proximate cause, but I’d bet that 10/7 had some already questioning the immigration policies of the last couple of decades. — Ed]