Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician who has led the right-wing populist Party for Freedom (PVV) since he founded it in 2006. He is also the party's leader in the House of Representatives, having held a parliamentary seat since 1998. In the 2010 formation of the first Rutte cabinet, a minority government of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) – which he left in 2004 – and Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), Wilders actively participated in the negotiations, resulting in a "tolerance agreement" between the PVV and these parties.

Wilders was born on 6 September 1963 in the city of Venlo, in the province of Limburg. He is the son of Johannes Henricus Andreas Wilders and Anne Maria (Ording) Wilders. He is the youngest of four children, and was raised Catholic. His father was Dutch; his mother Maria Anne Ourding was born at Sukabumi, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) with a mixed Dutch and Indonesian background. His father worked as a manager for the printing and copying manufacturing company Océ, and had hidden from the Germans during the Second World War, an experience so traumatizing that he refused to physically enter Germany even forty years later.