being labeled as far-right and views himself as a right-wing liberal, while saying he does not want to be "linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups". More recently, however, Wilders worked together with Marine Le Pen of the French National Front in an initially ill-fated, but eventually successful attempt to form a parliamentary group in the European Parliament which now includes parties from nine member states, among them Austria's Freedom Party, Italy's Northern League and Belgium's Flemish Interest. Geert Wilders has been charged in relation to incitement multiple times. Wilders was first accused of criminally insulting religious and ethnic groups and inciting hatred and discrimination. He was found not guilty in 2011. In 2016, he landed in court again and was found guilty of incitement and encouraging discrimination against Moroccan immigrants to the Netherlands, but faced no punishment. Early life and career Wilders was born on 6 September 1963 in the city of Venlo, in the province of Limburg. He is the youngest of four children, and was raised Catholic. He was born to a Dutch father and a mother born in colonial Indonesia, whose background was mixed Dutch and Indonesian. 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. Wilders received his secondary education at the Mavo and Havo middle school and high school in Venlo. Reflecting passions that came to the fore later in his career, Wilders took a course in health insurance at the Stichting Opleiding Sociale Verzekeringen in Amsterdam and earned several law certificates at the Dutch Open University. Wilders' goal after he graduated from secondary school was to see the world. Because he did not have enough money to travel to Australia, his preferred destination, he went to Israel instead and volunteered for a year in a moshav, Tomer, on the West Bank. With the money he saved, he travelled to the neighbouring Arab countries, and was moved by the lack of democracy in the region. When he returned to the Netherlands, he retained Israeli ideas about counter-terrorism and a "special feeling of solidarity" for the country. Living in Utrecht, Wilders initially worked in the health insurance industry. His interest in the subject led him into politics as a speech-writer for the Netherlands' People's