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Dutch government on brink of collapse after Wilders' far-right party quits | Reuters
(www.reuters.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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PVV has been dropping in polls for more than a year now. Let's hope this is the last time they are in a ruling coalition.
I know nothing about Dutch politics. But fear this might be a strategic move by them since they are more popular as “opposition”?
Wilders has been threatening to blow it up since day one. This coalition has been an uphill struggle from the get-go and none of the voters are in any way helped with the flailing policies and continuous notes that their official documents are lacking any semblance of professionalism and critical thought.
The sad thing is that we are a country divided on basically one issue. Migration. This is why populist parties can just ask simple questions like 'can we even trust our government?', 'are the government people even working?' or 'are the media still trustworthy?' and everyone is like 'yeah we need this guy in charge'. So voters do exactly 5 minutes of 'research' and then vote for the most incompetent guy who yells the loudest.
So we will go vote again. And we will most likely end up in a similar situation. And that, too, will fail.
At least now there is a chance again for a de facto cordon sanitaire to emerge.
I’m referring to an earlier Rutte cabinet (conservative-liberal VVD and christian democratic CDA) which relied on a confidence and supply construction with Wilders. Wilders got to go on with his opposition politics while supporting the coalition (not unlike what we’ve had this past year), but when the coalition wanted to save money because of a budget deficit, Wilders dropped his support and the cabinet fell. After this, Rutte was succesful in framing the PVV as unreliable and vowed never to work with them again, leading to the PVV becoming ever more irrelevant.
That was until the new VVD leader, Yeşilgöz, said she didn’t rule out working with the PVV during the last elections.
I think that's a nice and concise way to put it. I agree that the VVD kind of brought this on themselves but that's also due to them being the largest party for a lot of years in a row and there was a certain group of people who felt they couldn't rely on the VVD any longer.
I think Covid might've had something to do with that, it sort of fueled a polarisation on vaccines and government handling of individual freedom.
If somehow asylum/migration does get fixed or improved somehow, the 'out-group' will just find something new to polarise over. We've still got climate change, housing, nitrogen, power net congestion...
Actually, the amount of requests for asylum in the first quarter of this year has halved compared to the year before.
But it doesn’t matter whether asylum requests form an actual problem (and in reality it wasn’t problematic at all, except for problems that were caused by earlier VVD cabinets saving on centers for processing asylum requests). What matters is whether it can be framed as one. The PVV (like populists in general) is all smoke and mirrors.
I've been having a discussion about asylum with a friend all day. The thing is that we can see a lot about the actual figures and the amount of verblijfsvergunningen actually granted, but there is no way of telling how many of those requests are fulfilled due to migrant coaches who tell migrants just what to say in order to get asylum, or how many edge cases fall the right way because the employees at the asylum centers don't have the time or resources to properly look into certain situations.
I think if we apply this nuance to the actual debate, rather than calling it a 'too much' issue, it becomes a very difficult topic that doesn't really have a clear solution or answer.
The question then remains: if populists aren't set on solving a crisis that may or may not exist, are we voting ourselves into a totalitarian regime? I shudder to think so.
Admittedly I don’t know much about the actual workings of the asylum process.
However, I have no doubt whatsoever that the primary goal of Wilders is to attain power by whatever (non-violent, for as far as we know now) means necessary. One of the things Wilders immediately tried to do in this cabinet, through his asylum minister Faber, was sideline the chamber by declaring the framed asylum situation an emergency. This was just copying Wilders’ good friend Orbán, who has been able to rule by decree using emergency laws set into motion during covid.
Luckily, this didn’t work. Further, the Dutch political system works in such a way that absolute majorities are pretty much ruled out, always requiring cooperation with other parties. The biggest danger is parties like the VVD taking over PVV talking points and moving ever more to the right.
It should be good fun if proper parties all start doing populist stuff to win votes and once they form a cabinet by majority just knock every issue out of the park in the first year