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We shouldn’t be surprised by the chaos in the Netherlands

Simons thinks that COVID-19 was treated too much like a management problem and not enough like a social problem. “[Mark Rutte] feels like he’s the CEO of… this company called the Netherlands.” This, combined with the bureaucracy of a privatised health system, a highly decentralised administration, and a government that refuses to take decisive action that might antagonise voters, helps explain the high infection rates and the fact that the Netherlands was the last country in Europe to start vaccinating.

​The familiar story that no-one’s heard

Such tales of economic and social carnage may sound familiar if you’re British, but they are virtually unheard of in the Netherlands. Merijn Oudenampsen, an academic who researches Dutch neoliberalism, says this has to do with the country’s particular version of proportional representation, where coalitions are formed after elections. There was no controversial Margaret Thatcher figure pushing the new settlement through. “Instead, the tradition is to depoliticise matters, and to try to frame them in a way that all parties can agree with. If you’re in a political coalition and you want your plan to be approved, it’s not very smart to highlight the ideological content of the plan.”

Economic decisions were positioned outside the political terrain. “So you have this very technocratic neoliberal turn, which is not discussed in public as being a radical shift. It happened without people being very clear what was going on.”

​The rise of cultural politics

In place of an open discussion about social and economic policy, a highly conservative cultural politics was manufactured by political elites. Similarly to Thatcher’s Tories, the VVD, led by Mark Rutte since 2006, embraced the formula of economic liberalism plus cultural conservatism. “But in the Netherlands, the culturally conservative discourse really became everything in the sense that economics became a very technocratic thing… It’s no coincidence, of course, that the rise of the populist right happens at the moment of a new neoliberal consensus,” says Oudenampsen.

Muslims of Turkish and Moroccan descent – whose parents and grandparents had come to the Netherlands as guest workers in the 1960s – began to be characterised as a problem group. By 2002, the leader of the Social Democratic party (PvdA) felt himself at ease to speak in the Dutch media of ‘Kutmarokkanen’ – ‘shit Moroccans’. The murder of Pim Fortuyn, a pioneer of right-wing populism, in 2002 by an environmentalist, and of Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist in 2004, led to increasing toleration of right-wing extremism in elite politics and the media.

There are now two extreme right parties in the Netherlands. Geert Wilders’s PVV, founded in 2006, and the new FvD, founded in 2016. The FvD’s Trumpian brand of populism was a big hit in 2019’s provincial elections, where it won the most seats.

But last year, Whatsapp messages from members of its youth wing were leaked, which celebrated mass shootings in the US and said things like “Jews are extremely afraid of whites. That’s why all news organisations with mainly Jews at the top are so busy spreading anti-white rhetoric”. The party turned on itself.

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