Europe

Dutch refugee policy official refuses to work with new right-wing coalition government

Asylum committee chair says Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party is ‘inherently undemocratic’

Geert Wilders’s far-right Freedom Party was the big winner in November's election. Photograph: Sem van der Wal/ANP/AFP via Getty Images

Peter Cluskey in The Hague
Wed Jun 26 2024 - 17:16

A senior official involved in the implementation of asylum and refugee policy in the Netherlands has resigned, saying he will not work with a coalition government that includes Geert Wilders’s far-right Freedom Party because it is “inherently undemocratic”.

Rutger Groot Wassink, who was chair of the Dutch local authorities’ asylum committee, as well as social affairs chief responsible for asylum strategy in Amsterdam, left office with a scathing attack on the country’s new right-wing coalition, which is now almost complete.

Mr Wilders’s party was the big winner in the general election in November, and since then has been involved in talks with the centre-right VVD – formerly led by Mark Rutte who was succeeded by Dilan Yesilgoz – the farmer-citizen party, BBB, and fledgling New Social Contract.

The parties put their choice of premier – Dick Schoof, formerly head of the security service – in place last month, but there have since been difficulties in the selection of ministers, with two Freedom Party nominees forced to pledge publicly to moderate their behaviour while in office.

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With the new cabinet due to be sworn in by King Willem-Alexander next Tuesday, Mr Groot Wassink has warned that the Netherlands is “taking a very great risk by placing a party that is inherently undemocratic, with dubious views, to put it mildly, at the centre of power.”

[ Netherlands leader Rutte poised to become Nato general secretary ]

He said that while the new coalition promised the toughest immigration regime in the country’s history, very little would ultimately come of those plans because they were in conflict with existing domestic laws and international treaties.

“Everyone will be blamed when those plans don’t work”, he said, “primarily the refugees, of course, but also the courts, civil servants and the media.”

He added: “I don’t want to become involved in normalising what is completely abnormal.”

Mr Groot Wassink was known for working closely with outgoing refugees minister Eric van der Burg to force all of the country’s local authorities to accept an equal share of immigrants – but the new cabinet has already agreed to scrap that proposal.

On Monday, asylum minister-designate Marjolein Faber, of the Freedom Party, distanced herself from her previous view that mass migration to Europe is part of a plot to replace the white population with non-whites, a view generally regarded as an unfounded conspiracy theory.

[ Dutch left-wing parties gain support while Wilders also wins seats ]

Development aid minister-designate Reinette Klaver, of the same party, came under pressure for her reposting of the term “omvolking”, a Nazi-era term referring to the same controversial idea of population replacement.

On Wednesday, an invitation to the speaker of parliament, Martin Bosma of the Freedom Party, to lay a wreath at a national commemoration of slavery was withdrawn because he had disparaged it as “anti-white racism”.

Peter Cluskey

Peter Cluskey

Peter Cluskey is a journalist and broadcaster based in The Hague, where he covers Dutch news and politics plus the work of organisations such as the International Criminal Court

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