The fall of the government in the Netherlands over its refugee policy has highlighted the importance of the migrant issue.
Izvor: Tatiana Popova/Shutterstock
The downfall of the Dutch government due to its policy towards refugees highlighted the importance of the migrant issue as an arbiter of European politics, writes the New York Times. As eight years ago, far-right parties are gaining strength thanks to a strong increase in the number of migrants arriving in Europe.
Stopping the right is a growing problem for leading European politicians, says NIT. The fall of Mark Rutte’s government has highlighted an increasingly polarized debate in Europe over how to manage the migrant crisis, with thousands of people risking their lives trying to reach welfare, Vox reports.
Now there are not as many refugees as in 2015, but politically the situation is more sensitive, with the war in Ukraine and the growing insecurity of Europeans due to inflation and the strong rise in the cost of living. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced late Friday that the government was falling because of “irreconcilable differences on immigration policy.” On Saturday, he submitted his written resignation from the government to King Willem-Alexander, who returned from a family holiday in Greece for this very reason. The issue of family reunification is controversial: if they grant asylum to a son or daughter, will they allow parents, perhaps spouses and children, to join them?
The conflict in the fragile four-member coalition erupted this week when Rutte asked to limit the entry of children seeking asylum already in the Netherlands: they would only be eligible to apply after two years. The Christian Union and the liberal D66 did not want to accept that. Why did Rute ask for such a radical turn in the policy towards refugees in the first place? The Netherlands used to be a role model in human rights, in the seventies and eighties of the last century, it most generously opened its doors to war refugees and provided them with refuge.
Mark Rutte has been the Dutch Prime Minister for 13 years, this is his fourth government that he managed to put together after ten months of negotiations that lasted less than 18 months, writes the Guardian. Rute’s right-liberal VVD, left-liberal D66, the Christian Democratic Party CDA and the smaller Christian Union sat in the government.
Dutch immigration policy is already stricter than that of many European countries, but the recent increase in migration from countries such as Tunisia and Pakistan has reignited the debate on migration policy across Europe. Asylum requests in the Netherlands increased by a third last year, with some warning that there could be more than 70,000 by the end of the year, the most since 2015, when a million Syrian and other refugees left Turkey for Europe. According to other estimates, this year the number of asylum seekers will be 45,000, which is about the same as last year when the entire EU recorded a large increase. The Netherlands is the fourth richest nation in the EU, but the number of refugees it accepts is the EU average.
New elections in the Netherlands are expected in the fall, and the old government will remain in a technical mandate until then. The Dutch government has already been rocked by local elections in March, when the right-wing populist Farmer-Citizens Movement (BBB) won a landslide victory, winning the votes of farmers outraged by environmental measures to reduce nitrogen emissions, which require a reduction in livestock numbers. The right-wing populist BBB is expected to repeat its success in the parliamentary elections. Elections are expected in November, and after that, most likely, another painstaking formation of the ruling coalition.
The Dutch are suffering from high rents and a lack of housing, a big jump in gas prices and inflation. In this situation, it is easy to blame foreign migrants and, in particular, asylum seekers. Last year, the Netherlands was hit by humanitarian organizations’ assessment of very poor conditions for housing refugees. Rute wanted to fix this by reducing the number of new migrants, but he failed. Announcing his resignation, among the problems on which the government could not come to an agreement, he mentioned the housing of asylum seekers, after recent cuts in the system and the general shortage of housing. Although Rutte said no party was solely responsible for the fall of the government, the Guardian writes that some blame him because his party insisted on a stricter approach to family reunification of asylum seekers, in exchange for support for a law to distribute refugees evenly among municipalities.
Geert Wilders, the leader of the anti-immigrant Freedom Party, has already started campaigning, and Karolin van der Plas, the leader of the new populist Citizen Farmers Movement, has announced his entry into the fray. “Refugee pressure affects the political situation in countries like Austria, Germany, France and Spain. And not only there. It is also likely to dominate the election campaign in the Netherlands. Europe needs workers, it needs young people, but it does not want illegal immigrants, they other people of color who come by boat and jump the wires. Far-right parties are getting support everywhere on this issue. We are the party that can secure a governing majority to significantly limit the flow of asylum seekers,” said Geert Wilders. The leader of the Dutch anti-immigration Freedom Party supported Rutte’s first minority government 13 years ago, but also toppled it. Now he is delighted: he wrote on Twitter that the fall of the government will make the Netherlands “a beautiful country again, with less asylum seekers and crime, more money and housing for its own people”.
Mark Rute is the longest-serving European leader since Viktor Orbán, extremely adept at reaching compromises, so much so that he has earned the nickname “Teflon”, according to NIT. He has been negotiating a package of measures to reduce the flow of new migrants for months. The Guardian reports that there have been talks to to establish two classes of asylum seekers – those fleeing war and those seeking refuge from persecution and to reduce the number of family members they are allowed to bring.
The New York Times points out that Rute’s decision to bring down the government, rather than compromise, marked a new phase in European migration policy. Far-right parties, strengthened by the recent elections, dominate the debate on migration, manipulating the fear of the disappearance of national identity. Analysts interpret Rute’s unexpected insistence on an unusually sharp turn towards refugees as a maneuver to prevent an even greater outflow of votes to the right. The same problem is having a growing impact across Europe, in the shadow of inflation and the rising cost of living, growing insecurity stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and increasing numbers of asylum seekers.
Since the height of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, Italy, Germany and France, as well as smaller European countries, have experienced the rise of far-right political parties that have reshaped the political image of their countries. Thus in Italy far-right Matteo Salvini has become a key political figure. , last spring Marine Le Pen made a dangerous threat to Emmanuel Macron in the race for the President of the Republic. Viktor Orbán intensified his anti-immigrant rhetoric and thus became a leading voice in the global identitarian movement, writes NIT, with a large number of followers among the American right. Finally, Angela Merkel, despite her great popularity, had to leave the post of head of the German government precisely because of harsh criticism for letting in millions of refugees in 2015, as a result of which her CDU lost some voters who switched to the far right. AfD. But people coming to the EU now face a significantly different political and social context than those who arrived in 2015, NIT analysed. The European right, although it controls only a few countries like Hungary and Italy, has more influence than in previous years.
It is extremely surprising that the coalition fell apart over this topic, said Marcel Hanegraf, a political scientist from the University of Amsterdam, for NIT. The number of refugees who would request family members to join them is so small that it would not significantly affect the total number of refugees in the country, emphasizes the Dutch migration expert. What has happened is that Rute, known as the master of consensus, has now decided to use the issue of migration to score political points, which he did not do before.
Mark Rute presented himself to the European public as a persistent advocate of curbing migration in the EU, but not in the manner of the extreme right. He recently accompanied the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and Italy’s Giorgio Meloni on their way to Tunisia, where they offered the authorities one billion euros to help stop the flow of migrants to Europe. Refugees from Mali, exposed to Islamist violence, as well as from war-torn Sudan, Ivory Coast, Chad, Guinea and Senegal found refuge in Tunisia. Accusing them of violence and crime, authorities in Tunisia launched a racist attack on black African migrants instead of allowing aid organizations to help them, Reuters reported.
The number of asylum applications in the EU fell sharply in 2020 due to the coronavirus epidemic. Three million residence permits were issued in 2019, which dropped to 2.3 million in 2020 but returned to 2.9 million in 2021. The number of those who come to the EU without visas, often with the help of people smugglers, increased by 66 percent in 2022 compared to the previous year, the European Commission announced. To that should be added four million Ukrainians who received refugee status in the EU by the end of May this year. Immigration from Morocco, Tunisia and Pakistan has increased, and people continue to flee war and terror in Syria and Afghanistan. But that doesn’t compare to 2015, when a record 1.3 million people applied for asylum in Europe, roughly double the previous record since the fall of the Soviet Union.
BONUS VIDEO:
00:36 In France, local residents armed with baseball bats fight back against migrants looting shops.jpeg Source: Tweet/RK Deshpandey
Source: Tweet/RK Deshpandey
(WORLD)