On Saturday and Sunday nights, a group of Dutch citizens gathered at the border between Ter Apel and Rütenbrock in Germany with the intention of performing their own border controls and stopping asylum seekers from entering the Netherlands.
On Saturday and Sunday nights, a group of Dutch citizens gathered at the border between Ter Apel and Rütenbrock in Germany with the intention of performing their own border controls and stopping asylum seekers from entering the Netherlands.
And what exactly is feeding this xenophobia? Exactly. People are unhappy with asylum policy. And it’s not just far-right extremists at this point.
The main problem is the dissolution of the state care (verzorgingsstaat). People are unhappy because of rising prices, uncertainty of their future and inability to get a home.
It’s easy to get mad at ‘foreigners’ that get here and just ‘get a home’ like that. Populists really exploit that anger, while people should be mad at 13 years of liberal rule destroying certainties we’ve built up over decades.
If everybody would feel like their basic needs are covered, they could feel more welcoming to foreigners, as if there’s plenty to go around it’s easier to share.
But people get cajoled into thinking that the foreigner is their enemy, whilst the true source of their discontent is the vvd not caring about citizens but about fat, polluting and corrupting businesses, like BlackRock that got free reign to speculate on our housing market.
People have fallen victim to the wilders narrative. Wouldn’t it help to take a deep breath, a step back and look at the data… for instance, the number of asylum seekers is going down (for many different reasons, eg frontex has put up a formidable wall, and the conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan stopped etc), but the right wing and populism are on the rise. I can understand this causes confusion but the danger to Dutch (or European) democracy is now coming from another direction: rightwing extremist terror is increasing. That’s what the statistics and data clearly show. The way Wilders toppled the government was a disgrace, this guy is not a statesman but a Trump-like charlatan, hobnobbing it with Le Pen, orban, Meloni - all anti-democrats.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I never voted for wilders, and i never will. As far as i’m concerned hes just a grown baby who wants to do nothing but throw tantrums.
But it isnt just wilder’s fault. Before wilders we had pim fortuyn. And before that we had… well i’m not sure i was too young then :) but the point is, xenophobia has always been there. It’s the main reason for WW2. And you can’t solve that problem by screaming “YOUR. RACIST!!1!”.
Perhaps thats even part of the problem. The left keeps screaming everyone’s a racist who don’t agree with them. The right keeps screaming every asylum seeker gets our jobs and our housing. And there’s noone who presents the data in a clear, concise way.
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