WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY THE NETHERLANDS News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI FA #180 - The Netherlands between tradition, the Islamic question and inflation (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The Dutch vote which saw the surprising victory of the Freedom Party
(PVV) which obtained 37 seats and was accompanied by the success that
was certainly not as sensational, but important, of two other
populist-oriented parties, that of the New Social Contract ( NSC), led
by Pieter Omtzigt, who obtained 20 deputies and the Peasants' Civic
Movement (BBB) who obtained 8. Overall, the three parties have 65 seats,
while 76 are needed for a government majority. it means that to be
formed a government needs an alliance with the old right-wing liberals
(VVD) who had the majority in the government before the elections and
who today have 24 seats in Parliament. If such a solution were adopted
it would mean that the ad exclusion clause which until now has acted as
a barrier to the entry into the government of the far right with which
all the parties had declared, before the vote, that they would not build
alliances, has disappeared. However, the success of the Freedom Party
was so sensational and unexpected, and above all accompanied by that of
other populist movements, that it cannot be ruled out that an extreme
right-wing government could be established in the Netherlands. But,
before the contingent alchemy of government, what is of interest is
which country photographs the vote, since it gives us the measure of the
profound crisis of Dutch democracy and requires us to understand whether
it is a crisis limited to the country or more general problems that will
soon others who are part of the EU will also invest.
Like all crises, the Dutch one presents internal and external elements,
which however are intertwined in an inextricable way, to the point of
influencing the entire community policy. The Dutch case in fact
represents an important indicator of the possible crisis of the Union in
the face of its enlargement problems, conditioned by the war in Ukraine,
by the international economic situation, by the disappearance of the
energy policy based on the Russian-German axis, by the adoption of a
green policy by the EU, all factors that had ensured the Union the
stability of its economy.
Added to these external elements are internal factors relating to the
crisis of the integration model adopted by the country, which deserves
careful examination which we will try to develop taking into account the
economic and structural data of the country, as well as elements of a
sociological nature which constitute the characterizing traits of the
Dutch society decidedly little known and studied within the other
countries of the union.

The crisis of the Dutch model of integration

The Netherlands is a country of 17.53 million (2021) inhabitants with
substantially stable population growth. During the elections,
approximately 10.3 million voters went to the polls out of an estimated
total of 13.3 million eligible voters. This corresponds to 91% of the
population aged 18 and over. More than half of this group is 50 years
old or older. (Statistics Netherlands, based on provisional population
data from 1 October 2023). Emigration has a strong impact on this
situation, proof of which is that if we look at the age group between 18
and 35, a relatively high number of residents cannot vote because they
were not born in the Netherlands and do not (yet) have the Dutch
nationality. Almost all over 65s can vote (98%) and 85% between 18 and
35. More than half of adults not born in the Netherlands are unable to
vote because they have Dutch nationality. The largest group (57%) has
lived in the Netherlands for 25 years or more. Another group, more than
a quarter, have lived in the Netherlands for at least ten years. Of
these, almost 15% have one or two parents born in the Netherlands.
To better frame the problem of the immigrant population's participation
in the vote, it is necessary to take into account the legislation on the
acquisition of citizenship which has changed its physiognomy since 2000,
as since then the attribution of citizenship to foreigners has no longer
been conceived as a means to facilitate the participation of immigrants
in the life of the State, according to the original approach of the
1950s, but it was configured as a goal, placed as the culmination of a
path of integration. The matter is regulated by the Rijkswet op het
Nederlanderschap of 19 December 1984, amended several times, most
recently by the law of 21 December 2000, in force since 1 April 2003,
which introduced the naturalization test for the first time, as well as
the Wet Inburgering civic integration law of 30 November 2006, in force
since 1 April 2007.
The Netherlands currently has a mixed system of ius sanguinis and ius
soli . Second generation immigrants are granted Dutch citizenship by
birthright. The first generation born in the Netherlands to foreign
parents retains their parents' citizenship, but for those who have spent
most of their lives in the Netherlands, once they reach the age of
majority, it is rather easy to obtain Dutch citizenship because they
know the language and culture of the country. For the latter, two
possibilities open up: using the option procedure ( optieprocedure ) or
the naturalization procedure ( naturalisatie). Unlike what happened in
other countries, the Dutch approach to naturalization was instrumental,
mainly aimed at guaranteeing equal rights to both Dutch citizens and
immigrants, without forcing the latter to possess a Dutch passport.
Such an imposition, in fact, would not have been in conformity with the
originally dominant ideas of multiculturalism and respect for cultural
identity. Consequently, many parts of the legislation were changed to
allow foreign residents to participate more actively in Dutch society.
For immigrants, obtaining citizenship is conditional on passing a test
on knowledge of the language and society of the Netherlands. In fact, on
1 April 2007 the civic integration law came into force, approved on 30
November 2006, which introduced the new civic integration exam
(replacing the previous test), making it mandatory both in order to
obtain a permanent residence permit, and to acquire Dutch citizenship:
this has meant that a growing number of resident migrants are excluded
from voting, because they are not citizens, but nevertheless have access
to public and social services as residents.
It follows that especially in cities and suburbs there are more and more
people who are part of the population in all respects, but without
political and voting rights. The result of this structural situation is
that PVV is the most voted party in around 250 of the 342 Dutch
municipalities, including cities such as Apeldoorn, The Hague, Rotterdam
and Zoetermeer: more than 2.4 million Dutch voted for the PVV, while
GroenLinks-PVDA, the party of the left managed to convince the largest
number of people in Amsterdam and in most of the big cities.

The failure of integration by membership

In the 70s of the last century, Holland considered itself, and in fact
was, the European country that managed to welcome and integrate those
who decided to settle there and was the country for the young people of
Europe in which they were able to live, in a climate of almost absolute
freedom, one's life. Over the years, a different type of emigration has
poured into the country, also because the growing needs for the search
for well-being, the exponential growth of wars and inequalities in the
world, the growing pressure of climate change, have made the migratory
phenomenon structural .
This combination of factors meant that a massive migration, with a
strong Islamic component, was also concentrated on Dutch territory among
those who sought and found refuge in the country.
This new type of migrants introduced something new in Dutch society
because the 16 existing cults were joined by another, the Muslim one,
completely different from the previous ones, since it had not been
subjected to the scrutiny of secularization and had not been subjected
to that process of "washing " to which the 16 cults present and
recognized in Holland have been subjected over the course of centuries.
In fact, during repeated wars, political and cultural battles, the cults
present in Holland had had to tone down their fundamentalist needs and
accept a necessary coexistence, in the name of tolerance and mutual
recognition, giving life to a multi-confessional consociational
government system which had expressed the different political parties.
The result was an institutional system that was completely peculiar and
characterized the country. Strengthened by this experience, the Dutch
mistakenly believed that, to solve the problem, it was enough to add one
more cult to the others, leaving the developed rules unchanged, and
decided to operate by adhesion, placing the Muslim cult alongside the
pre-existing cults.
They had spent one hundred and thirty years of reflection to resolve the
problem of relations between the State and religious confessions,
finally deciding to liquidate every economic relationship between the
State and the cults once and for all precisely in those years (1989):
well they decided, a posteriori, that the Muslim cult would also have
been part of the Interkerkelijk Contact in Overheidszaken (ICO) and
would have been somehow associated with the agreements, but they soon
realized that things weren't working.
In fact, immediately and without imposing conditions, para-confessional
consociativism ends up being of great advantage to the cults, without
allowing any of their secularization and does not contribute to the
creation of a democratic circuit aimed at the civil education of future
citizens. For this to happen it must be "filtered" by a system of
values, culturally governed by a secularism shared by all the groups
that participate in the consociational pact and this certainly has not
been and is not the case for Muslims. All this is even more true if seen
in light of the particular financing structure
that characterizes Islam in Europe today and its links with the
countries of origin, which is why we are witnessing the increasingly
consolidated presence of a network of Salafist mosques directly financed
by Saudi Arabia and the Gonfo countries, which compete with two equally
dangerous networks of mosques and places of worship financed by Turkey
(through Diyanet, an association founded by Atatürk in 1924 with the
initial aim of modernizing Islam, but now radicalized) which seeks
together with the Ministry of Waqf of Morocco to influence Islam which
is taking root in European territory.
These networks remain dependent, not only through funding, on the
countries that created them: the Muslims who are part of them are
induced to live with their ears and hearts in their country of origin,
reproduced by the mass media, they give life to communities closed and
cohesive on the territory, Imams come from their countries of origin to
lead the cult and in fact act as a point of reference for the
communities, as political-religious guarantors of these bonds. These
components of the population tend to operate like a State within the
State, to create ghettos, to manage the territory by imposing behaviors,
customs, food habits, cultural practices foreign to the tradition and
customs of other citizens: the hypothesized and hoped for melting pot
does not happen by producing rather an identity segmentation of the
population, which tends to be conflictual because it exacerbates
differences.
Muslim emigration has concentrated in large cities and suburban areas,
disrupting the housing market, the provision of social services, the job
market, with the growth of black and precarious work.
However, at least essential services must be guaranteed to residents and
above all the school service which should act as a vehicle for
integration. Well, having chosen not to have a public school, taking
advantage of the almost exclusive state funding provided for
denominational schools, schools have grown significantly
Muslim schools, ghettoizing the children of migrants, in a particular
situation of greater public funding for Muslim confessional schools,
produced by the general mechanisms through which the confessional school
is nourished. This element has also contributed to generating forms of
hostility towards Muslims, seen as a group that uses their condition
within a permissive welfare state, to carve out situations of better
treatment, while there is a general degradation of public structures .
both in terms of health care, the availability of housing, and access to
social services, and above all aid and subsidies to deal with the
increase in the cost of living, the growth of inflation, in the face of
a substantial stagnation of wages and pensions.
All this is happening while, due to environmentalist policies, the
incomes of a not insignificant part of the population, made up of rural
workers and those who live from livestock farming and agriculture, are
reduced as a result of the restrictive measures adopted regarding the
use of fertilizers and phosphates, the reduction of arable land imposed
to create environmental protection areas, the increased cost of energy,
the growth in prices and inflation which has significantly impoverished
the standard of living in the once most prosperous part of the country,
dedicated to agriculture and livestock, Frissland, today subjected to a
concentric attack on its economy and which, not surprisingly, strongly
supported the parties that won the last electoral round.

The errors of the left

The left pays the price for having ignored the problems, for having
simplistically underestimated the difficulties of integrating migrants,
for having forgotten the deep country, and above all for having erased
from its own experience all the cultural effort that civil society has
made over the centuries and the same components of the social left have
done to subdue the Dutch religious communities that threatened to
transform the country into a field of eternal religious war in a
peaceful and tolerant cultural environment, capable of accepting what is
different from itself, in the name of respect for the individual on the
one hand and on the other in the superior interest of social cohesion,
which alone could guarantee the country the possibility of well-being,
development and peaceful coexistence. In proposing themselves as
managers of the advanced stage of development of capitalism, all this
has been replaced by permissive legislation on multinationals that
profit and make profits on low taxation of those companies, of those
multinational companies that place their registered office in the
country, thus doing a dumping operation on other countries belonging to
the European Union, which focus on startups and advanced production
processes, neglecting and belittling the production base, made up of
agricultural production, which neglect the territory after it has been
the objective of maximum care for which the country was famous and
proud; who have no hesitation in filling the landscapes with wind
turbines that disfigure the landscape, just to make up for the lack of
low-cost energy, due to wicked choices in international relations,
pretending to ignore that it would not have been necessary to promote
research into gas and oil in the North Sea and even in the lands stolen
from the sea, with the risk of producing subsidence and the return of
the waters, if there had not been the break with Russia, and the support
for Ukraine (it is no coincidence that the Freedom Party is against
support for Ukraine and does not want its migrants!).
The left has done all this while saying that it wants to pursue an
environmentalist policy, of reducing fuel and carbon emissions, that it
wants to stimulate the production of alternative energy, without paying
attention, for example, to the production of biogas, without reflecting
on the economies of possible scale compared to the economic model that
characterizes the country, prisoner of a criminal community policy
regarding relations with foreign countries and expansion of the
community which puts the common agricultural policy and with it the
production base of the country at risk.
It is no coincidence that all the parties, winners of the last
elections, are against the intervention in Ukraine, the support for this
war, the breaking of economic relations with Russia and the use, to
please the Americans and the English, of energy coming from the United
States and the Gulf Emirates, upon Ukraine's entry into the Union. It is
to be believed that if the Netherlands gives itself a right-wing
government, it will be difficult for the future European Parliament to
ratify Ukraine's entry into the European Union without a blow.

The role of the Farmers' Party (BBB)

Indispensable for the establishment of a right-wing government is the
BoerBurgerBeweging Farmers' Party (BBB) which has 8 seats and comes from
the Christian Democratic centre. The party is led by Caroline van der
Plas. and won the 2023 Dutch provincial elections, winning the most
seats in all twelve provinces. Since the provincial councils elect the
Dutch Senate the party holds 16 seats in the Upper House. The BBB is a
right-wing agrarian and populist political party aligned on Eurosceptic
positions and limits itself to supporting Dutch membership of the
European Union for exclusively commercial purposes, while but wants to
reduce the power of the EU "to the level of how it was once understood
the EEC". It therefore opposes the federalisation of the EU arguing that
each country and region within the Union should be allowed to maintain
its own identity and culture without interference. In foreign policy,
however, the party has Atlanticist positions, as it supports the
Netherlands' membership in NATO and has called for supplying Ukraine
with F-16s.
Regarding immigration and asylum, BBB supports the reception of refugees
fleeing wars, but prefers that they be helped close to the region from
which they come rather than encouraging migration to the Netherlands and
requires that most refugees return home once the conflict is over. In
the case of
economic migrants, it demands that immigrants are already employed and
financially self-sufficient before moving to the Netherlands, and that
they must learn Dutch, work and pay taxes in the Netherlands for at
least five years before being entitled to permanent residency; illegal
immigrants must be deported.
The party pays a lot of attention to food policy and rural development,
strongly opposes the green policy of the European Union and the
proposals to mitigate the human impact on the nitrogen cycle in response
to the nitrogen crisis in the Netherlands, considers the Party for the
Animals and the animal rights organization is one of its main enemies as
it opposes intensive farming. He promises to establish a "countryside
ministry" located at least 100 kilometers from The Hague and the removal
of the ban on neonicotinoids and proposes to pass a right to farm law,
which would allow farmers to have a greater say on agricultural extensions .

The Omtzigt anomaly affects the coalition

A sensational success, which was also announced, was achieved by the New
Social Contract (NSC) party, a "personal party" led by Omtzigt which
elected 20 deputies. This party, which comes from a split of D66, a
centrist, Catholic-oriented political formation, owes its success mainly
to its leader's management of the scandal consisting of the unjust
request for reimbursement of family allowances made by migrant families
since 2013 to 2019 who would have unduly enjoyed tax benefits.
The parliamentary investigation has shown that in reality Mark Rutte's
government, in its inability to develop a policy to combat immigration,
has established forms of bureaucratic persecution of migrants, to
illicitly affect their chances of living and settling in the country,
through an excessive burden of taxation, in clear violation of current
legislation. The investigation demonstrated that the finance officials
acted on the basis of precise indications from the bureaucratic leaders,
profiling taxpayers on an ethnic basis, who, based on their surnames,
were reached with requests for the repayment of family allowances
received. Victims of embezzlement were, unjustly, thousands of Dutch
citizens, many of them immigrants. The scandal, which involved more than
10,000 Dutch families, was the basis for the early resignation of the
Rutte government and Omtzigt was able to demonstrate that innocent
people were criminalized and thousands of families were deprived of the
necessary subsidies intended for child care for amount of tens of
thousands of euros. There have been many full-blown cases of bankruptcy
and even divorce, fueling general indignation.
It must be said that in presenting the resignation of the entire
executive, Rutte then called a press conference in which he assumed,
together with his ministers, the "political responsibility" for the
scandal. Stating that "Innocent people have been criminalised, their
lives have been destroyed and the House has been informed incorrectly
and incompletely. Political responsibility - he declared - lies with the
government in office and no one else" and promised compensation to the
families involved in the affair and a reform of the bureaucratic
mechanisms that gave rise to it, which did not take place due to the
elections.
This was one of the reasons for the many consensuses that reached
Omtzigt who was very skilled in taking vague and generic positions on
many problems, to the point that it cannot be said whether his positions
are right or left, but he presents and above all, offers his party, as
good for all sides, if the declared aim is to proceed with the
moralization of the country. What distances him from the positions of
the Freedom Party (PVV) and the BBB is the position towards the European
Union, he is pro-European, and the Ukrainian war: Omtzigt wants to have
weight in Brussels and supports the Atlanticist choices and the BORN.
In light of these considerations, it is clear that the meeting between
the three parties we have dealt with will certainly be a common policy
in defending the interests of Dutch agriculture and the reasons of the
farmers who are affected by environmentalist politics, the flower of the
'buttonhole of the left and the previous liberal government, which do
not share the restrictions on Dutch agriculture that Ukraine's entry
into the union would entail, which suggests a different foreign and
community policy position of the future Dutch government on this
delicate issue.
However, significant points of divergence with the farmers' party would
remain the policy on intensive farming that farmers support, the
opposition to the expansion of natural parks that farmers oppose, and
many other issues that require necessary mediation and quite a few
compromises also for satisfy the positions in this regard supported by
the freedom party.
Since the government coalition requires the necessary presence of the
liberal party, it is not clear when the compromise necessary for the
formation of the executive which also involves this last political
formation, which finds moments of convergence with the others in
immigration policy, can hold, and this is undoubtedly an element of
cohesion of the future majority, but it records very marked differences
in orientation in foreign policy and economic policy, while a
battleground is certainly constituted by the measures to be undertaken
and supported to satisfy the demands of the agricultural world Dutch who
had so much political weight in the recent electoral confrontation.
Therefore the negotiations will be long, with an uncertain outcome and
everything to be verified.

Gianni Cimbalo

https://www.ucadi.org/2023/12/20/lolanda-tra-tradizione-questione-islamica-e-inflazione/
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