On September 13, Dutch prime minister Dick Schoof held a press conference to announce his new government’s coalition agreement. Essential to these plans — as the coalition’s four right-wing to far-right parties had already agreed in May — is the introduction of an unprecedented “asylum crisis law.” In an extraordinary expansion of the tools to restrain migrants, it will allow the government to take anti-immigration measures without the approval of the parliament or senate.

The declaration of an alleged “asylum crisis” is the culmination of a more than two-decade-long offensive by right-wing populist forces. In 2001, the media-savvy dandy Pim Fortuyn, the father of this part of the political spectrum, changed the rules of Dutch politics by making an obsession with “immigrants” socially acceptable. Four years later, Geert Wilders founded his anti-Islam electoral vehicle, the Party for Freedom (PVV). The neoliberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) under Mark Rutte, in power for the last fourteen years, maintained a symbolic distance from the PVV, allowing its purported liberal “reasonableness” to compare favorably with Wilders’s “extremism.” Yet the PVV and several big Dutch media channels have constantly put migration on the agenda. Hamas’s October 7 attacks were further used to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment.

This provided the background for the November 22, 2023, general election, which set the stage for the new government. The snap vote came after then prime minister Rutte opportunistically let his government fall by refusing to compromise on migration; Dilan Yesilgöz, his successor as VVD leader, then embraced a far-right course on the issue. Presented with the choice between original and copy, at election time voters chose the former. In the vote, the PVV secured almost a quarter of seats in parliament. Other big winners were the right-wing populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) and the vaguely Christian democratic New Social Contract (NSC).

After long, soap-operatic negotiations, a new cabinet was finally put together earlier this summer. The PVV, a party of which Wilders is the only member, lacked suitable seasoned politicians to deliver a prime minister. After a chaotic process, Schoof — a senior bureaucrat with no political experience, but who is former chief of the national counterterrorism unit — was shoved into the limelight. The government that Schoof now leads is the Dutch version of technopopulism, to use the term coined by Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti. Claiming to be “prime minister for all Dutch people” and to “address the real problems of the Dutch people,” Schoof offers a deeply political program dressed up as sober, technocratic pragmatism.

As elsewhere in Europe, migration has been declared the root of all evil. Dutch experts and engaged policymakers tirelessly point out that there is no “crisis,” but to no avail. In the course of 2023, for instance, the number of asylum seekers was no more than the average over the 1990s. In fact, the Netherlands’ acceptance of refugees is around the European average; Germany, Sweden, and Austria take in more people per capita. Just as crucially, the government’s exclusive focus on asylum seekers is highly misleading, since migrant workers make up the bulk of the migration flow. The Dutch labor market, which underwent far-reaching liberalization in the 1990s under the two liberal–social democratic cabinets, runs partly on cheap labor, which is shamelessly exploited in horticulture and distribution centers.

Still, migration is serving as a lightning rod to distract from growing social disparities. The real crises in society — the housing crisis, the energy crisis, and crisis over social security — mainly affect the working class and lower-middle class. These ills are partly a product of the VVD’s neoliberal policies, which have stopped the construction of social housing, slowly dismantled public services, and reduced real incomes. For years, the ruling parties of both center left and center right mainly represented the interests of relatively wealthy, university-educated urbanites and ignored the working class and the petty bourgeoisie. With a recent attack raising the value-added tax on higher education, books, and culture, the new far-right government seems to want a form of symbolic revenge.

Given that evidence of the migration “crisis” does not exist, it was no accident that during his presentation, new prime minister Schoof spoke of “an experienced crisis” — what people believe to be a drama. After the chorus about migration has been heard for decades, it has started to have its effect in creating a moral panic. It is reminiscent of what psychologists would call illusionary truth effect: false information is accepted as “true” through repeated exposure and familiarity. Although right-wing populism is often explained as emerging from a crisis, it just as often derives its success from staging its chosen narrative of crisis.

Before looking to solve a problem, one can first ask whether the terms of the problem make sense. Unfortunately, this is just what isn’t being done. Despite their declared abhorrence at Wilders’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, all parties on the left-wing side of the spectrum — the social democratic Labor Party (PvdA), the green party Groenlinks, and the Socialists — have over the years come to accept the terms of the problem as posed by the far right. Recently, Frans Timmermans, the leader of the PvdA-Groenlinks alliance, declared, “With us it is always possible to discuss how to make asylum policy stricter and more austere, as long as you stick to the law.” More than two decades after far-right leader Pim Fortuyn was murdered, his language has become hegemonic.

The announcement of the “crisis” is just the beginning. In a farcical spectacle, Marjolein Faber, the PVV minister for asylum and migration, has announced in a letter to the European Commission that the government is going to present an opt-out from the European migration pact. On her first international journey, she chose to visit Denmark — a country that negotiated an opt-out in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty to allow it stricter rules than other European Union member states for dealing with asylum seekers (for instance, they cannot appeal being rejected). Following in its footsteps, the PVV wants to treat migration on a European level as a zero-sum game. A competition between European countries for the strictest migration policies without collectively addressing the question of migration could potentially lead to a disastrous erosion of asylum seekers’ legal rights throughout Europe.

The novelist W. F. Hermans once described the idea that “we must not stay behind” as the typically Dutch angst. For at least the last two decades, the Netherlands managed to present itself as progressive on the world stage, even if this reputation was already living off the past. Now the small country can congratulate itself for not “staying behind” in another way: with the new government’s plans, at a stroke it finds itself at the forefront of the far-right wave in Western Europe.

Despite their significant differences with the PVV, parties like the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and the Rassemblement National in France may push for similar measures. But discord is already emerging in the Netherlands’ far-right coalition government. The question is how long the staged “asylum crisis” can mask the cynical motives that lie behind it.