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To many Dutch voters, it came as no great surprise. This week, the Senate rejected a package of immigration laws hailed by the outgoing Schoof government as the toughest ever devised. It was not merely the left that sank the proposals. Two members of the government’s coalition – Prime Minister Rob Jetten’s own D66 and
It’s not uncommon to see camouflage on the high street in Belgium. It is a peculiarly Belgian reflex: when the state feels the strain, it reaches for the army. This week, the federal government has done so once more. Soldiers have been deployed to bolster security around Jewish sites and neighbourhoods in Brussels and Antwerp,
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Fabiana Bolsonaro, a member of Brazil’s São Paulo state assembly, last week used makeup to darken her face and arms in what can only be described as a crude attempt at blackface in the middle of a parliamentary session. Her performance appeared to be a doubling down, in distinctly embarrassing fashion, on her earlier insistence
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Rob Jetten being sworn as prime minister of the Netherlands would, not long ago, have seemed an exotic proposition. That he does so at the head of the country’s first modern minority government elevates the occasion from unusual to faintly vertiginous. A cordon sanitaire has been drawn not merely around Wilders but around much of
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Early coverage of the Dutch elections has inevitably focused on Geert Wilders – still the bogeyman of the country’s political establishment. Wilders lost seats and saw some of his support drift towards other parties on the right and to the liberal centre of Democrats 66 (D66). His Freedom party and D66 are leading in the polls, with
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Reinette Klever, the former minister for foreign trade and development aid on behalf of Geert Wilders’s Freedom party, navigated her mere 11 months in office with relative ease and minimal controversy. She amiably took part in business missions and state visits, and even managed to deliver on several of the policy shifts promised in the
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The small community of Uithoorn, just outside Amsterdam, has unexpectedly found itself on the front line of Europe’s flag wars. Late last week, Dutch national flags – in bold red, white and blue – began appearing across the town. Their purpose? Perhaps a spontaneous show of resistance to a planned asylum centre earmarked for the
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Belgium’s federal Prime Minister, Bart De Wever, is not your average European leader. A conservative intellectual with a sharp tongue and a taste for historical analogy, he is perhaps the only European statesman to cite Edmund Burke more readily than Brussels regulations. A long-serving mayor of Antwerp – one of Europe’s great port cities –
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Bram and Hubertus are marked for death. Camouflage-clad government marksmen – licensed but anonymous, for security reasons – are hunting them in the sparse woodlands of one of Europe’s most densely populated nations. But it’s proving trickier than expected. The hunters are not alone in the woods. A parallel force – equally camouflaged, well equipped and
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In the early hours of 20 August, a 17-year-old girl set off on her bicycle, making the journey from central Amsterdam to the nearby village of Abcoude after a carefree evening out. What followed was any parent’s worst nightmare. In distress, the girl dialled emergency services, reporting that she was being chased and assaulted by
