During the Troubles, people in Northern Ireland liked to say that even the dogs in the streets knew who planted the bombs. In a small community where mortal enemies lived cheek by jowl, names of perpetrators rarely stayed secret for long, even when cases never came to court. Politiek Den Haag is a similarly claustrophobic ..read more

Dutch television is currently broadcasting De Joodse Raad (The Jewish Council), a historical drama about the organisation set up by the Nazi occupiers in 1941 to liaise with Amsterdam’s Jewish community. Two respected community leaders, Abraham Asscher and David Cohen, agreed to chair the council in the hope that they could spare their fellow Jews ..read more

Geert Wilders announced this week that he would not be the next Dutch prime minister, and there was much rejoicing. But behind the curtain the mechanics of the new government remain as opaque as ever. The “programme cabinet” is a vehicle built by a social scientist, Kim Putters, to convey four parties with fundamentally different ..read more

It turns out the would-be Dutch coalition partners have spent the last three months dancing round constitutional handbags. Half of Ronald Plasterk’s seven-page report on the first stage of negotiations was taken up by a declaration by the four parties that they would safeguard the institutions of government and the rights of citizens – a ..read more

It seems a very long time ago that Caroline van der Plas sat in a television studio and declared: “I want to be with Pieter!” Back in those distant days of late October, the idea of Geert Wilders storming the elections was so far-fetched that he didn’t even get a seat at the College Tour ..read more

When the negotiations to form the next Dutch government began, much was made of Geert Wilders’s promise to put his most blatantly unconstitutional policies into cold storage. This week it feels as if the temporary parliament building in The Hague were hit by a severe power cut, because the talks have gone sour faster than ..read more

Geert Wilders’s statement that “we have a serious problem” (we hebben een serieus probleem) went viral on social media last week, mainly because it was one of those sentences that make the Dutch language look like a phonetic transcription of Officer Crabtree in ‘Allo ‘Allo. But it is worth examining in all its banality for ..read more

When Mark Rutte resigned last July after 13 years as prime minister, he created a political vacuum. That vacuum swelled during an insipid four-month election campaign, sucking up any hope that a new generation of leaders could engineer real change. All three of the party leaders who seemed best placed to succeed Rutte made strategic ..read more

Last week there was heady talk of a breakthrough in the stand-off between Pieter Omtzigt and Geert Wilders over the small matter of people’s constitutional rights. Both men emerged from an intimate tea party with Ronald Plasterk to say they had “cleared the air” over Wilders’s promise to put his anti-Islam policies into “cold storage”. But this is the Netherlands in autumn, when the air only clears for long enough to allow fresh storm clouds to gather over the North Sea. Plasterk’s scouting report made it plain that Omtzigt’s fundamental objections were undiminished ..read more

Three opinion polls in the last days of the election campaign prove one thing beyond doubt: Dutch voters are bored of this election, bored beyond measure. And they have much to be bored about. A damp, tepid, defensive contest, micromanaged from start to finish, unexpectedly caught fire on Saturday when Maurice de Hond served up ..read more