The Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders has pulled his party out of the country’s four-party ruling coalition in a row over immigration and asylum policy, signalling the probable collapse of the Netherlands’ 11-month-old government.
Wilders, whose populist, anti-Islam Freedom party (PVV) finished as the largest in parliament in the last elections, said on Tuesday he had informed the prime minister, Dick Schoof, that all PVV ministers would leave the government.
“I signed up for the toughest asylum policy, not the downfall of the Netherlands,” he told reporters after earlier announcing on social media that since there had been “no signoff on our asylum plans” the PVV was “leaving the coalition”.
The announcement followed a brief early morning meeting of the four party leaders in the already fractious and fragile coalition, the first to include the far-right PVV, which has struggled to reach consensus on much since it was sworn in last July.
It is unclear what will happen next. The three remaining coalition partners could in theory try to stay on as a minority administration, but new elections later this year are seen as more likely. Schoof called an emergency cabinet meeting for early afternoon.
Frans Timmermans, the leader of the opposition Labour/Green alliance, said fresh elections were the only option. “I see no other way to form a stable government,” Timmermans, a former European Commission vice-president, said.
The coalition between the PVV, the populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), the centrist New Social Contract (NSC) and the liberal-conservative VVD took nearly six months to form and has come under sustained fire from Wilders, who is not a cabinet member.
He wanted it to adopt a 10-point plan aimed at radically reducing immigration and asylum. Legal experts have said several of the proposals breach European human rights laws or the UN refugee convention, to which the Netherlands is a signatory.
The coalition partners reacted with anger and disbelief to the far-right firebrand’s decision. Dilan Yeşilgöz, the VVD leader, said Schoof had appealed to the four party leaders to act responsibly before Tuesday morning’s meeting.
“He said we are facing enormous international challenges, we have a war on our continent, an economic crisis may be coming our way,” Yeşilgöz said, adding that she was “shocked” by Wilders’s decision, which she called “super-irresponsible”.
Yeşilgöz added of the far-right leader: “We had a rightwing majority and he lets it all go, for his ego. He’s just doing what he wants … This is making us look like fools. He’s running away, at a time of unprecedented uncertainty.”
Caroline van der Plas of the BBB said she was extremely angry, adding: “He is not putting the Netherlands first, he is putting Geert Wilders first.” Nicolien van Vroonhoven of the NSC said the move was “incredible and incomprehensible”.
Wilders’s plan includes enlisting the army to secure and patrol the borders, turning all asylum seekers back at the border, shutting refugee accommodation facilities, sending all Syrian refugees home, suspending EU asylum quotas and banning family members joining refugees already in the country.
Frustrated by the lack of progress, he warned at a press conference last week that if immigration policy was not radically tightened by implementing the points on his list, the PVV – the largest party in parliament, with 37 seats – would be “out of the cabinet”.
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Coalition partners did not embrace his idea, saying it was up to the migration minister from Wilders’ own party to work on specific proposals to be put to parliament.
Recent polls show the PVV has lost significant voter support since its shock election win in November 2023. The party is polling about at about 20%, roughly level with the Labour/Green alliance that is currently the second-largest in parliament.
It is not the first time that Wilders – a polemicist who has spent years in opposition, has a conviction for discrimination and managed to strike a coalition deal only after abandoning his bid to become prime minister – has turned his back on power.
In 2010 he pledged support to a minority government led by the former prime minister Mark Rutte, but walked away from the confidence and supply arrangement less than two years later after a dispute over government austerity measures.
“You know that if you work with Wilders in a coalition … it won’t go well,” Rob Jetten, the leader of the opposition liberal D66 party, told the public broadcaster NOS. “If it hadn’t happened today, it would have happened sometime in the next few weeks.”
Jetten said the government had been unable to take many decisions because it was prey to too many “rows and crises”, adding that the other three coalition parties had been taken “hostage” by Wilders.
Schoof, a career bureaucrat with no political experience, could hand his resignation in to King Willem-Alexander as early as Tuesday afternoon, less than a month before the Netherlands is due to host a summit of Nato leaders in The Hague.
