Dutch government collapses after far-right leader pulls party out of coalition
The Hague: The Dutch government collapsed on Tuesday, most likely ushering in a snap election, after anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders quit the right-wing coalition, accusing other parties of failing to back his tougher immigration policies.
But Prime Minister Dick Schoof, an independent, accused the political maverick of irresponsibility, and the other coalition parties denied failing to support Wilders, saying they had been awaiting proposals from his PVV party's own migration minister.
PVV ministers will quit the cabinet, leaving the others to continue as a caretaker administration until an election unlikely to be held before October.
Frustration with migration and the high cost of living is boosting the far right and widening divisions in Europe, just as it needs unity to deal effectively with a hostile Russia and an unpredictable and combative US president in the form of Donald Trump.
'I have told party leaders repeatedly in recent days that the collapse of the cabinet would be unnecessary and irresponsible,' Schoof said after an emergency cabinet meeting triggered by Wilders' decision.
'We are facing major challenges both nationally and internationally that require decisiveness from us,' he added, before handing his resignation to King Willem-Alexander.
The prospect of a new election is likely to delay a decision on boosting defence spending and means the Netherlands will have only a caretaker government when it hosts a summit of the transatlantic NATO alliance this month.
Wilders said he had had no option but to quit the coalition.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sky News AU
6 hours ago
- Sky News AU
UK immigration spouts ‘rapid cultural changes' with no ‘shared national identity'
British news presenter Patrick Christys comments on the United Kingdom's recent surge in immigration, claiming the country is being reduced to nothing more than a plot of land with 'no shared national identity'. 'You cannot have a successful country if you have no sense of shared national identity, culture and history,' Mr Christys told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. 'I worry, many people worry, that Great Britain is now being reduced to nothing more than a plot of land, where anyone from all over the world can reside. 'We're seeing rapid cultural changes … the Muslim population could be as high as 20 per cent in Britain by the turn of the century.'
The Advertiser
8 hours ago
- The Advertiser
NATO will commit to Trump's spending target: Hegseth
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth says he's confident members of the NATO alliance will sign up to Donald Trump's demand for a major boost in defence spending, adding that it had to happen by a summit later in June. The US president has said NATO allies should boost investment in defence to five per cent of gross domestic product, up from the current target of two per cent. "To be an alliance, you got to be more than flags. You got to be formations. You got to be more than conferences," Hegseth said as he arrived at a gathering of NATO defence ministers in Brussels. Diplomats have said European allies understand that hiking defence expenditure is the price of ensuring a continued US commitment to the continent's security and keeping the US on board means allowing Trump to be able to declare a win on his five per cent demand during the summit, scheduled for June 24-25. "That will be a considerable extra investment," NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte told reporters, predicting that in the Hague summit "we will decide on a much higher spending target for all the nations in NATO." In a bid to meet Trump's goal, Rutte has proposed alliance members boost defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP and commit a further 1.5 per cent to broader security-related spending, Reuters has reported. Details of the new investment plan will likely continue to be negotiated until the eve of the NATO summit. In the meantime, Rutte said he expects allies to agree on Thursday on what he called "historic" new capability targets. The targets, which define how many troops and weapons and how much ammunition a country needs to provide to NATO, would aim to better balance defence contributions between Europe, Canada, and the United States and "make NATO a stronger, fairer and a more lethal alliance", he said in opening remarks to the meeting. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth says he's confident members of the NATO alliance will sign up to Donald Trump's demand for a major boost in defence spending, adding that it had to happen by a summit later in June. The US president has said NATO allies should boost investment in defence to five per cent of gross domestic product, up from the current target of two per cent. "To be an alliance, you got to be more than flags. You got to be formations. You got to be more than conferences," Hegseth said as he arrived at a gathering of NATO defence ministers in Brussels. Diplomats have said European allies understand that hiking defence expenditure is the price of ensuring a continued US commitment to the continent's security and keeping the US on board means allowing Trump to be able to declare a win on his five per cent demand during the summit, scheduled for June 24-25. "That will be a considerable extra investment," NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte told reporters, predicting that in the Hague summit "we will decide on a much higher spending target for all the nations in NATO." In a bid to meet Trump's goal, Rutte has proposed alliance members boost defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP and commit a further 1.5 per cent to broader security-related spending, Reuters has reported. Details of the new investment plan will likely continue to be negotiated until the eve of the NATO summit. In the meantime, Rutte said he expects allies to agree on Thursday on what he called "historic" new capability targets. The targets, which define how many troops and weapons and how much ammunition a country needs to provide to NATO, would aim to better balance defence contributions between Europe, Canada, and the United States and "make NATO a stronger, fairer and a more lethal alliance", he said in opening remarks to the meeting. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth says he's confident members of the NATO alliance will sign up to Donald Trump's demand for a major boost in defence spending, adding that it had to happen by a summit later in June. The US president has said NATO allies should boost investment in defence to five per cent of gross domestic product, up from the current target of two per cent. "To be an alliance, you got to be more than flags. You got to be formations. You got to be more than conferences," Hegseth said as he arrived at a gathering of NATO defence ministers in Brussels. Diplomats have said European allies understand that hiking defence expenditure is the price of ensuring a continued US commitment to the continent's security and keeping the US on board means allowing Trump to be able to declare a win on his five per cent demand during the summit, scheduled for June 24-25. "That will be a considerable extra investment," NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte told reporters, predicting that in the Hague summit "we will decide on a much higher spending target for all the nations in NATO." In a bid to meet Trump's goal, Rutte has proposed alliance members boost defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP and commit a further 1.5 per cent to broader security-related spending, Reuters has reported. Details of the new investment plan will likely continue to be negotiated until the eve of the NATO summit. In the meantime, Rutte said he expects allies to agree on Thursday on what he called "historic" new capability targets. The targets, which define how many troops and weapons and how much ammunition a country needs to provide to NATO, would aim to better balance defence contributions between Europe, Canada, and the United States and "make NATO a stronger, fairer and a more lethal alliance", he said in opening remarks to the meeting. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth says he's confident members of the NATO alliance will sign up to Donald Trump's demand for a major boost in defence spending, adding that it had to happen by a summit later in June. The US president has said NATO allies should boost investment in defence to five per cent of gross domestic product, up from the current target of two per cent. "To be an alliance, you got to be more than flags. You got to be formations. You got to be more than conferences," Hegseth said as he arrived at a gathering of NATO defence ministers in Brussels. Diplomats have said European allies understand that hiking defence expenditure is the price of ensuring a continued US commitment to the continent's security and keeping the US on board means allowing Trump to be able to declare a win on his five per cent demand during the summit, scheduled for June 24-25. "That will be a considerable extra investment," NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte told reporters, predicting that in the Hague summit "we will decide on a much higher spending target for all the nations in NATO." In a bid to meet Trump's goal, Rutte has proposed alliance members boost defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP and commit a further 1.5 per cent to broader security-related spending, Reuters has reported. Details of the new investment plan will likely continue to be negotiated until the eve of the NATO summit. In the meantime, Rutte said he expects allies to agree on Thursday on what he called "historic" new capability targets. The targets, which define how many troops and weapons and how much ammunition a country needs to provide to NATO, would aim to better balance defence contributions between Europe, Canada, and the United States and "make NATO a stronger, fairer and a more lethal alliance", he said in opening remarks to the meeting.
Sydney Morning Herald
9 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
My grandmother fled the holocaust. Now it's time for Jews to abandon Israel
Since the October 7 butchery of Jews by Gaza's reigning death cult, the anti-Zionist left and the antisemitic right have indulged in a masterclass of double standards and selective outrage. Social media algorithms, designed to inflame, flood our feeds with Gazan disaster porn. Instagram influencers are suddenly brave opponents of the Zionist colonial-settler state. Many of them know little of the Oslo Accords, of Yitzhak Rabin, of Ehud Olmert 's peace plan. They couldn't tell you who invaded and occupied the West Bank as soon as Israel was created (hint: it wasn't Israel, and it rhymes with 'Blordan') or who invaded and occupied Gaza (hint: it wasn't Israel, and it rhymes with 'Blegypt'). The online warriors elide the Arab states' sterling effort at wiping out Israel in 1967 and the attempted do-over in 1973. They denounce Israel's failure to create a Palestinian state while ignoring the repeated reluctance of Palestinians to condone a two-state solution during periods when a majority of Israelis believed it was not merely desirable but inevitable. So Jewish Australians have found it head-spinning, since October 7, to be collectively blamed for the plight of Palestinians by anti-Zionists who don't seem to give two stuffs about actual, real-life Palestinian people – activists who never mention the sinister coercions of Qatar, Iran or Hezbollah in Lebanon; who've never campaigned for the right of Palestinian refugees to escape Hamas' brutality by seeking better lives in neighbouring Arab states; who remain silent about Muslims being crushed in Syria, Chechnya, Yemen and Sudan; who chant catchy slogans whose subtexts they don't understand about rivers and seas, and globalised intifadas; who pretend that Iranian theocracy and jihadist ideology aren't a problem in Palestine or the wider Muslim world. Many pro-Palestinian Jews who detest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are rendered mute by a tsunami of foggy-headed anti-Zionist righteousness so selective that it smells like an anti-Jewish double standard. Many Jews also remain wistful about a homeland for the most persecuted group in history. There's still an allure to the Israel that my grandmother dreamt of when she fled the Holocaust; the Israel envisioned by Zionism's early pacifist-socialist, hippy-dippy kibbutzniks, of which today's anti-Zionists are unaware. But how far does the Actual Existing Israel have to stray from its founding principles and from the basic moral tenets of Jewishness – and for how long – before we stop making excuses for it? Loading Palestinians in the occupied West Bank endure lives of systematic dehumanisation under military law. Their Jewish neighbours, most of them in newly illegally built towns, enjoy the full rights of citizenship, sometimes with violent impunity. The settlements are an elaborate, militarised thicket of ethnic discrimination. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza have been crushed to within an inch of their lives, many of them too young to bear any responsibility for the jihadists holding them hostage. The annihilation of Gaza and the open rhetoric from senior Israeli cabinet ministers of ethnically cleansing the territory are not self-defence. Israel is no longer in an emergency, where all bets are off. It is now choosing a strategy. It is now proactively erasing the future of millions of people. If you suspect that a fair bit of the pro-Gaza hoo-ha is motivated by bias against Israel (and some of it is), read the work of Israel's own progressive independent media: Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and B'Tselem, and the Israeli historian Lee Mordechai's website Witnessing the Gaza War. Listen to my recent interview with the world-renowned Israeli genocide expert Professor Amos Goldberg, who wrote 'There's No Auschwitz in Gaza. But It's Still Genocide.'
