But while Wilders can comfortably fill a small venue with traditional working-class voters, young men in black, MPs and party stalwarts in this stronghold and fishing village north of Amsterdam, the question is whether he will do the same at a national level. This veteran of Dutch politics is leading in one of the polls, and is neck and neck with two other parties in another, with a snap election today. After a shock win in 2023 elections, his far-Right Party for Freedom (PVV) party failed to pass its promised asylum laws, collapsed the coalition and has slumped from its current 37 seats to between 23 and 29 in the final polls.

Yet many continue to support the one-man party’s narrative about how asylum seekers — 12% of immigration last year and less than the European average — are responsible for the country’s housing woes, integration questions, and price inflation.

The Netherlands does experience real pressures: starting with demography. Like many Western European countries, it is dependent on immigration for its future prosperity. A state commission last year recommended “moderate growth” to 2050 — from 18 million currently to 19 or 20 million. It has an aging population and Europe’s shortest working week. In this rich land, a larger group of labor migrants and highly-skilled “expats” are essential to staff farming, distribution and meat processing jobs, as well as more high-tech industries.

As for the low-paid migrants who come in larger numbers from Eastern Europe, they typically face the worst housing and exploitation. Left-wing parties like Frans Timmermans’ GreenLeft-Labour argue that cracking down on poor conditions and minimum wages is a better way of getting a “grip” on migration in Europe’s second-most densely populated country. Wilders, by contrast, proposes a “total asylum stop”, the army at the borders and stronger measures to eject people who are refused asylum or commit a crime — without discussing labor migration at all.

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Faced with a housing crisis — caused by a decade of stimulating property speculation, a rising number of single-person households, and a lack of building to keep up with population growth — views have polarized around immigration. Wilders blames the asylum seekers, who get priority for 7% of new social homes if they get a residency permit; Dutch media and progressive Amsterdam politicians criticize “rich” expat workers, who buy 1.5% of houses nationally.

Today’s election, therefore, is a turning point: will a centrist coalition (excluding Wilders) form an effective government in the 150-seat parliament, build affordable housing, solve an environmental crisis around excess nitrogen compounds and address affordability? Or will dissatisfaction only grow among disaffected voters, especially since the main parties have now erected a cordon sanitaire against the controversial, anti-Islam Wilders?

Certainly, Wilders manages to inspire a level of loyalty rarely seen in other parties, in this fragmented political culture.“Being a freedom party voter becomes a social identity, it becomes who you are,” says Bert Bakker, who studies political communication at the University of Amsterdam. “And just as supporters of Ajax [football club] remain loyal to the team even though it’s going through terrible periods of management, regardless of government, a core of the Freedom Party supporters will stay loyal.”

The fact that Wilders has not succeeded in government; that many of his ministers were accused of incompetence; and indeed that he walked away within 11 months, does not, Bakker says, matter to them. “We live in a very fragmented country,” he continues. “There’s just a strong group of voters who feel the country is moving in the wrong direction. And that a lot of that is tied to [beliefs about] migration and/or corrupt elites — that’s the populist part of it.”

People at the event on Saturday tell me Wilders truly hears their concerns. “He is going to save our country — I hope so,” says Astrid Arnold Harmsen, a special-needs assistant who hands Wilders a hand-written letter. “There’s a lot going wrong here. It’s impossible to get social housing, children can’t get a home, immigration is too high and we do too much for foreign [countries] instead of for ourselves.”

Do they have a point? While the Netherlands scores well on income equality — probably due to high income tax — wealth is spread far more unevenly. The richest 10% hold more than half of the assets, and a decade of housing-market stimulus has doubled prices: Europe’s second highest increase in the price-income ratio. Homeowners, 57% of households, still receive €11.2 billion in mortgage interest relief, while 17,000 more people are paper millionaires as property values soar.

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The extent to which such problems are the fault of immigration, however, is open to debate. The UN special rapporteur on the right to housing last year said that foreigners were not responsible for the country’s general housing crisis. Steije Hofhuis, a postdoctoral researcher on migration at the Berlin Social Science Center, points out that settled asylum seekers take up just 12% of new social housing stock — if you don’t count people who have moved from one social home to another — while it has not been acceptable to talk about the “broken” asylum system, or neighborhood cultural issues in recent years.

No less important, while the Netherlands still has a comparatively high stock of social housing, the “free” private rental market is small and expensive. With a shortage of some 400,000 homes, that’s hardly surprising. This has downstream effects too, with surveys indicating a social divide between those with academic and vocational educations, even as the latter are not well represented in councils and parliament.

Wilders, in Hofhuis’ view, has no interest in solving these issues. “I’m afraid it’s a somewhat cynical model of Wilders,” he says, “and I do find it genuinely interesting why so many people are so eager to vote for him when it is so clear he’s not interested in solving any problem.” “I think the level of anger is just huge and he, of course, has a vocabulary that appeals to that and worsens it.”

Wilders’ offensive style does not preclude him from winning votes, even though he has a conviction for insulting Dutch Moroccans and proposes anti-constitutional laws and policies on Islam.

What might prove more damaging for Wilders, rather, is something as banal as the weather. “If the turnout of the voters is high, it’s likely that the PVV will profit from that,” explains Bart Koenen, senior researcher at the Verian polling research center. “There are a lot of PVV voters who, in reality, when it’s bad weather on Wednesday, look outside and say: ‘Oh no, I’m not going to vote.’ [Wilders is] very aware of the fact that he has to mobilize a lot of people who haven’t got that much confidence in democracy.”

The Netherlands’ longest-serving MP faces other challenges too. The Christian Democratic Appeal leader Henri Bontenbal has had a dramatic rise in the polls, with a message of competence and common decency. Young and dynamic D66 liberal democrat leader Rob Jetten looks to be enjoying a last-minute boost with a “yes, we can” (Het kan wél) campaign that also takes on issues around immigration, proposing to limit sectors with a high demand for low-paid labor, while giving refugees, who have a good chance of winning asylum, the opportunity to have language lessons and work from day one. Together with the PVV and GreenLeft-Labour, they are vying closely for first and second place.

At a campaign event in Amsterdam on Sunday, D66 supporter Henri de Haan says the Netherlands could represent a new dawn for European centrism, after the failures of the far-Right in government. “You see nationalism in France, Belgium, Germany, England,” he suggests. “Parties that play on these feelings. I think that in the Netherlands we are a bit ahead because we have seen that an extreme Right, divisive party, [the] PVV has exploited those feelings to win votes, they were the largest, they were in government and they have achieved precisely nothing.”

But in the meantime, says Koenen, it has become “more socially acceptable” to be far-Right. A recent anti-immigration demonstration in The Hague is a case in point: despite descending into violence, many protesters failed to cover their faces.

All the while, Koenen suggests that politicians across the European Union will be looking closely at the Dutch results. “It’s the first,” he says, referring to the fact that the Dutch, ahead of other European countries, will go to the polls to judge the success of the far-Right at the heart of power. “I think that there will be a change, that people will choose the middle parties, the center parties. But it doesn’t lead to less voting for the PVV.”

In the face of a crippling housing crisis, van Steenberge is one of a growing number of Dutch voters turning not to the far-Right, but to a centrist party making a surprising comeback, Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA). The CDA’s campaign emphasizes “core Dutch values” like fairness and solidarity while making clear that you don’t have to be Christian to agree..

The country is at a crossroads. In the 2023 elections, the bouffant-haired veteran of the far-Right, Geert Wilders, won the most seats, shaking the political establishment. But by June, he triggered the collapse of the government, citing a lack of support for his asylum policies.

Ahead of a general election on 29 October, the question is whether anti-establishment parties that feed on feelings of exclusion will continue to rise or whether a different story of nationhood can emerge. The CDA does not define itself in opposition to outsiders but as an inclusive movement of “Christian democracy”. Created in the Seventies to forge bonds between Protestants and Catholics, it’s back with a quiet “c”.

The latest polls show a dramatic rise in CDA support that would give it some 25 of the 150 seats in parliament — compared to its current five. At a packed AGM and campaign launch in Rotterdam earlier this month, the mood among the 1,500 attendees was jubilant. Louder than the crowd’s rendition of the Dutch national anthem were the words of praise for their cherub-faced soft-spoken leader, Henri Bontenbal.

“Are you, like me, meeting people every day who say: ‘I’m going to vote for Bontenbal’?” former CDA prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende asked the room. “They say the CDA is needed again in Dutch politics. When you look at what is happening, it seems like a bad theater show in The Hague. There’s a gap between people and politics, trust is falling away, democracy is under pressure… And then there is Henri Bontenbal, who comes here with another story.”

The term for common decency, fatsoen, is on everyone’s lips. The program voted through at the Rotterdam meeting stressed a return to values many Dutch people see when they look in the mirror: fairness, moral integrity, order, solidarity and kindness. While the CDA advocates for “more grip on migration”, it refused to support a migration bill this summer because a Party for Freedom amendment would have criminalized offering illegal migrants something as simple as a bowl of soup.

The Party for Freedom, though, is still leading in the polls. But having achieved little during its year of government, it has been losing voters while the up-and-coming far-Right party JA21 threatens to split its base. JA21 voices the same suspicion of immigration and Islam but with politer words. By contrast, Wilders’ unfiltered comments resulted in a criminal conviction and two decades of 24-hour protection against death threats. JA21 has attracted scores of members; the Party for Freedom has just one – Wilders.

Even if the Party for Freedom wins the most seats again, it has no realistic hope of forming a majority government in the splintered Dutch scene. Every other major party — the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), GreenLeft/Labour and the CDA — has already ruled out working with it. JA21 leader Joost Eerdmans dismissed the idea of a minority far-Right government on stage at that conference, wondering: “Is that a stable answer to the mess and chaos that was left behind, also by Wilders?”

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Dutch society used to be organized around “pillars” — groups such as Catholics or socialists who had their own media, neighborhoods and several main political parties. But the highly proportional parliamentary system has struggled with the ever-more splintering of political support across a dizzying number of parties.

Amid this political volatility, the country faces real, pressing issues. Someone earning an average income can afford just 2% of homes nationwide. There is a housing shortage due to an increase in single-person households and population growth of a million since 2014, largely through labor migration. Combined with lax lending rules and the world’s largest homeowner subsidies, this means home prices have doubled. (The average property goes for almost twice the UK average.)

According to a recent state commission report, the country needs to grow to around 20 million people by 2050 to maintain prosperity. But as Europe’s second most densely populated nation, the Netherlands faces hard choices about how to use its land: for meat processing, logistics depots, or to address the country’s nitrogen crisis caused by decades of intensive farming. And it’s hard to deny the impact of climate change in one of the world’s most vulnerable river deltas.

In contrast to the hard-Right narrative, the CDA is sending a clear message about responsible choices and trade-offs. Beneath the focus on decency, the CDA strikes a soft-Right, pro-Europe chord. The party would criminalize rejected asylum seekers who refuse to return to their country of origin. It also backs a controversial law to distribute asylum centers more evenly across the country. Regarding the country’s nitrogen problem, it sides with the farmer unions which plan to cut emissions through innovation and voluntary buy-outs, with sanctions only a last resort. On security, it proposes a “freedom contribution” tax and Scandinavian-style military service. And when it comes to addressing the housing crisis, it wants to phase out the world’s most generous mortgage tax breaks and stop existing homeowners blocking new builds — a big deal for young people like Van Steenberge, who has bought an apartment but is waiting for a court ruling on whether it can be built due to protests from the neighbors.

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Bontenbal refuses to trade insults with opponents, explains controversial policies clearly, and defends compromise. He is now seen by voters as a safe pair of hands. “You can say now he is the new rising star, like Balkenende in 2002 and later Mark Rutte,” Joyce Boverhuis, pollster at EenVandaag, said. “In our polls, we see that of all the party leaders, he is most seen as prime minister because of his stability, decency, and also [that] he is open to make compromises. He is really realistic and people appreciate that.”

Many think the center can in fact hold. At the CDA conference, D66 liberal democrat MP Jan Paternotte, an unlikely guest, expressed cautious optimism. “I think that people have had enough of arguments, of promises made that turn out to be pipe dreams. There is a huge need for honest politics.”

The Dutch have always been deeply pragmatic about bridging political differences. According to D66 “list pusher” Sandra Phlippen, who is also chief economist at ABN Amro bank, climate collaboration isn’t Left or Right, but part of the national identity since devastating 1953 floods sparked the delta program. “This fundamental belief in being safe from the water is going to begin to change,” she told me, a few days before conference weekend.

Anything can change in Dutch politics. In the last two elections, there were last-minute spurts first for D66, and then in 2023 for the Party for Freedom. Tom Louwerse, director of research at the Leiden University Institute of Political Science, closely monitors the polls and sees signs that voters could roll the dice and make a Left-Right coalition likely – with Bontenbal and his CDA in pole position..

“Presenting this more moderate image until now has served him quite well,” he said. “We also see sometimes in Dutch elections that parties peak too early, so you never know whether that’s the case or that they just keep on growing until election day.”

Some believe any centrist government would be reckless to ignore the same anti-establishment discontent that sparked Brexit and propelled Donald Trump to power. Hans-Martin ten Napel, associate law professor at Leiden University, has studied the CDA’s comeback but believes radical voices are still loud, even if it is broadcast on alternative channels.

“The system made sense in the previous century when society was not so fragmented,” he said. “But I think parts of the electorate have become increasingly frustrated. You can vote for change, as perhaps two-thirds did in November 2023. But nothing ever seems to change.”

Will the Christian Democratic Appeal have the moral courage — and the votes — to break that cycle?

Yesterday morning, Wilders told the leaders of the three other Right-wing parties in the governing coalition that he was quitting and withdrawing his ministers. Given that his party was the largest in the coalition — which also constitutes the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the farmer-citizen movement (BBB), and the good governance party New Social Contract (NSC) — this was pretty much a death sentence. By the afternoon, Prime Minister Dick Schoof had resigned, saying it was all “unnecessary and irresponsible”: a snap election now looks likely.

Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Wilders and his anti-migration, anti-Islam party. The man often called a “firebrand” has exploded what is likely to be his only shot at Dutch government.

Wilders’ official reason for leaving the coalition was asylum policy. A week ago, he presented a 10-point plan to cut migration; his measures included using the army to police the border and sending home many Syrian refugees. When his fellow coalition leaders refused to add his plans to the coalition deal, instead inviting the PVV asylum minister to submit them as policy proposals in the normal way, he walked out.

Yet the real problem for Wilders is not the asylum numbers — refugee applications halved in the first quarter of this year compared to 2024. It’s that Wilders’ party has been plummeting in the polls. In the 2023 election, his party won 37 of the 150 seats. Now it’s polling neck and neck with the center-right VVD — another pillar of the governing coalition — though other polls put Frans Timmermans’ GreenLeft/Labour alliance in the lead.

Where, then, is Wilders going wrong? Asylum is normally the golden ticket for the Dutch far-Right: it was the most significant issue in the last election, after a row broke out about a small number of refugees who had priority for social housing during a severe national housing crisis. There were also widespread concerns about asylum centers opening across the country.

But today, the two greatest issues the Dutch think their politicians should be dealing with are the housing crisis and healthcare. Wilders’ poorly thought-through proposals on both have stuttered. His party demanded a rent freeze for social housing in the spring budget, which infuriated housing corporations and private owners, and received the worst possible feedback from the Council of State. It has since been withdrawn. Meanwhile Wilders’ promise of a lower future healthcare “excess”, it turns out, will also mean higher health insurance premiums, which is not exactly a vote winner.

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His asylum minister Marjolein Faber has also made a series of missteps — most recently, refusing to sign honors for Dutch volunteers involved with refugees — and has struggled to answer questions on two migration bills: the first would introduce a dual status for political refugees and those fleeing war; the second would limit family reunification.

This experiment in government has revealed the deep inconsistencies in the Freedom Party’s policies and the inexperience of most of its ministers. Wilders is a staunch Thatcherite and yet has a voter base with ties to the Socialist Party. His manifesto is a hotchpotch of measures that claim to help the working class but don’t make economic sense. Despite being a veteran opposition politician, he lacks a vital skill set in a system of proportional representation: he cannot compromise nor build coalitions.

The other three coalition leaders have been talking about Wilders in terms normally used to describe a grumpy toddler. “It is totally irresponsible. It is so childish. I do not think it is worth a voter’s mandate,” said Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, leader of the VVD.

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But Wilders’ relationship is even more strained with another coalition party, the NSC, whose popular founder Pieter Omtzigt withdrew from politics last month. Omtzigt, one of the key figures in uncovering a childcare benefits scandal in which some 40,000 parents were incorrectly accused of fraud, created his own Right-wing party on a ticket to promote constitutional rights. To enter into an uneasy coalition with NSC, Wilders, who has a criminal record for insulting Dutch Moroccans, promised to put “on ice” his manifesto’s anti-constitutional measures such as banning mosques, Islamic schools, and the Koran.

Ironically, like Wilders’ Freedom Party, the NSC benefited from a 2023 protest vote, with many voters apparently wanting to punish a tin-eared elite that seemed to be ignoring the common man. Yet not much progress has been made on the policies on which both were elected. And in the background of this uneasy marriage, the Dutch housing crisis is getting worse, with one in eight houses facing subsidence due to climate change, and signs this week that some schoolchildren are sleeping in garage boxes or in cars after relationship break-ups, due to a lack of housing.

Like many other Dutch protest parties, the NSC and BBB have collapsed in the polls to virtual insignificance. But there are signs that central and Christian parties — traditionally the bedrock of Dutch politics — are recovering their support. Last week, Yeşilgöz-Zegerius hosted British startup Looking for Growth in a campaign-style meeting in Amsterdam’s business district. And the cherub-faced new leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Appeal, Henri Bontenbal, has seen his party’s poll numbers recover during its period in opposition. “What we have seen in the last two years is the evidence why we don’t want [to work with the PVV],” he told Dutch media on Tuesday afternoon. “I see the PVV standing on a platform with autocrats like [Hungarian prime minister Viktor] Orbán, flirting with Donald Trump, ridiculing the press… Especially when the world is so unstable, we should cherish democracy.”

While Wilders might have made world headlines, he has probably given up power for good. Although he told the Dutch press he would be back — “the next time to become prime minister and… make the PVV bigger than ever” — it is unthinkable that he could muster more than 50% of the vote in the splintered Dutch political scene. After this performance, surely nobody will want to go into coalition with him again — and some of his voters, in vox pop interviews yesterday, seemed baffled. The question going forward, as the Netherlands heads into its next election, is whether these fractious political gangs can stop fighting and get on with business.

To this day, evidence is still emerging of how Dutch people looked away — and sometimes even profited — as 102,000 of their fellow countrymen, women and children were murdered. It is the worst record in Western Europe. But now, as survivors approach the end of their lives, the Netherlands seems ready to pass on a truer Holocaust story to a younger generation.

In his new documentary, Lost City, director Willy Lindwer highlights evidence of the tram journey that brought Anne Frank and her family from the Weteringschans prison to Central Station on 8 August 1944 after their “secret annex” hiding place was discovered. It turns out that the Amsterdam transport company, the GVB, invoiced the Nazi occupier for these tram rides for 48,000 Jewish people — and continued to do so even after the war.

“What we discovered,” says Lindwer, “is that the Amsterdam tram collaborated in a massive way with the Nazis. And that last invoice was never paid so Amsterdam got in bailiffs for two years after the war to try to get 80 guilders back from the tram ride that the Frank family was in.”

In the coming years, the Dutch will have to confront more unsettling truths. Earlier this month, the Netherlands opened its first National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam to tell not just the tales of the astonishingly brave resistance, but also stories of the Jewish people who were murdered, the civil servants who betrayed them, and the ordinary people who did nothing — or even took the houses and possessions of the deported.

Inevitably, these two cultural events have become entangled in the public consciousness following Hamas’s bloody attack on Israel on October 7, and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Israeli president Isaac Herzog used a speech at the opening of the National Holocaust Museum to call for the “immediate safe return” of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas — while, outside, crowds of pro-Palestinian protesters turned nasty, apparently jeering at Holocaust survivor Rudie Cortissos and his great-granddaughter (although they said they supported the museum). The number of reported incidents of antisemitism in the Netherlands doubled last year and the Centre for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI) reported an “enormous peak” after October 7.

To understand all this, we must look to history, and the several important ways the Netherlands differed from other Western Nazi-occupied lands. On 10 May 1940, the German army invaded the neutral country, and after five days of fighting and heavy bombing of Rotterdam, the Dutch surrendered. The state was destroyed and a new administration was installed headed by Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian Nazi who would go on to order the deportation of the Dutch Jewish population to Nazi extermination camps.

The Netherlands — in particular, Amsterdam — had for centuries been a safe place of refuge for Jewish people. But during the war, there was far more solidarity with the Jewish populations in France and Belgium than in the Netherlands, possibly because Dutch society was based on separate “pillars”, communities living alongside one another rather than mixing. The geography of this small, densely populated and relatively unforested land certainly meant there were far fewer places for Jewish people to hide.

Indeed, while there was a Dutch resistance movement that smuggled 600 Jewish children to safety from the site of the Holocaust Museum, many citizens also profited from occupation. So-called “Jew hunters” were paid for betrayal, a Dutch railway charged Jewish people for their tickets, Amsterdam levied housing tax on Holocaust survivors for their time in the camps, and Jewish property was routinely stolen. In Lost City, a Jewish woman describes escaping arrest to find all her valuables stolen by her neighbours. Tini Jacobs-van Dulst remembers cycling through the city with her mother in September 1943, aged six, looking at empty houses and choosing one on the Diezestraat. “We never spoke about why these houses were empty,” she says. “I found out myself as a teenager.” And my late neighbour, Maud Hedeman, who survived via a prisoner exchange with Switzerland, could never understand why a Dutch family would not give her father back the family rug when they returned.

After the war, the extent of this betrayal was not discussed. For many Jewish people, the memories were simply too painful. Tram line 8 was scrapped, “Euterpestraat”, the street of the German headquarters, was renamed after resistance fighter Gerrit van der Veen, and there was little space for the Jewish war experience in public life.

“The memories of Dutch Jews were mostly suppressed,” says Bart Wallet, professor of modern Jewish history at the University of Amsterdam. “All the attention went to the resistance and to the military that liberated the Netherlands. Jews specifically didn’t fit the image that people wanted to convey during memorial activities and monuments… The Jewish community held their commemorations until the Sixties exclusively inside synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, not in a public sphere.” Only now, he says, can the Dutch people bear to face the full story. “The Holocaust Museum is a pivot point in Dutch memory culture.”

But for many Dutch Jews, this doesn’t go far enough. Holocaust survivor Salo Muller, who won group compensation from the NS railway service to repay the cost of Holocaust train tickets, has also demanded an apology and reparation from Amsterdam’s trams.

Simmering in the background, meanwhile, is a row over a public-funded “cold case” study naming Jewish Council member Arnold van den Bergh as the “betrayer” of Anne Frank’s family. Rosemary Sullivan’s bestselling book on the case, The Betrayal of Anne Frank, was stoutly refuted by historians in the Netherlands and later withdrawn. It is seen by some as implicitly blaming the Jewish population for its own destruction. To the frustration of relatives, who have retained an American law firm to defend Van den Bergh’s name, the deeply contested book is still available in other countries.

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Further research on the involvement of Amsterdam’s government in the Nazi’s antisemitic policies is expected to be released this year by the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. “We saw ourselves as the nation of Anne Frank,” says emeritus professor Johannes Houwink ten Cate. “It hurts when we are forced to see ourselves as the nation of the tram driver transporting the Frank family to the station and from there to a transit camp, and to a death camp from there. It took us a long time to come to terms with our not-so-good track record during the Holocaust.”

This reassessment is a function of a former colonial nation wrestling with its identity. The background is one defined by tumult: where Geert Wilders wins an election by attributing all social woes to asylum seekers, where middle-class Amsterdammers blame “expats” for their housing crisis, and where, in government, the Dutch apparently lose their famed ability to “polder” across differences and form a normal coalition.

And in this polarised, politically fragmented country, it throws up the question of who “belongs”, where we all originally come from and how much that actually matters. Was Dutch tolerance ever all it was cracked up to be? And where on earth is it now?

Faced with such a task, looking honestly at the past is a good place to start. But it is an uncomfortable journey, just like the tram ride when Willy Lindwer realised that, on the way to their deaths, Anne Frank’s family would have had a brief glimpse of their secret annex.

It’s a sentiment shared in Lost City by Izak Salomons, who was imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen. At one point, he explains how his sweet, six-year-old grandson asked him how he survived the war. “I said: ‘Well, we were in a camp…The Germans weren’t very nice.’ Then I saw that he was welling up and so to comfort him, I said, ‘Now they are nice again.’

“He mulled it over and then said: ‘True, but they are still ashamed.’”

Times are indeed pretty good for Caroline van der Plas. Surrounded by the thousands of blooms that adorn the Royal FloraHolland Trade Fair, the leader of the BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB), the Dutch farmer-citizen party, is here to baptise a new pink rose named in her honour. She’s also here to rally support among the nation’s sympathetic flower-growers before this month’s general election.

“Farmers are fighting hard,” she tells them. “Not just to survive — but also for the environment and for the energy transition. We will keep representing the voice of common sense in the years ahead.”

In the splintered political landscape of the Netherlands, this voice of the countryside has spent the past years thrusting itself into the mainstream. In March, as the Dutch government formulated plans to buy out thousands of “peak polluter” farms, the BBB soldiered on, winning the nation’s regional elections and seizing the biggest share of the Dutch Senate.

Since then, some of her supporters have recently switched to another new party, Pieter Omtzigt’s centre-right New Social Contract, wooed by his growing reputation as a corruption-buster and strong showing in the polls. But the BBB is still set to win up to 11 MPs on November 22, a huge gain on its single seat in the last general election. In the Dutch system of proportional representation, there is a high chance that it will be invited to be part of the next coalition government.

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To do so, however, the BBB will need to shake off its association with the radical Right groups who joined its farmer protests last year. When I put this to Van der Plas, she downplays the risk. “That’s simply not true and I always get a bit cross about it,” she says. “If you look at our voting behaviour and what we do, we are a centre-right party.”

Today, the BBB has expanded from the single issue of farming. Its representatives frequently talk about a “noaberstaat” (a state based on a traditional sense of community), more power for parliament, pro-business policies and an increased social safety net. It also wants to limit asylum to 15,000 migrants a year and impose housing rules for labour migrants. All form the basis of its election manifesto, which party officials refused to have costed by independent economists. “We don’t speak in woolly words,” Van der Plas explains. “We speak the language of the people on the street. And that appeals to a lot of people.”

Her programme certainly appeals to the crowd watching the “Sweet Caroline” rose being christened. “It’s good that she is here,” Arno Heemskerk, an orchid grower from Zevenhuizen says. “There are some who would rather get rid of the farmers and the growers, and we are made out to be big polluters. Of course, we need to do something for the climate, but if there’s one sector that has been busy for years, it is the horticultural sector. We need to make the transition but we need more time to do it.”

One rose grower, who wishes to stay anonymous, suggests that support for the BBB is also motivated by a fear of the Left. He’s particularly concerned about the return of Frans Timmermans, a former European politician who headed up the European Green Deal and now leads a new GreenLeft-Labour coalition. “We are busy seven days a week producing these roses,” he says. “Anyone but Timmermans. We are afraid of him.”

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Steven Van Schilfgaarde, chief executive of Royal FloraHolland, is more optimistic about Van der Plas. “What I see in the BBB is that they want to listen, they have a warm heart for the sector and they understand its economic importance for the Netherlands,” he says.

As the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter, farming has always been a central pillar of Dutch politics. But it also remains a divisive issue. As well as making up some 1.4% of the country’s GDP, it is also responsible for nitrogen-based and phosphate emissions and a major contributor to unlawful levels of damage to protected nature reserves. In response, the BBB does not deny that the farming sector needs to reduce pollution, but instead believes that this must happen more slowly, giving farmers “perspective” on future income rather than just buy-outs to stop.

By doing this, says Bart Koenen, a researcher at Kantar Public, the BBB is attempting to distance itself from its depiction as a radical protest party and brand itself as a voice of common sense. “We have had four [Mark] Rutte governments and the need has grown strongly for a new kind of politics, new faces, a more transparent government,” he says. “It is quite a Left-wing party on social security, access to medical care and affordable transport, and so it’s in a position to speak to a large proportion of the electorate in the cities. But on the other hand, it wants a quota on migration, scoring well with the Dutch public because a lot of people find immigration a big problem that hangs together with a huge housing shortage.”

He points out the BBB’s approach to scrapping nitrogen pollution rules — which currently restrain speeds on motorways and house-building — plays well in solving the country’s lack of an estimated 390,000 homes. “The BBB says that the nitrogen pollution problem isn’t important: we need to build houses.”

In the hope of making this happen, Van der Plas has spoken openly about a potential coalition with Omtzigt’s New Social Contract, which is campaigning primarily around better governance after a series of expensive government scandals over childcare benefits, the Groningen gas wars and unpopular Covid lockdowns. Sarah de Lange, professor of political pluralism at the University of Amsterdam, sees new voices on the centre-right thriving following the total collapse of traditional government parties. “The far-Right in itself is not doing that great, contrary to popular narrative,” she says. “But that is because other parties are doing so well. The core message of the BBB is about the good people in the countryside or provinces who have common sense, against the cosmopolitan elite that is neglecting part of the country. It is agrarian populist with far-Right leanings on some issues [such as immigration].”

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But Van der Plas, a charismatic and straight-talking figure, is working hard to appeal in the cities too. After the flower presentation, a swig of fizz and a mint, she will be whisked off to a photoshoot outside the massive trade fair. Later, she will take off her Doc Martens to have tea in her socks in a caravan with a community of travelling people in Amsterdam.

Joining her out campaigning, Claudia van Zanten, a former councillor for the liberal VVD in Amsterdam and seventh on the BBB candidate list, says it is a party of business that does not just appeal in the countryside. “BBB is a party of the community that is committed to all residents of the Netherlands, farmers and citizens,” she says. “We want a smaller government with fewer civil servants and impossible rules… that pays attention to the human dimension again.” It’s a message, she points out, that did well earlier this year in parts of Amsterdam Municipality such as Weesp. And it appears to have established a stable level of support elsewhere; Van der Plas in particular won public admiration over summer, when she claimed she had no desire to be prime minister, tottering around and abroad “in high heels”.

“I’d never have thought that this would have happened when I was a little girl,” she tells the crowd as she pours pink fizz over a bunch of “Sweet Caroline” blooms intended for her Irish mother. “I am going to tell her: ‘Your daughter has her own rose!’” And when election results are in and coalition negotiations start, she may well find she is coming up roses too.

Like everything in the life of this man — who, as a result of his criticism of Islam, has received death threats and had 24/7 security for 19 years — the words are carefully chosen. Other populist parties on the Dutch Right have risen and fallen but Wilders, remarkably, is still here, the longest-serving MP, with 25 years in parliament. He is the establishment “outsider”, dependably critical of the government, and the Netherlands’s best-known party leader. And right now, he is polling as the biggest voice on the far-Right, ahead of next month’s general election, with his anti-immigration, anti-Islam stance combined with left-wing social policies on topics such as benefits, pensions and healthcare.

Most parties have for years said that they will not work with Wilders. Objections have been made to his attitude towards the rule of law and his refusal to apologise for a 2014 speech calling for “fewer” Moroccan people — which was judged to be criminal. But now, for the first time in a long time, his Party for Freedom (PVV) has a chance at governing. The party currently leading some polls, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), has a new head, Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, and she has said she will “not shut out any party” from coalition negotiations.

So, does this party of one — for Wilders is the only member — really want to be part of the Dutch government it has been attacking for years? “Yes, we do, actually — and I think our chances are improving by the day,” he tells me, leaning in and speaking softly. “Because people or parties who were excluding us are not, now — at least not all of them — and we are doing better every week in the polls.” Why is this?

“We have a very stable party, a good programme, good candidates and people are really fed up with policy about asylum seekers, immigration and terrorist threats. So, I believe if there would be any chance for us — which, of course, is not true, but still — if there would be any chance to govern, it would be now.”

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Indeed, despite the recent rise of a Dutch farmers’ party, and one hat splintered from the Christian Democrats under the popular backbencher Pieter Omtzigt, Wilders has endured in Dutch politics. “Wilders has, over the years since 2006 when he started the Party for Freedom, built up a very strong brand,” says Sjoerd van Heck, a pollster at Ipsos. “He has adhered to the basic principles of how you position something in the market, communicating a consistent message and always staying true to it.” He is, for instance, consistently anti-immigration.

As an immigrant to the Netherlands, I found it somewhat uncomfortable to interview the people who came to the PVV launch. It was surprising to find that many think Wilders sometimes goes too far. “I don’t see him as prime minister, but he has a lot of good points,” says Robert, 65, from Roermond. Past proposals, such as for a headscarf tax, are not popular, even among his supporters.

Jeanet Brakel, 48, from Noord Brabant, tells me: “He says things you’re not supposed to say, and some people find him too hard-line, but he does it for us and he does it in a funny way.” I wonder if she would feel more kind-hearted towards immigrants if she felt less hard up herself? “It’s difficult,” she replies. “Everything is expensive. Holland was a rich country but now so many people are lining up [for benefits] and the foreigners come here and get everything.”

To his supporters, Wilders is a strong voice against the cosmopolitan, liberal ideology that, most feel, leaves them behind. He has what van Heck, the Ipsos pollster, describes as “an economic agenda that’s a bit Left-wing”. And some of those I met at De Blauw Trap swing between fringe parties on the far-Right and those on the far-Left. Hai van Dijk, from Venlo, says he has swung between Wilders and the Socialist Party (SP). “It’s all a protest vote, an anti-vote,” he says. “People don’t feel heard.”

He is not alone, according to Matthijs Rooduijn, associate professor of political science at Amsterdam University. “Discontent was always mobilised by parties on the fringes of the political spectrum: radical Right parties or radical Left parties like the SP,” he says. “But right now, we have two parties that are really mobilising this discontent — and really expressing worries about our politics in the Netherlands — that are not clearly from the fringes of the political spectrum.” That is, the new farmers’ party, and Omtzigt’s.

Responding to this new challenge, from these two new parties, Wilders has claimed in the Dutch press that he is “milder” than he used to be, willing to cooperate on reducing asylum rather than “banning” it, and scrapping his “Ministry for Remigration and De-Islamisation”. But Rooduijn says the content of his manifesto is much the same: “When you look at his programme and ideas, it’s not really more moderate than it was in the past. What has changed is maybe the tone of Wilders” — in a bid, apparently, to appeal to more mainstream parties as a coalition partner.

The other thing that has changed, according to Rooduijn, is “the fact that Yeşilgöz has opened the door a little bit”. But, he adds, “I still don’t think it is very likely he will be part of a government coalition”. Other parties, not least Omtzigt’s recent addition, still exclude Wilders. Omtzigt is currently leading some polls, and his manifesto launch this week addresses the core issues of this election: promoting a decent standard of living, controlling immigration, but above all restoring trust in government. Recent scandals have severely damaged faith in politicians — including one relating to earthquake damage in Groningen and another relating to tax that felled a previous government and is still unresolved.

It will be very difficult for any government to restore that trust, though. The Netherlands is one of the world’s most proportional systems, with 21 groups in parliament and 26 standing. A whole spectrum of views gets parliamentary representation, but the irony is that voters have very little influence over who actually governs: the coalition process is a “black box” of political negotiation that takes place in The Hague, not the ballot box.

Whether or not Wilders succeeds in being part of government — or supporting a minority coalition — the influence of far-Right parties like his is undeniable. “To some extent, these voters have succeeded,” says Rooduijn. In response to them, centre-right parties have shifted their policies. “They have become more restrictive on immigration, more focused on identity issues,” he says, in a bid to win back voters.

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Meanwhile, Wilders sells his story of being an outsider while taking a vigorous, sometimes poisonous, sometimes funny part in the democratic system. He is an excellent debater, sharing his quick wit in the chamber through social media clips and regular newsletters. In a recent budget debate, he enticed his Forum for Democracy rival Thierry Baudet to explain why he doubts the moon landings happened, before saying, like a practised stand-up: “I think you are already quite far on your way to the moon.”

Was he inspired by Trump, with his banter and his America first mantra? “Well, it was not what I thought about: I am not Trump,” he tells me. “But it is happening in many Western countries and also in the Netherlands, that our own people have been forgotten: normal, average people, families, who are having trouble making ends meet.” Although at the campaign launch, Wilders referenced the conflict in the Middle East and terrorist acts in Europe — and has consistently been pro-Israel — his voters seem focused primarily on the Netherlands. “We are there for them.”

After an hour of pressing the flesh, he is ushered into a car which 11 police officers accompany out of the square. Back in De Blauw Trap, the crowd trickles home. And I notice a sign above the bar. “Nights you can’t remember,” it reads, “with friends you’ll never forget.”

Around 650 refugees are being taken off the ship; only 220 will remain. It has already outstayed its agreed welcome — until March 1 — in the North Holland village of Velsen-Noord. The local council has agreed that children currently attending a local school and people with an economic “bond” can stay until the end of May, but after that? Nobody knows.

This is the reality of temporarily housing asylum seekers and migrants on disused cruise ships or barges — a policy the UK is also pursuing. The Government plans to house hundreds of asylum seekers in Dorset, on the ship that was criticised for poor conditions when it was used as a detention centre in the Netherlands in 2006.

Cruise ships and other vessels have been employed at scale in the Netherlands since a refugee shelter crisis hit a year ago, as asylum seeker numbers headed to a five-year peak. There were devastating scenes at the Dutch registration centre of Ter Apel, where people were sleeping outside for days. One baby died in a “cold, draughty and dirty sports hall” overspill centre. The Netherlands’s Doctors Without Borders was deployed for the first time within the country itself.

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Since then, national and local Dutch politicians have been tied up in a debate about who should house asylum seekers and where. The COA refugee settlement agency reports that the total number of asylum seekers being sheltered has more than doubled since 2017, to almost 52,500 this month. A new wave of refugees is expected this year.

Two cruise ships are currently being used to shelter refugees: the Silja Europa, and the MS Galaxy, housing 1,500 people at an industrial harbour in Amsterdam. In Nijmegen, there are two other ships with 250 Ukrainian refugees; in Arnhem, Ukrainian refugees have been sheltered on two small cruise ships — although they are permitted to work straight away. There are five boats housing refugees and asylum seekers in Rotterdam.

On board the Silja Europa, Abdul Aziz, a 40-year-old lawyer from Syria, is sitting in the middle of a deserted lounge area. He has been here for seven months and hopes to find work, a house, and then to bring over his wife and two sons. “The ship is good,” he says. “It is a good life, but there are problems because of many languages, many countries. I transfer to Nijmegen on April 24 — it’s difficult to leave the ship to a new place with four, maybe five people in the same room.”

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With an eye to avoiding an appearance of luxury, the ship’s swimming pool, gym, casino and shops are closed, although one facility provides second-hand clothing and sanitary products three times a week. The disco, looking out onto the North Sea channel, is now a “silent space” for private prayer and weekly female-only fitness classes. There’s a children’s play area run by refugee volunteers and a restaurant offering three meals a day, beginning at 3.15am during Ramadan, when I visited. A medical area has a dedicated doctor and nurse, so as not to detract from local facilities, and there are offices for the IND immigration service and a refugee charity aid VluchtelingenWerk help area.

“We really don’t want to give the impression that we are living a sort of a luxurious life here,” says location manager Hanneke Niele, describing how the 32 nationalities and eight languages rub along. “People get three meals a day and a cabin. And if you compare it with some shelters, then it is luxurious. But we use it as an emergency shelter. Boredom is one of the biggest challenges. No matter how beautiful it is, no matter how much privacy people have, if they are not allowed to work and do not go to school, that is just a disaster.”

In other ways, too, the ship falls short. Taqwa, 24 and from Jordan, is grateful for the help but says it is tough not to be able to cook herself. “I think in the average prison you have more space,” says councillor and head of the liberal democratic D66 party Bas van Ruig about the cabins. “It is ultimately an emergency solution.” The other problem with temporary shelters is that they make an unsettled situation even more febrile, constantly breaking people’s connections and shifting them between schools and potential work.

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“Look, we were faced with a difficult choice,” says Rutger Groot Wassink, who is deputy mayor of Amsterdam and in charge of asylum policy. “Do you think people should lie on the grass of Ter Apel or do you give them shelter on a boat? I’d rather they have shelter on a boat. But you can’t do this for long.”

For Wassink, the situation is highly political. “During the war in Syria, we sheltered about 60,000 people. But we have since cut back and also sent a message to the rest of the world: ‘Don’t come to the Netherlands.’ As a result, many reception locations have disappeared.”

Meanwhile, refugee organisations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) advocate a return to well spread, small and permanent reception locations, which are far cheaper for the public purse. “Even in the mess last year in the Netherlands when people were sleeping outside the now infamous Ter Apel, it didn’t deter people,” says Andrea Vonkeman, office head. “People were still coming. I don’t think a causal relationship has ever been established with a good system as a pull factor and bad conditions as a deterrent.”

As the debacle at Ter Apel brewed last summer, the policy to house refugees on ships was announced and sparked huge opposition — particularly to the initial idea (quickly scrapped) that the vessels might be moored at sea. However, despite these concerns, there have been no notable incidents so far on board. Children go to school, the ships have been opened to journalists and locals, and there are bus services so refugees aren’t stuck at remote locations.

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Standing at the harbourside in Velsen-Noord, even local politicians who vociferously opposed the ship thought twice about the hard departure date. “If we knew then that we would have so little nuisance, it would not have been a problem,” said Joost Bleekman, head of Velsen Lokaal. Still, agreements were made, and he doesn’t want the boat to stay.

Where will the refugees go next? While some municipalities have stepped up, perhaps motivated by compensation — Velsen-Noord was given more than €3 million — other regions have done nothing to help. A controversial bill to forcibly “spread” asylum seekers evenly throughout the country has been repeatedly postponed, and the protest party BoerBurgerBeweging — which is critical of the plan — has just won regional elections, potentially throwing a spanner in the works.

Without an adequate, permanent system in place, refugees are doomed to keep on moving. As Niele walks around the Silja Europa in her smart pink jacket, one man after another approaches her politely, anxious about where he is going to be shipped next, asking for her help. One thing’s for sure: this is no pleasure cruise.

Antwerp harbour leads up the River Scheldt and into the heart of Europe, a port the size of 16,600 football fields, sucking in 240,000,000 tonnes of freight each year. From the giant aerial photograph spread out on the floor of the Port Authority Building, you can see the open sprawl of its spreading fingers and multiple roads. But it’s not just bananas, steel and new cars that are unloaded here. Antwerp is now Europe’s main artery for cocaine smugglers, and the attendant violence they bring with them.

The increase in violent crime is, according to the Antwerp Federal Police, impossible to ignore. Last year, they confiscated €20.7 million in cash and goods and started 94 investigations into drug-related violence. Intercepted cocaine in Rotterdam harbour, in the Netherlands, dropped from almost 73,000 kgs in the record year of 2021 to under 47,000. Meanwhile finds in Antwerp have increased to a peak of almost 110,000 kgs. Antwerp is now, say customs officers, “the top destination for criminals”, and established Dutch drug gangs are spilling over the Belgian border. Last autumn, four Dutch suspects were arrested for allegedly preparing a kidnapping attempt on the Belgian justice minister Vincent van Quickenborne, who went into hiding following a summer of grenade attacks linked to Dutch and Belgian criminal gangs. In Antwerp this January, 11-year-old Firdaous EJ, the niece of an alleged Belgian druglord, was shot dead in a drive-by attack on her home.

“It’s a narco-state lite,” says Teun Voeten, a photographer and the author of several books on the drug trade, who lives in Antwerp. He was first made aware of the problem of drug violence by the sound of hand grenades on his street in Deurne in 2018, an attack which damaged 16 cars and 10 houses. “The Amsterdammers were always the big bosses, but with the cracking of EncroChat and Sky ECC, some gang leaders have been arrested. Now the Antwerp families are going for themselves, and every change is marked with violence.” It is something Antwerp mayor Bart de Wever has warned about repeatedly: vergismoorden, collateral murders of civilians, which are rife in the Dutch criminal world. Now he says it is a “national crisis”. Last month, Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo announced €17 million a year for a new harbour police force, more scanners, screening for 16,000 personnel in “sensitive” positions, and international efforts, including a deal with five shipping companies and the Dutch.

“Belgium has a problem because of its proximity to the Netherlands,” says Andrew Cunningham, drugs market and crime lead at the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA). “Rotterdam was seizing big hauls of cocaine a few years ago, the Dutch really improved port security, then there’s this waterbed effect: the criminals move to Antwerp to bring in the cocaine. Antwerp is a huge, sprawling port and it’s very difficult to control.” Around five years ago, police and prosecutors feared crime was leaching from the Dutch underworld into Belgium. But when academics including Charlotte Colman, professor of criminology at the University of Ghent, investigated the matter, they didn’t find a displacement, but an expansion of both the drug market and the Belgian and Dutch criminal networks.

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Historically, when there was a Low Countries frontier at all, the Dutch-Belgian border was always leaky. The Fifties and Sixties saw a “bitter battle” for customs officers when Dutch gangs began smuggling butter southwards. The Dutch, who had commercialised margarine, weren’t bothered about what they spread — but the Belgians demanded butter, which cost twice as much. Stuffing it into the back of American trucks, armed butter smugglers traded it over the border until it was no longer profitable. Then came the illegal drugs. By 2015, a peninsula in the River Maas had become a top crossing point for drug smugglers. It was impossible to police, so Belgium gave it back to the Netherlands.

The criminals here speak the same language and exploit the free travel. “It’s a historical thing, that Belgium and the Netherlands work together, and they misuse the border,” says Prof Colman. “For example, in the case of synthetic drug production, you have the drug production facility in Belgium and then the dumping in the Netherlands… The border between Belgium and the Netherlands is a bottleneck for criminal justice, and an opportunity to be invisible and expand territory for the criminal organisation.” When one of her research team went into prisons to interview people convicted of producing or smuggling drugs, they said they saw Antwerp and Rotterdam “as one port” — all that mattered was which contacts they had on the inside. So when Rotterdam increased fines last year for people trespassing in the harbour to collect drugs hidden in shipping containers, the smugglers could easily shift to Antwerp. “The criminal organisations also take advantage of the difference in jurisdictions,” points out Joris van der Aa, crime reporter for the Gazet van Antwerpen.

Researchers believe most of the cocaine coming to Belgium goes to the Netherlands, and police hacks of “secure” messaging services — key to arresting suspects Ridouan Taghi and Saïd Razzouki in the ongoing Dutch Marengo gang trial — have revealed the inner workings of this relationship. “Initially with the Belgian-Dutch criminal networks, the [Dutch] were mostly involved in the higher level: logistics, the financial organisation,” says Prof Colman. “But today we notice that Belgians have gone up the chain, including controlling and organising the smuggling. They are not only working for Dutch people: Dutch people could be working for them as well. We see an expansion in the criminal networks, and we also see a kind of shift with people from Belgium picking up the lead role as well.”

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The cocaine trade is particularly streamlined, and the European market price of €50 a gram remains stable despite the amounts intercepted. Cunningham at the EMCDDA says: “When I ask law enforcement what they think the interception rate is, sometimes they say 10%, sometimes they say 25%.” Even if 40% were intercepted, it may still be worthwhile for criminals — like self-service tills in supermarkets, which accept a certain level of theft as “shrinkage” in exchange for lower staff costs. This is also a story, after all, about trade: a battle between the trade of the criminals supplying European demand for drugs, and “legitimate businesses” whose infrastructure networks they piggyback. When a company’s ships bring perishable goods to a new harbour like Vlissingen instead of Antwerp, says Van der Aa, the cocaine follows.

On the flip side, harbour companies and shipping businesses know that if — as Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb wants — they scan every fruit container, this costs time and money, making them less competitive. When I asked the five shipping firms that signed an accord with the Belgian and Dutch governments last month about this — Hapag-Lloyd in Germany, MSC in Switzerland, Seatrade Group Rotterdam, CMA-CGM in France and Maersk in Denmark — there was some reticence.

Menno van Gorcum, director of Seatrade Group Rotterdam, is glad of joint action. “It had reached a level where something had to be done, and fortunately there is sufficient political attention to this,” he says. “We just keep on doing what we have been doing.” Hapag-Lloyd stresses that it is a team game and agrees that nobody wants to be less competitive than other firms — or to tell the criminals how to get around the new measures. The puzzling thing, though, is why criminal gangs are now so openly violent, when this draws attention to their activities and forces politicians to invest more in policing. Voeten, whose book on the crystal meth trade is being translated into English later this year, believes it is down to cocky amateurism. “A good gangster is an ultra-capitalist,” he points out. “You use violence now and then, but the imminent threat of violence works better than violence itself.”

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While violent crime in general has decreased across Europe, in the context of drug-related criminality, it has remained stable or increased, according to the EMCDDA. Cunningham ascribes this to the rivalries between many groups “all vying for a slice of the lucrative cocaine market”. The increase in Belgium is undeniable since 2012, with the first known case related to a rip-off deal. Now experts see violent crime used as intimidation and punishment, but also a tactic, so that police will investigate a competitor. We also know more about “invisible” violence, including the construction of an underground prison equipped with a gruesome torture chamber in the Netherlands.

Elsewhere, the contrasting approach of the Belgian and Dutch governments is starker. While the Belgian prime minster and the mayor of Antwerp are talking about cracking down — including on drug users — the Dutch will start a trial of regulated cannabis growing in the south this October, and Germany plans to legalise and control the drug. “Let’s be realistic: it’s impossible to make a fortress of our ports,” says Van der Aa. “The federal police is short 150 detectives. Trying to stop the cocaine is cat and mouse play, but the criminals are still there. You have to stop them — and that is not happening in Belgium.”

“It’s fine on the other side, it’s fine on the other side!” sing five rowdy, dancing Brits, to the tune of the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West”. On the other side of the 14^th century Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal, a cluster of partying men yodel back. It is midnight on a Friday in the heart of Amsterdam’s De Wallen district, and I am on a reconnaissance tour with Amsterdam’s Night Watch.

This is not the Night Watch memorialised by Rembrandt in 1642, the civic militia that would defend the city of Amsterdam from outside attack. Now the enemy is within, in the area named for the old city walls, but now infamous as the red-light district of Amsterdam. Els Iping and her neighbour Romeo are pacing the streets. Armed with quiet words and high-vis jackets, they are part of the “Wallen Watch”, a local vigilante defence force against drunken, doped-up tourists on raucous, licentious holidays.

When tourists slip behind chains intended to dissuade them from trespassing on people’s doorways to smoke weed, when there are strippers dancing on bars without a sex licence, when two groups of British tourists share their version of 1980s hits with entire neighbourhoods, Els politely takes note. “Please could you be quiet,” says this grandmother and former politician, who has lived in the Red Light District for four decades. “People live here.” To my amazement, every time, the tourists (often British) look abashed, say sorry and go on their way.

Why have the people of Amsterdam been forced to take public order into their own hands again? Because six decades of tolerating sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll have turned their city centre into a non-stop Saturnalia for visitors “on holiday from their morals” (as former Labour councillor Dennis Boutkan memorably put it). But morality aside, it is also a question of numbers: with thousands packing out the roads and streets on weekend nights, it is sometimes impossible for even emergency vehicles to access the area. And Els and Romeo are not alone in believing all this has been facilitated by the legal grey area of state policy on soft drugs.

Romeo, who has lived for six years at the heart of all this, says that when he leaves for his morning work at 4am, there are frequently still groups of screaming tourists. “With the corona rules, the place was empty in a day,” he says wistfully. “I saw people who live here, who never dared to sit outside before, having a picnic.” Now the pandemic lockdowns are gone, the tourists are back. And 47% of them are tempted to Amsterdam by the coffeeshops, although it’s clearly the combination of party behaviour (drinking, screeching, leering, urinating, with a spliff on the side) that creates the most localised nuisance. “We started last year with 30 people,” Els tells me. “Six people have moved away. It’s noise you can’t arm yourself against. We are desperate…but I don’t want them to win.”

“They”, in her view, are the businesses that have everything to gain from a loud and cash-filled Red Light District: the drug dealers offering a menu from pills to cocaine, the brothel owners, the 166 cannabis “coffeeshops” (100 serving tourist demand alone), plus sweet shops, bars and restaurants (for those with the munchies). Some may be set up by upright businessmen; some, says the mayor of Amsterdam, are part of criminal networks. Thanks to the opaque business constructions common in the Netherlands, it’s hard to tell them apart.

And for local residents, ironically, the Dutch idea of “tolerance” has become completely intolerable. The prostitution windows where sometimes-trafficked foreign women show off their cosmetically enhanced wares, the raucous bars, the coffeeshops where cannabis is sold and smoked, feel like an invasion: not a liberal paradise, but a human zoo from another age. A soft drugs policy that was ahead of its time in the Sixties has stranded the Netherlands in a no man’s land between controlled legalisation and arrant criminality. Under the Opium Act, a policy of toleration or gedoogbeleid means that the state allows “coffeeshops” to be established, taxed, and to sell cannabis to customers for consumption on site. However, since commercial cannabis growing is illegal, they have to buy from criminals.

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Mayor Femke Halsema, the deputy mayors and heads of the local police and public prosecution are convinced that the situation is untenable. Halsema believes that full legalisation and regulation of cannabis — and also cocaine — is the answer. In the meantime, she wants to enforce an existing national law to ban tourists from coffeeshops in order to shrink the sector. A majority of city councillors, concerned about more vulnerable young men being sucked into dealing to meet tourist demand and a consequent explosion in street crime, voted against her proposal this month.

Diederik Boomsma, councillor and head of the local Christian Democratic Appeal party, is one strong advocate of banning tourists from coffeeshops and is raising awareness about the dangers of drug use. “Peter Hitchens wrote a book about the drug policy in Britain and it starts with saying: cannabis isn’t merely a drug: it’s a cause,” he tells me. “That’s true in Amsterdam more than in other places and when something becomes a cause, people associate it with their self-understanding as a free, liberal, open-minded, tolerant city. But it doesn’t work. On the one hand, we say it’s allowed, you can buy the stuff in this coffeeshop, but it’s supplied by criminals so obviously you are going to have a huge criminal infrastructure. Why would you do something that funds violent criminals? Peter R de Vries was murdered right in front of my house.”

He is referring to the murder of a Dutch journalist who had been advising the crown witness against an alleged drug cartel — a killing which shocked the country into paying attention to its drugs problem. It was the third execution linked with the Marengo murder trial (involving leading members of a Dutch-Moroccan criminal organisation) following the deaths of the crown witness’s brother and his lawyer. For while the Netherlands’s transport links and horticultural and technical skills have made it a perfect landing-point for South American drugs (alongside its hugely successful domestic drug industry), this has brought violence in its wake. Experts like Jan Struijs, chairman of the Nederlandse PolitieBond police union, go as far as to call the country a “narco-state 2.0.”

Threats that the Telegraaf newspaper suggests come from the quarter of organised crime have recently even been aimed at Dutch Princess Amalia and Prime Minister Mark Rutte. And four suspects were arrested in and around The Hague on suspicion of preparing to kidnap Belgian justice minister Vincent van Quickenborne, after Dutch drug gang violence spilled over into Antwerp this summer. Across the Netherlands, drug experts like Pieter Tops and Jan Tromp — who wrote an influential 2019 report on the “dark side” of Amsterdam — believe some coffeeshops are part of a chain of ever more violent and lucrative drugs criminality, with shops, bars and property used to launder the money (part of a dodgy €16 billion a year that washes around the country, according to the De Nederlandsche Bank).

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It’s a desperate situation, with the Dutch government investing millions in deterring crime that undermines public order, and putting together international partnerships to make its coastline “as unappealing as possible” for drug criminals importing their products. The public prosecutor finally has a larger budget to go after crime that has seeped into the “upper” world: lawyers, art galleries, accountants, banks and even civil servants who have committed alleged passport fraud, sold private details, failed to properly scrutinise their clients, or been over-eager to take payment in cash.

The justice minister of the Netherlands, Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius doesn’t think legalisation by the Netherlands alone will do much, but admits the tolerance policy on cannabis really isn’t working. “If I’m honest, the ‘back door’ as we have it now in the Netherland, that [soft drugs] are tolerated but you can’t grow them, is very difficult to explain,” she tells me, after a meeting of European justice ministers in Amsterdam.

“Abroad, people look at you as though you are crackers. One point of view is that weed and soft drugs are another sector, another branch, with hard-working entrepreneurs and nothing wrong. But there’s also a notion that this is an entry point for cartels and other levels of drug dealing. You need to look at this very carefully.” She hopes that a much-delayed trial of legalised growing within 10 local areas begins soon so the ministry can analyse whether regulated cannabis growing reduces criminality. Meanwhile, others countries are experimenting with more permissive approaches to cannabis. Uruguay made the drug legal in 2013, followed by Canada, Mexico and some US states. Medical usage was legalised in Portugal in 2018 and Thailand is turning a blind eye, to stimulate tourism.

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While some people, including Amsterdam’s mayor Halsema and the attorney for the Marengo crown witness, Peter Schouten, believe legalising and regulating drugs is the only way to sort out the situation in the Netherlands, others want to send a message that drug tourism isn’t welcome. Boomsma has proposed a ban on weed smoking in public in the centre of Amsterdam, and believes his motion will get a council majority this year.

In the meantime, the situation in De Wallen — even compared with the bad old days of heroin addicts on the streets — is relentless for local people like Els and Romeo. While some political parties are focused on the problems of vulnerable districts on the outskirts, Els and Romeo point out that it is madness to make any part of the city essentially unliveable at a time of desperate housing need. Even some of the tourists seem blown away by it all. A young Australian woman emerging from the Casa Rosso “erotic theatre” at the end of the night on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal, seems a bit dazed. “I need to wash off the filth,” she says, looking around and only half-joking.

The Netherlands needs more than a shower of liberal platitudes to clean up De Wallen. It needs clear drugs policy, a flashlight on criminal constructions and a power hose.

“We did it out of despair,” says Annemarie Nijhoff, who lives there with her partner Boelo ten Have. “That’s why we painted the farmhouse pink. It has been in the family for generations, carefully maintained. But for the last 10 years, it has been cracking so fast that we cannot repair it. Every time we report damage, we are told we are outside the earthquake zone.

“We believe it is a result of mine-related damage. We can’t pull it down because it’s a national monument. So we are completely stuck.”

Theirs is a common tale. This northernmost Dutch province has seen more than a million reports of damage since 1986, due to decades of earthquakes caused by 60 years of gas exploitation. In the process of emptying fourth-fifths of a field that contained 2,800 billion cubic metres of gas, the Dutch state has earned the equivalent of €417 billion. Its partner the Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij (NAM) — owned by Shell and ExxonMobil — has taken the equivalent of €64.7 billion, according to figures seen by the Financieele Dagblad.

But what is most shocking is what has gone on behind closed doors: a succession of secret deals and convenient political myopia that are slowly being exposed in a ground-shaking parliamentary enquiry being televised across the country.

When the gas field was discovered and the first well was drilled in 1959, it was a gift to the once Nazi-occupied and war-torn country. But as the decades wore on, alarming signals of seismic activity, earthquakes and damage to buildings were dismissed, belittled and ignored by central government, which needed both the gas and the cash from exports.

Slowly, inexorably, press coverage and public outrage started to swell until, in early 2021, parliament voted to install its ultimate weapon of scrutiny: an enquiry to examine politicians, oil and gas executives, mining experts, residents and even schoolchildren who found themselves living in temporary homes with earthquake-proofed beds, as their families fell apart.

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Now in its fourth week of hearings, the enquiry has uncovered political ignorance, secret lobbying, and agreements with NAM to avoid reducing production to strictly necessary levels. It also exposed a brazen admission by the former finance minister that, especially after the financial crash, the Treasury couldn’t do without the gas cash. Even though earthquakes were worsening and by 2015 the high court ordered non-essential extraction to stop, it did not.

Today, as a result, at a moment of Europe-wide energy insecurity, much-needed Dutch gas is no longer a political option, even if up to 20% of the field is still there. Thanks to tin-eared politicians and slippery oil firms, we are as vulnerable as the rest of Europe. Indeed, a week after Liz Truss removed a ban on unconventional fracking for shale gas in the UK (which is prohibited in the Netherlands), the Dutch experience might be seen as a lesson for politicians to listen and tread carefully.

In the beginning, the gas was welcome. “Straight after the Second World War, industry and government worked very closely to rebuild the Netherlands and extracting the gas for the benefit of the people at that time was a good thing,” says Liesbeth van Tongeren, Green Left politician and former director of Greenpeace Nederlands, who campaigned as an MP to reduce gas extraction from Groningen. Rather than build a sovereign wealth fund like Norway, the gas boosted the annual budget for the state, especially in later years.

But then, in 1986, the earthquakes began to start. The worst didn’t take place until August 2012, in Huizinge: it measured 3.6 on the Richter scale, but because of its relatively shallow depth (compared to natural earthquakes), it caused extensive damage and a cataclysmic feeling of shock.

By 2013, Groningen province was campaigning for expert research into the risks and compensation for damage. Yet somehow, that same year, gas extraction rose from 27 billion cubic metres to almost 54 billion, with the NAM advocating for more. The years that followed involved high court rulings, political promises to “stop the gas tap” and three different bodies charged with compensating owners and strengthening buildings.

But on the ground, the tremors were trivialised, partly because nobody died or was seriously injured as a direct result. “The Hague had the feeling that this was very far away,” says Van Tongeren. “If anything like that earthquake had happened in Amsterdam, it would have been dealt with completely differently. It was easier to ignore.”

Fast forward to today, however, and pledges to stop extracting gas from the field remain unfulfilled. Like every country in Europe, the Netherlands is scrambling to create more processing facilities for Liquefied Natural Gas. Any political debate about increasing this year’s 2.8 billion cubic metres of gas is unlikely to go anywhere. The government is promising to close the Groningen field entirely in 2023 or 2024, but only “if the geopolitical situation makes it possible”.

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Meanwhile, Groningers are left angry and bewildered. What they are hearing in the enquiry reaffirms their suspicions over the years, the sense of being taken for fools, and a justification for all of their mistrust. “Some people think it’s all very well to have a parliamentary enquiry but that it won’t solve today’s problem,” Coert Fossen, chair of the Groninger Bodem Beweging (Groningen Ground Movement), tells me.

Another reason for their frustration is the fact that many have had to fight for every euro of compensation. Another historic house in Groningen has just been painted protest pink, an estimated 13,000 homes are still unsafe, and tens of thousands of claims have been rejected.

Fabian Buiter, a financial controller from Beerta, probably heard the most outrageous excuse from the Instituut Mijnbouwschade Groningen (IMG) now handling claims. An inspector said splits in his bathroom tiles masking €30,000 of damage were due to poor quality fittings and the soap he used in the shower. He lives on the edge of the official “contour lines” and after a failed court case, paid for the damage himself. He might even laugh about the soap-dodgers, if the whole thing didn’t make him want to cry.

Small wonder, then, that these down-to-earth Groningers, who are more used to ploughing the fields and keeping themselves to themselves, have lost trust in their government. For them, the political damage is done; and even when the gas stops, the earthquakes will continue for decades.

Some in The Hague put their hope in a strong enquiry report next February, leading to the creation of an independent arbiter that can control and effectively regulate fossil fuel extraction in the future. Others believe the situation will help speed up a transition to renewable energy. The danger is that despite the efforts of earnest parliamentarians, this scandal, like all the others in The Hague, will soon be written up, written off, and a part of fading memory. But in this corner of the Netherlands, the aftershock will remain.

Jan Brok, vice chairman of the BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) party, understands why Netherlands farmers have spent the past month blockading food distribution centres, roads and ministers’ driveways. They are horrified by a new environmental policy that will mean a likely 30% reduction in livestock.

The Netherlands is a country of four million cattle, 13 million pigs, 104 million chickens, and just over 17 million people. It is Europe’s biggest meat exporter with a total area of just over 41,000 square kilometres, and a fifth of this is water. It is one of the world’s most densely populated countries, with the EU’s highest density of livestock.

But there is a significant cost to this abundance: the local environmental impact. Such intensive agriculture, and livestock farming in particular, creates harmful pollution. Manure and urine mix to produce ammonia, and together with run-off from nitrogen-rich fertiliser on fields ends up in lakes and streams, where it can promote excessive algae that smothers other life. Manure here is not a vital fertiliser but a problem waste product.

For decades, this success in trade and agriculture has been accompanied by high emissions of harmful nitrogen compounds, including nitrogen oxides emitted by industry and transport. Levels were dropping, and in 2015, the Dutch introduced a ‘trading scheme’ known as the Programmatische Aanpak Stikstof (PAS) to try to reduce the pollution.

But a Council of State court ruling in 2019 — on a case brought by two local environmental organisations against various farms — ruled that this offsetting scheme was invalid. Permission could not be granted for polluting projects or farm expansion in exchange for promised nitrogen-related reductions in the future: the reductions needed to come first.

The government panicked: national shutdowns were put in place, building projects were put on hold and traffic speeds reduced to 100 kph in the daytime on major roads; it was also obvious that farming was a problem — something needed to be done about all ammonia, nitrogen oxide and nitrous oxide emissions.

Then, in January, the conservative-liberal-Christian coalition pledged to halve nitrogen production by 2030, with a €25 billion budget to back it up. That money was the loud part. The quiet part included the possibility of expropriation, of the government forcibly purchasing farmland. Plans drawn up by civil servants include slashing livestock numbers by 30%. More than €500 million is being brought forward for regional government to buy out farmers this year and next.

Leading the charge among the coalition partners are the Democrats 66 (D66) party. They insisted on “real action for the climate” in their last manifesto. Tjeerd de Groot, the D66 nature and farming spokesman, pointed out that the Netherlands is Europe’s biggest nitrogen emitter, followed by Belgium and Germany. He told a current affairs programme last week: “It is absolutely essential — but also painful — that the plans go through.”

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In June, the government published two documents. One: a map showing the areas that need to reduce emissions by between 12% and 95%. The second was a statement that aimed to help farmers — which De Groot admits failed spectacularly. Farmers saw ruin, not a pair of documents. They looked at the percentage reduction figures next to their farms, and began interpreting how many cattle they would need to cull. It was an enormous blow. Many of them had made huge, expensive investments in new equipment to reduce the environmental impact of their herds.

Hence the massive uprising. A huge rally in the central village of Stroe was followed by wildcat protests; ministers were challenged at their homes; police vehicles were attacked; roads and food deliveries were blocked. Supermarkets lost “tens of millions” according to food retailers group CBL. In one incident, a police officer shot at a 16-year-old farmer’s son, apparently misreading his intent to leave a rally. Last weekend, farmers replaced road signs, declaring a free state of boerenlanden (farmer land) in some villages.

“The [farming] sector is dumbfounded,” says Brok. His party has seen a huge increase in the polls and been signing up 300 members a day. “It has been pushed into a corner by a [Mark] Rutte government that has lost public support in all kinds of ways. Everything that is happening is about frustration, legal battles, people digging in their heels, it’s anger.”

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Wytse Sonnema, a spokesman for the farmers’ association the LTO says that their own grassroots proposals that would lead to a 40% reduction by 2030, had been completely ignored. “Famers in the Netherlands are deeply concerned and angry about nitrogen policy that was presented by the national government on June 10^th”, he explains. He was angered by the map showing entire regions facing 70% reduction targets. “According to the government these should all add up to a country-level reduction of 50% in 2030, which is simply unfeasible, and will have disastrous effects on not just agriculture, but on the economic, social and cultural viability of rural Netherlands.”

While some see the farmers as denying a reality that has been approaching for the past 30 years, their protests have drawn on wider mistrust in politics. (The uprising comes after the previous government stepped down last year, after a childcare benefits scandal involving ethnic profiling by the tax office  — they eventually returned to power and formed exactly the same coalition.) Across the country, people have been hanging Dutch flags upside down along roads and bridges in an expression of support for the farmers.

Jeroen van Maanen, an organic farmer with 130 cows, who helped organise the Stroe protest, said nitrogen has become more than a gas. It has overtaken every other agricultural problem. European law demands that farmers protect vulnerable natural areas, by improving ground water quality and soil quality, and through careful land management. “If you block all other solutions, there’s only one left: a reduction in farmed animals”, he says. “That’s their primary goal and they are using nitrogen as a reason to achieve it.

“Everyone in the world is born an omnivore, whether we like it or not. It’s a populist agenda… that’s purely about less livestock, fewer animals, more vegetable alternatives. I think it’s crazy. Plant-based food needs fertiliser, and where do you get it if you don’t have manure?”

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One group of organic farmers has proposed its own 10-point plan for change, which has so far been ignored by government. There are also indications that some young farmers are open to downscaling — but as vulnerable freelance businesses, they need the cash and security to do it. Who is going to pay more, or take less profit along the supply chain, to make this happen? “I speak to many farmers who want to change: the question is how”, says Natasja Oerlemans, head of the food team at WWF Netherlands, stressing that they are not farmer bashing. “The how is not very clear in current government communication but I think there are multiple opportunities for farmers to transition.

“The fact that our food system in the Netherlands is broken is not new. The current situation is detrimental for biodiversity but also for farmers — many don’t have a successor, every day five farmers stop, and about half of their income is dependent on European income support subsidies.

“Our farmers still think we are feeding the world. But the whole process of intensification and scale enlargement has made farmers  very low income, producing for a bulk market, exporting 70%, but with limited volume compared to Ukraine or the US. It’s not working for them, for the environment and for us as people, our air quality or water quality.”

Johan Remkes is the latest negotiator appointed by the government to diffuse the crisis. Remkes was an curious choice. He came to the position already an object of suspicion among farmers, because he chaired a commission on nitrogen that recommended drastic cuts. The anger and protests are likely to continue. Last week, a provincial government meeting was evacuated and 150 people sheltered in a cellar after a bomb threat. Police and politicians talk about a “hardening” of protest, threats and intimidation, while farmers talk about being both singled-out and ignored.

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The world is beginning to take notice. Internationally, the farm protests have been cheered on by alternative Right-wing media, desperate to fit them into a larger story. On one side the localist farmers with their traditional occupations. On the other, the globalist ‘world elite’, pushing a green agenda developed by the World Economic forum in Davos.

Yet this is a deeply parochial issue. The wider resonances detected in some English-language reporting of the protests generally miss the point. Although legal rulings from cases brought by green activists have driven the agenda, a broad spectrum of political parties agrees change is needed in industry, transport and building to combat climate change. It’s not Klaus Schwab driving farmers to black roads — it’s a run-of-the-mill collection of Dutch politicians and activists. And it’s not just farmers who are getting edgy. Corporations are also starting to fume, or even move abroad, with the prospect of unclear future greening costs, and the pain of manoeuvring through the elephantine Dutch bureaucracy.

So a local issue — for now. A stone’s throw away in Belgium, Flanders is beginning to limit nitrogen emissions and ordering tens of farmers to stop their work. Like the air and water that flows over borders, environmental issues, and clumsy attempts to solve them, will come for us all.

A hit squad compared to a “well-oiled murder machine”. A lawyer and journalist shot on the streets of Amsterdam. A blasé approach to killing the wrong person — there’s even slang for every accidental victim: a vergismoord. Welcome to the Marengo trial, where 17 men stand accused of involvement in six murders, four attempted murders and preparing for six others between 2015 and 2017.

Fear hangs in the air around this court case, telling a tale of a country where the hydra of organised crime has so many heads that it is threatening the very rule of law. When the trial resumed this month, journalists were asked to sign agreements not to name judges or prosecutors, for fear of them being targeted. After reports that co-chief suspect Ridouan Taghi was planning a jailbreak, the streets around the fortified courtroom known as the Bunker are ringed with police cars and trained teams made up of police and soldiers.

The Marengo is only the latest in a series of organised crime trials to shake the Netherlands. This year, Dutch courts are also trying alleged criminal druglord Roger P., accused of turning shipping containers into an underworld prison, with its own gruesome “torture chamber”. Meanwhile, a Marengo side-trial involves motorbike club Caloh Wagoh members charged with shooting dead five people, preparing three other murders and “putting another seven people on the waiting list to be killed”.

“I call The Netherlands a ‘narco-state 2.0’,” says Jan Struijs, chairman of the Nederlandse PolitieBond police union. “We aren’t Mexico, with 14,000 dead bodies, but in our parallel economy, there is an attack on public order and unprecedented numbers of people with personal security — politicians, judges, prosecutors, police staff, journalists — because there is still a serious risk from organised crime. It is a huge problem, being tackled on every front, but we have a long way to go.”

Struijs first raised concerns that this small, well-connected trading nation has “characteristics of a narco-state” four years ago. At the time, there was a muted political response. But then the brother of the Marengo crown witness Nabil B was shot dead and the crown witness’s original lawyer, Dirk Wiersum, was gunned down outside his house. Finally, last July, celebrated crime reporter Peter R de Vries, who had unconventionally agreed to act as Nabil B’s representative, was shot in the head on a busy central Amsterdam street and died of his wounds.

Today, few would argue that increasingly violent crime has clawed its fingers deep into civil society. But as Lieselot Bisschop, criminologist at Erasmus School of Law in Rotterdam, points out, before you can combat the crime, it is important to understand who is involved and how. She and a team of researchers have been looking at the key drug runners’ entry and exit point of Rotterdam port, where last year a Hit and Run Cargo team (HARC) confiscated a record 72,808 kilos of cocaine plus another record of 1,500 kilos of heroin. “Whether it’s a good thing that they are catching more, I don’t know — is more going through anyway?” says Prof Bisschop. “The quantity aspect is always very challenging. It’s a dark number, guesstimates.”

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Meanwhile, the Netherlands is apparently a centre of synthetic drug manufacture, with regular busts of “professional” crystal meth and MDMA labs, especially in Noord Brabant. When international police decrypted millions of messages on devices criminals thought were secure — such as Sky and EncroChat, and the Dutch decoded Pretty Good Privacy software for Blackberry’s in the Marengo case — they lit up a web of crime.

Experts agree the Netherlands’s infrastructure is key for both legal and illegal trade. In their 2020 book, Nederland Drugsland, Dutch police academy professor Pieter Tops and journalist Jan Tromp explored how criminals exploit its efficient ports, good roads, and strong financial and digital infrastructure. “The Netherlands has long been a trading country — not just the harbours but also our high-quality internet environment. We have huge numbers of bankers and our country is central in Europe in terms of all kinds of transport and transit,” says Struijs. “We have huge numbers of imports, which means a lot of drugs are mixed with legal trade, coming in containers of fruit or liquor. Organised crime takes advantage of the legal infrastructure.”

Corruption is another factor. As a nation, the Dutch are keen to make a deal — and regular businesses haven’t always been too fussy about carrying out background checks, as various banking money laundering cases and high tax haven rankings show. The NVB Dutch banking association says an estimated €16 billion in illegally-earned cash washes around each year.

Personal corruption is also a problem in a port 40km long and with 180,000 employees, says Bisschop. “Within Europe, it is definitely the gateway for any kind of trade and probably for cocaine. Over the years, the port has become more physically and digitally secure. We think this has contributed to more pressure on the people in the port. Basically, you need corruption to pull it off — both public and private, not just police and customs but also planners in container terminals. You need someone on the inside.”

So in court, says veteran crime reporter Saskia Belleman, there has been a spate of cases against allegedly corrupt customs staff, shipping and port employees, partly as a consequence of a Dutch gedoogcultuur of looking the other way. There are also concerns about so-called “collectors”, often young men who trespass into the harbour and collect drugs.

Nobody knows if the Netherlands is worse than other European port countries in terms of international organised crime, but its soft drug culture is undoubtedly a weak spot. Although smoking cannabis and coffee shops selling the drug are tolerated, it is illegal to grow commercially. This means that cafes offer a legally tolerated channel for criminal activity, and a training ground for young criminals.

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In the Netherlands, it’s become increasingly common to read about the ethnic aspect of organised crime — the so-called “Mocro Maffia” Moroccan-origin mafia which inspired a true crime book and spin-off television series. But Peter Schouten, one of the new lawyers for the crown witness in the Marengo trial, says: “It’s not true that it’s only people with another ‘heritage’. Certain gangs have a kind of micro-organism, a gangland where there’s a lot of the same culture, but there are other gangs arrested, and you read stories saying that the new kingpin is ‘Bolle’ Jos from Brabant.”

It’s hard to measure organised crime, partly because victims don’t always make reports, but ethnic minorities are overrepresented as crime suspects. Statistics Netherlands researcher Maarten Bloem says, though, that “if you correct for age, education level, socio-economic category, there is not much difference between different ethnic origins”. He concludes: “It’s not so much about someone’s colour but the situation in which they find themselves.”

It is unclear whether the segregated, Dutch grammar school system helps contribute to excluding certain groups, too: critics say it selects too young, hammers in socio-economic difference, and makes no account for innately-talented children who speak Dutch as an additional language.

Crime, after all, can be seen as a way out of poverty and an equal opportunities recruiter. So there’s a widespread recognition that long-term crime prevention needs to offer other options, especially to young men in problem districts. There’s a new drive targeting “vulnerable” areas in Utrecht, and projects such as working with the “top 600″ criminals and their families in Amsterdam. Meanwhile, international efforts have been led by the mayors of Rotterdam and Belgian Antwerp — where a record 90 tonnes of smuggled cocaine was found last year. They have visited South American counterparts and lobbied governments to ramp up international efforts against organised crime, increase barriers in harbours, and confiscate criminal assets.

In Rotterdam, there are promising signs of public-private cooperation, with busts by the multi-agency HARC, a new Information Sharing Centre, a business integrity initiative, and a “training container” to coach harbour staff in combatting corruption. A long-awaited law banning civilians from the container area is in place to help apprehend those vital ‘collectors’ picking up drugs from containers, while Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb is also enforcing a €2,250 anti-nuisance penalty. The new Dutch coalition hopes to add to these initiatives. It will start investing specifically in combating crime that “undermines” public order from 2023, ratcheting up to a €100m yearly investment by 2025. In the meantime, the last budget put aside an extra €434m to increase annual budgets for police, judicial organisation and subversive crime prevention, though experts warn that money must not be used to add to the layers of bureaucracy.

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Instead, some want a shift in public attitudes on drug taking: as the prosecutor said in the torture container trial, show users the “abhorrent” consequence of their habits rather than perpetuating the permissive, hippy culture of the Seventies. “It’s not done in the Netherlands to point in the direction of drug users,” says Belleman. “If you don’t use drugs, there’s no market. But people who use cocaine at the weekends don’t make the connection between organised crime and their drug use — and if you tell them, they are really offended.”

Perhaps the biggest problem, however, lies in how to prosecute those alleged criminals who are caught. In the mega-Marengo trial, hearings are currently mired in details such as whether the co-chief suspect Saïd Razzouki left his reading glasses behind when he was extradited from Colombia in December, and whether due process was followed in his subpoena.

The accused in the trial deny the charges, and Schouten doesn’t expect a verdict until 2023. “This trial is under an enormous amount of pressure,” he says. “This is about the rule of law, the dyke against injustice, and we must continue to protect this. But there is a lot of fear.” Even when the trial verdict is reached, until words turn to action, that fear is unlikely to go away.

With this image, Sullivan ends her book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation. Her subtitle, less a mystery unsolved than a secret well kept, trails the book’s bombshell: that a Jewish Council member, Arnold van den Bergh, was in their view “the betrayer”.

It took five years, a €100,000 public subsidy, cutting edge artificial intelligence and a retired FBI special agent, Vince Pankoke, to reach this conclusion — which was launched less than a month ago by an international publishing machine. Sullivan outlines the theory of the Cold Case Diary team: that Van den Bergh “saved his family by giving up addresses, including Prinsengracht 163, to the SD”.

The team described itself as “confident” of this conclusion, which was based on an anonymous note sent to Otto Frank, the only member of the family who survived two years hiding from the Nazis in The Secret Annex. But the global publicity campaign, promoting the idea that it was a Jewish man who betrayed the Franks, unleashed a wave of criticism.

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Some scholars and historians immediately questioned the claim, sources distanced themselves, the Dutch publisher Ambo Anthos apologised for any offence caused and paused distribution, influential German magazine Die Zeit accused Sullivan of “sensationalism”, and the heads of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and Anne Frank Fonds in Basel expressed doubts about the work. The team fiercely defended their conclusions in their blog. But they did  backpedal on earlier interviews, in which they had stated that there was an “85% probability” that they were correct, saying this was not an 85% certainty but a “conditional probability”.

While the book predicts a strong reaction to its “powerful” and “unsettling” conclusions — which are presented like a “true crime” documentary and with the certainty of a court verdict — the team has apparently been surprised and shocked by the backlash. They feel like victims of a kind of witch hunt.

The Dutch wounds of Nazi occupation are clearly so close to the surface that, at a scratch, they still bleed. The Netherlands has the worst record of Jewish deaths in Western Europe: an estimated 73% of the Jewish population died. Professor Frank van Vree — a researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies — points out that Remembrance Day on 4 May was named one of the most important national unifiers in a recent, wide-ranging study by the Netherlands Institute for Social Research.

But just as the Dutch self-image of a tolerant, open society has been challenged by admissions of systemic racism, looking closely at the reality of the Holocaust reveals some uncomfortable truths. “From the mid-Sixties, the story of the destruction of Dutch Jewry and the complicity of the non-Jewish Dutch is a permanent struggle with the rosy Dutch self-image,” says Van Vree. “The knowledge that this really happened… in a society that considered itself a haven of tolerance… It never disappeared, this feeling of guilt”.

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And the story of Anne Frank brings a lot of these tensions to the surface. After it was published in 1947 (and with the 1955 Broadway play that brought it to American attention), the diary weathered claims that it was fake, as well as initial hesitancy from international publishers to make Anne Frank, as some historians have it, the centrepiece of Holocaust memorial.

Her story is also perfectly designed for a global audience. “She comes from a very humanist, Frankfurt-based family; she counts as one of the famous Dutch but in reality she’s German,” says Johannes Houwink ten Cate, emeritus professor and chair of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam. “And the way Judaism was practised in the Anne Frank family comes very close to the American reform tradition.

“Anne Frank is ideal for identification,” he goes on. “She keeps her faith in humanity, she has all the dreams 13-year-old girls have”. And we fulfil Anne’s dream of becoming a writer by the positive act of reading. “The Anne Frank diary has become a sort of mirror of our society”.

There’s one conspicuous absence in the book, though. “Anne Frank is of course the most famous Holocaust victim”, says ten Cate, “because her book is not about the Holocaust”. The diary ends abruptly; we know where she went, and what happened to her. But “the Holocaust is not mentioned in the book.” The great question the reader is left with is: who betrayed her?

Past theories include warehouse worker Willem van Maaren, Dutch national socialist Tonny Ahlers, famous “Jew-hunter” Ans van Dijk, and a bureaucratic investigation into food stamp fraud. But while ever more books come out to present a new villain to counter Anne Frank’s heroism, the truth of the Dutch war experience was different: collaborating with the Nazis was not the occasional act of the rare individual.

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The Netherlands suffered military defeat in five days. There is evidence of sustained civil service and economic collaboration with Nazism after this — the state railway company, for instance, recently agreed to pay €50m in compensation for transporting people to Nazi camps. The population, meanwhile, mostly kept its head down. But many police and civilians betrayed Jewish people in hiding and received financial rewards: kopgeld or “head bounty” (Pankoke, the retired special agent, discovered a microfilm of 956 kopgeld receipts in an American archive).

Solidarity with Jewish people was greater in France and Belgium, which had experience of resistance movements, and where the Germans did not institute a civilian government. The geography there also made hiding easier.

But after the war, the Dutch popular narrative did not recognise that particular groups had suffered more. Stories of the treatment received by Jewish people returning from the camps are appalling: they were given no preferential state help, and sometimes found their possessions taken by other citizens not keen to return them. They even faced housing tax bills for the time when they were imprisoned by Nazis.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that the Protestant Church in 2020 declared its sense of guilt for failing to protect the Jewish population. That year, Dutch king Willem-Alexander said in his Remembrance Day speech that his great-grandmother Queen Wilhelmina — while in exile in London — did not do enough to support the Jewish community, even “if only by words”.

But it’s very late in the day to recognise some of these injustices. When, in 2016, Amsterdam announced a €10m payment to Holocaust survivors for taxing them while they were in the camps, there were not enough of them left to take it, and the money was instead given to Jewish-related causes.

Meanwhile, after years of examining the cases of museums exhibiting art looted by the Nazis, Dutch restitutions policy has only just been changed to show “more humanity and goodwill”. This year, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum is expected to hand back a Kandinsky painting, considered a “forced sale”, to the Jewish heirs. Other claim cases are still rumbling.

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During this moment of reckoning, the aim of the Cold Case Diary team was, to quote Pankoke, to “provide some closure to the descendants of those who were captured”. But the fact that it points the finger at a Jewish man has been a source of much controversy. Van Vree feels this kind of conclusion should only be made when it is beyond any reasonable doubt. “That’s the last thing that you should suggest — only at the very end, if you are absolutely sure about it”, he says. “The critics are almost all people who are very aware of the non-Jewish guilt about what happened. This is very improper, and if you accept it, you might imply that actually the non-Jews are innocent, so to speak”.

For relatives of Van den Burgh, including his great-niece Elise Tak, the accusation is “appalling”. She questions the proof that any list of hiding places existed, and where the accusatory, anonymous note sent to Otto Frank came from.

Meanwhile the Dutch population is left wondering how to feel about the behaviour of its ancestors. Which is ironic, given that the filmmaker Thijs Bayens started the “cold case” project to try to understand what happens to a population if life is “threaded with fear”.

“The truth never is about the past — it always is about us,” says ten Cate, who expects to see another four or five ‘betrayers’ named in his lifetime. “If it’s only about the past, we don’t give a damn. Historians … isolate particular facts and events from the past and bring them into focus because we want to re-form them to something that is relevant for our own identity. Often it takes the form: what would I have done and what exactly is the relation between us, our identity, our self-image, and what happened in the past? Are we entitled to have a better self-image than our parents?”

Whatever your answer, and whatever you think of Sullivan’s book and the team’s conclusions, we have to confront the facts. Reparations can still be made, especially while there are survivors. “It is important to have these conversations now,” he says. “Belated justice is justice.” And even after attempts at justice, it is important to remember, and to trip over, the painful stumbling stones of the past.

Sitting respectfully in our ‘pews’, we put our hands together… and clap. This is not a service but a comedy night. And Amsterdam’s newest ‘church’ is really a theatre for debate and cultural centre in disguise. Incensed by the illogical nature of the current Dutch coronavirus restrictions, Yoeri Albrecht, director of De Balie, last week changed the statutes of his organisation and registered it with the chamber of commerce as a faith-based movement: overnight, The Philosophical Society; the Community of Reason was born.

It is unlikely to be the last. His example, a group of Dutch mayors predicted wryly in an open letter to the government, is likely to mark the start of “an unprecedented religious revival in the coming weeks”.

The Netherlands has been in partial or full lockdown since November, primarily due to the pressure of patients with the Delta variant on the hospital system and one of Europe’s least efficient booster campaigns. But just over a week ago, the restrictions were loosened — albeit in a strikingly surreal fashion.

In the Netherlands today, brothels can open but museums can’t. You can sweat, unmasked, in a gym but you can’t sit in a bar nursing a quiet gin. “You can come together in the Veluwe [in the country’s Bible Belt] to talk about a 2,000-year-old book, but you can’t get together in Amsterdam to talk about a book from last month,” as Albrecht put it.

So last Friday night, I was among 50 people who snuck into De Balie under the cover of darkness — for fear of the police turning up — who signed a big, black book to join the community, and prepared to enjoy a night of much-missed comedy. “The Philosophical Society; the Community of Reason is about democracy and the rule of law, the solace and consolation of culture, experiencing something together that culture can give, seeing a bit of light after two years of darkness,” said Albrecht – something of an unusual opening blessing.

Everything about the evening was as absurd as the situation in the Netherlands. The crowd devoutly wore face masks and staff religiously scanned coronavirus ‘QR code passes’. But the comics were not announced in advance, photos and recording were banned, and the whole affair had the illicit frisson of an under-age boozing session.

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Yet De Balie is far from alone in its rebellion. Across the Netherlands, bars and restaurants have been opening regardless of the restrictions – especially in towns near the German and Belgian borders. On Saturday, for instance, 30 hospitality venues threw open their doors in Horst aan de Maas in protest. Last Wednesday, some 70 museums and galleries around the country decided to ‘open’ as temporary hairdressers, beauty salons and gyms – including world-renowned institutions such as the Van Gogh Museum, the Concertgebouw, and Amsterdam’s oldest theatre, De Kleine Komedie.

“We have a problem with the fact that hairdressers and nail bars and commercial activities can be open, and we can’t,” explained Van Gogh Museum director Emilie Gordenker. “We support everything we need to do in order to keep people safe. But this policy just seems contradictory and it seems to favour the commercial sector over the cultural one.”

Even the Dutch government appears to recognise this inconsistency. In a bizarre moment during a recent press conference, Mark Rutte emphasised that the Dutch have a constitutional right to protest, and that temporary openings could be viewed in this regard. “The right to demonstrate also applies to sectors like the hospitality industry, and I can imagine that mayors could look at ‘what’s allowed for a little while’… with the emphasis on ‘a little while’,” he said. “So if they want to open for a few hours to show ‘we are demonstrating’, then it’s up to the mayors how they deal with that.”

If it was an attempt to shunt on responsibility for enforcing his restrictions to local government (even though this is actually their structural role in the Netherlands), it soon backfired. Last week, 31 mayors — including Amsterdam chief Femke Halsema and non-conformist Breda mayor Paul Depla — wrote to the Government, pointing out that short-term policy-making is “reaching its limits” and putting local enforcers in a perilous position against a growing mood of civic disobedience. “It is in fact impossible but also undesirable for the state to use repression to forcibly convince Dutch citizens that the measures are correct,” they pointed out.

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Ahead of the Government’s next coronavirus press conference tomorrow, it also emerged at the weekend that the country’s medical advisory body, the Outbreak Management Team, wants cultural and hospitality venues to reopen alongside everything else until 8pm each day.

No doubt it would be a welcome move; but is it too little too late? In the Netherlands, the damage from these lockdowns has become increasingly evident. In the government’s most recent press conference, new health minister Ernst Kuipers admitted that two-thirds of young people are suffering from loneliness. Even since the November partial lockdown, the SCP, a social and cultural government think tank, has found that psychological wellbeing had dropped, particularly among the young.

And as for the affected industries, it’s unlikely that, even if the restrictions are lifted, business will be able to return to normal any time soon. Thousands of people working in the hospitality and culture sectors have simply given up and looked for work elsewhere. Many will be in coronavirus quarantine, after coming into contact with someone who has been infected. And for those who do want to return, it won’t simply be a matter of turning up to work the day after an announcement is made. An orchestra can’t just suddenly pick up bows and be ready to perform again next week: they need advance notice to plan.

“You see that the Netherlands is mentally exhausted with the pandemic and all of the restrictions — young people but also a lot of others,” said Concertgebouw managing director Simon Reinink on Wednesday, as the orchestra gave a protest rehearsal in front of a crowd of 50 people. “The one thing that can give meaning to life is the cultural sector. There has been a chronic underestimation of the importance of culture for people’s psychological health and wellbeing — and this is a huge problem.”

And as more rules are broken, mainstream civic disobedience risks becoming a habit; this is a country where ‘rules’ (like soft drug laws) are already treated flexibly and even the prime minister admits society tends to be “slightly anarchistic”. “Rules only work if they rest upon social and political agreement,” pointed out the group of mayors in their letter last week. “For example, almost everyone in the Netherlands understands and respects the importance of stopping for a red light. Enforcement powers are there to bring the few offenders into line and issue fines.”

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Despite last week’s mini-revolts, that remains a sentiment shared by most of the country. While “wappie” Dutch vaccine sceptics and pugilistic rioters sometimes make a lot of noise, 89.2% of the population is double jabbed, and almost 55% are boosted. Most of us have done our bit, we’ve followed the rules, despite their inconsistency and blunt capriciousness.

But all the signs suggest that we have reached a turning point: the latest reports suggest that while mostly-Omicron coronavirus infections are ramping up, the number of people needing hospital treatment is relatively stable.

But from the images of the violence that were soon shared across the world, there didn’t seem to be much of that famed Dutch moderation, openness and reasonableness on show. While the rioters left destruction in their wake, it later emerged that the police had directed live rounds of fire at rioters, leaving four people with gunshot wounds. As Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans — who initially likened the protests against the Netherlands’ latest coronavirus restrictions to a World War Two bombardment (before retracting the war analogy after facing a barrage of criticism) — said, there was a “bitter irony” to the location of such wanton violence.

Dutch leaders were quick to paint the riots as acts of hooliganism rather than protest, with commentators citing the existence of group chats where people reportedly said things such as: “Where’s the protest? I want to riot.” Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb called it “an orgy of violence” that drew “a number of people who had no intention of acting peacefully, but who were there to riot, to confront the police, and to destroy public property”. Dutch caretaker justice minister Ferd Grapperhaus echoed his comments, saying that a protest against a controversial (and as yet unimplemented) idea to restrict access to certain areas for unvaccinated people was hijacked by football hooligans and criminal low-life.

But just 10 months after a the country was gripped by nationwide riots in protest at an earlier coronavirus curfew, such an explanation seems overly simplistic. I can’t be the only person here in the Netherlands left wondering why some of the country’s 17.6 million citizens are so visibly out of control and alienated from the majority. This isn’t some new phenomenon: the Dutch police have been highlighting the increasing violence of protesters for several years.

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According to the latest reports, it seems that rioters in Rotterdam were made of a number of disparate groups, motivated for a range of reasons. Football hooligans, young men with nothing to do, harbour workers with low wages and job security, and those suffering from the national shortage of decent housing were all ripe for civil disobedience. As MP Attje Kuiken says: “It’s a poisonous cocktail.”

But behind their resentment — which includes recent anger at a nationwide ban on fireworks this New Year — there are clearly bigger social problems. A widespread disaffection with government is evident in the peaceful protests in major cities practically every weekend (sometimes for things as trivial as wearing face masks).

As in many other Western countries, there is a deep polarisation in Dutch society, and increasing distrust in politicians. This was exacerbated when the Government fell in January over a scandal in which tens of thousands of parents — most of dual nationality — were wrongly accused of childcare benefit fraud and forced to pay back every cent they had ever received, with devastating consequences for their financial, personal and children’s wellbeing. Last week, the Dutch highest court officially apologised for upholding unlawful tax office rulings. But while 15,000 people have received €30,000 in compensation so far, the apparent racism engrained in government institutions has not yet been fully investigated.

After elections in March, resulting in a hugely splintered outcome, Dutch political parties are still unable to form a government — a telling picture about the difficulty in finding common ground. Those who voted for change are no doubt disappointed by the continued presence of the same establishment faces around the table, led again by liberal Mark Rutte. Meanwhile, newish far-Right parties such the Forum for Democracy have delighted in exploiting the pandemic to undermine “the political elite”. As Amsterdam University cultural anthropologist Dr Danny de Vries tells me: “Just a few days ago one of them publicly threatened another politician in the chamber, saying his time would come when tribunals are held to hold him accountable for ‘corona crimes’” Only last week, the leader of FVD, Thierry Baudet, compared corona measures to Nazi Germany.

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Yet the country’s political leaders have hardly earned a glowing report. For all their confidence in their liberal, efficient and wealthy society, they have been behind at every step in the pandemic. The Government was one of the slowest in Europe to start vaccinations, and now that it has one of Europe’s highest infection rates, it has just started offering boosters. Moreover, despite being perfectly well aware that there have been at least 31,000 corona deaths (as recorded on death certificates), the Government continues to put a much lower figure of “officially-tested positive deaths” front and centre on its dashboards. Conveniently, this number (18,966) is less than neighbouring countries like Belgium, which have always recorded suspect deaths too.

And so while there is broad support for vaccination and the Dutch have fully vaccinated 84.7% of adults, trust in government policy and leadership has plummeted recently. There have been U-turns on policy, with nightclubs open one minute, and then closed the next, and an imprudent loosening of most restrictions at the end of September. With coronavirus infections at record highs in the past week, and hospitals saying they will soon have to make decisions about who gets the IC beds, virologists are talking once more about the need for a full lockdown — and it’s not only the coronavirus sceptics or protesters who are looking at December with sinking hearts.

When he appeared on a morning chat show yesterday, Nijmegen mayor and chairman of the National Security Council Hubert Bruls was keen to emphasise that most people are not out on the streets rioting. That’s true, and it’s difficult to say whether the Dutch have more coronavirus sceptics — or, indeed, hooligans — than anyone else (although the head of Viruswaarheid corona protest group Willem Engel, adds a certain flair to events with his experience as a former dance teacher).

But anyone who has ever tried to stand in a queue in the Netherlands will realise that there’s a widespread sense of assertive individualism here, which is not often restrained by social norms such as politeness or the-other-person-was-actually-first. Basic rights like freedom of speech, movement and protest, are also grounded in the constitution, which has meant that it is very difficult for a government to restrain them. This has led to a surprising number of civilian court cases about coronavirus policy (eventually overturned by the courts).

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As a Brit living in the Netherlands, I’ve been surprised how much opposition there has been to following relatively minor rules such as wearing a face mask in certain places; the mere prospect of showing a coronavirus pass for entry is enough to cause a spiky hour of debate in most social groups, where it’s likely that at least a few people will disagree with their existence as a matter of principle.

Another element that might sit behind recent discontent is something that the Netherlands is often praised for: a light-touch legal system and emphasis on alternatives to prison and processes like mediation. Although Grapperhaus has pledged to fast-track stiff justice for rioters, and police are busy scanning camera images to round up the Rotterdam culprits, the Netherlands has recently been seen by organised crime as a “low-threshold” entry point to Europe.

The current struggle with organised crime has laid bare gaps in policing capacity, and a sense that a liberal but illogical weed policy is not helping (because smoking weed is tolerated, but growing it commercially is a punishable crime). Young men are apparently attracted to act as “collectors” of drug shipments in containers at Rotterdam harbour or criminal errand boys, and there’s a desperate need to offer other opportunities to certain groups of young people — something that has been recognised by the new mayor of Utrecht, Sharon Dijksma.

The recent violence in Rotterdam cannot, therefore, be dismissed as mere hooliganism. As the authorities launch an official investigation into the gunshot wounds sustained on Friday night, and police forces are deployed across cities to stop-and-search as bars close at 8pm, this isn’t a time to sit back and dismiss the rioting as an “orgy” of criminal activity. It’s time to sift through the ashes.