There is perhaps no country in the world more liberal than the Netherlands. A commercial republic since the sixteenth century, it became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage and euthanasia in the early 2000s. Abortion and psychedelics are available, and of the major countries in Europe, the Netherlands is the least religious.
On the surface, the country’s election on Wednesday was a reaffirmation of its liberal character: after the collapse of a right-wing cabinet, the progressive D66 party—led by 38-year-old Rob Jetten—tied for first place and now seems poised to take the country back toward its liberal tradition.
Under the surface, though, the election reveals the staying power of a more defensive and conservative set of ideas in Europe. The next Dutch government, while it will be made up of ostensibly liberal and centrist parties, will almost certainly pursue large increases in military spending and restrictions on immigration and asylum. The Netherlands is poised to typify a phenomenon present all over the continent: governments justifying conservative means to pursue liberal ends.
Europe’s liberals are mandating assimilation programs for immigrants in the name of secularism. They are bolstering the military in service of European cooperation. They are restricting migration in order to protect tolerance. And they are defying European legal precedents in the name of preserving the larger European project.
The Netherlands has voted to make itself Europe’s clearest example of Fortress Liberalism.
For decades, Dutch liberalism meant openness to immigration and laxity on defense. In 1995, the Netherlands welcomed about 96,000 immigrants. In 2022, the country took in over 400,000. Now, approximately one-sixth of Dutch residents were born abroad and 14% of Dutch youth are Muslim.
During that period, support for immigration restrictions grew. This caused friction between progressives and centrists in the coalition of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, disagreements that became irreconcilable in early 2023. Rutte’s centrist government collapsed. With immigration central in the subsequent election, the hard-right Geert Wilders won a dramatic victory: his Party for Freedom (PVV) won more seats than any other party. The mainstream parties decided to work with him.
The result of Wilders’ success was the Schoof Cabinet, which united Wilders with right-of-center liberals on the promise to curb immigration. They had some success—the rate of immigration into the Netherlands fell 20% between 2022 and 2024. But Wilders’ demands proved too much. In May this year, Wilders called for the Dutch government to invoke Article 72 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which provides that member countries can abrogate EU asylum laws when they interfere with “the maintenance of law and order and the safeguarding of internal security.” Wilders claimed the influx of asylum seekers constituted a war-like threat to Dutch sovereignty.
The traditional center right, following European legal precedent, rejected the proposal. In June, the Schoof Cabinet became the second Dutch government in a row to collapse over immigration. The split reflected a dynamic at work throughout Europe: even where parties agree on the need to limit migration, they remain divided over the breadth of the restrictions and whether to defy European courts and precedents.
The Netherlands long had a similarly firm consensus on military spending. The country spent no more than 2% of its GDP on its military for decades. Like the rest of Europe, the Dutch trusted the American security umbrella provided by NATO and the solidarity and deterrent force of the European continent.
But under pressure from the Trump administration and the war in Ukraine, the Netherlands has dramatically boosted its military budget. In 2024, it spent more per capita on defense than France, Italy, or Germany. It increased its budget faster and farther than other European countries. Rutte, who signed budget after budget with minimal defense spending, is now Secretary General of NATO, pressuring other European leaders to commit to spending 5% of GDP on defense.
In Wednesday’s election, all the participants in the fallen right-wing Schoof Cabinet performed worse than they did in the previous election in 2023. Both Wilders’ PVV and the parties of the traditional center right lost seats. Yet there is no reason to believe the Netherlands will reverse course on immigration or defense. While the messaging may change, Dutch liberals will likely accelerate the Netherlands’ becoming a more defensive and militarized country.
The new Dutch consensus extends across the spectrum. Even the Party for the Animals—a leftwing group devoted primarily to animal rights—endorsed increased defense spending in June. The progressive D66 party supported budget cuts to defense for decades. This year, their platform proclaimed: “Our military is our greatest strength,” and called for an EU-wide army to defend against Russian aggression.
D66 has similarly changed its line on immigration. Party leader Rob Jetten (likely the country’s next prime minister), while criticizing right-wing rhetoric, has taken an approach that echoes Bill Clinton’s catchphrase on abortion—“safe, legal, and rare.” He has promised to make the Netherlands’ asylum system “fast, strict, and fair.” Jetten wants all asylum claims to be processed in migrants’ country of origin rather than on Dutch soil. He proposes mandating Dutch language learning for all refugees from “day one.” A September policy paper from D66 put it bluntly: “The Netherlands is a country with liberal values. Those who do not respect those values lose their rights.” It reflects a broader tonal shift: Jetten has broken with his party’s tradition of individualism, embracing the Dutch flag and speaking often about national pride and community.
Jetten’s party is not an outlier: the main left-wing party, until recently the first-choice party of Dutch Muslims, pledged to “get a grip” on migration, while a conservative party which may join Jetten’s coalition wants to revise articles of the European Convention on Human Rights which prohibit inhumane treatment of migrants and protect the rights of migrants to establish families.
The Dutch Bar Association claimed earlier this month that 12 of the 15 main Dutch political parties were making promises that violated the rule of law. For example, D66’s promises to separate troublesome asylum seekers in shelters and to swiftly punish threats against police officers—measures which enjoy broad support in Dutch society—were deemed possible violations of due process and related rights.
The political parties poised to play a role in the Netherlands’ new government have all tried to reconcile promises of toughness on immigration and defense with more abstract commitments to liberal values and the European project. Military buildup is presented as a project of European solidarity in the face of Putin, who would undermine liberal democracy. Even those promising to revise human rights conventions frame revision as necessary for “restoring interstate trust” between EU members. Assimilating Muslim immigrants is described as essential to upholding modern attitudes on gender and sexuality.
A speech last year by Dilan Yesilgöz, Mark Rutte’s successor as the leader of the Dutch center right, captured this spirit succinctly. Yesilgöz pointed to her own story as a Turkish refugee, and invoked Spinoza and the Enlightenment to paint a hard line on immigration as necessary to preserve Dutch liberalism. She declared:
Where the world’s first same-sex marriage once took place here in Amsterdam, two men now walking hand in hand down the street are being verbally abused. Where we fought for equal rights for women half a century ago, in some families here in this city, girls are now denied swimming lessons or school camps. Or they even become victims of honor-related violence. [...] Unfree ideas are being spread in the Netherlands from Islamic countries, but also from the Kremlin [...] This isn’t how we envision the Netherlands. This isn’t my Netherlands.
Yesilgöz’s speech appropriates an idea once advocated only by the hard right but which now resonates all over Europe: for liberalism to be saved, some illiberal policies are needed. It was once only leaders like Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen who explicitly tied gay rights and secularism to limiting migration and preserving Europe. Not anymore. In Poland, a populist government was recently ousted and the liberals who replaced them enacted tougher asylum policies in the name of serving as Europe’s “Eastern Shield.” Nine European leaders, ranging from the Danish center left to the Italian right, co-authored a letter calling for human rights courts to be more permissive on immigration restrictions in the name of safeguarding democracy.
Today, only one government in Europe—Viktor Orbán’s Hungary—outright rejects liberalism. But the other side of the spectrum has now also become fringe. The message that Western democracy is best preserved by pacifism and openness to foreigners is no longer viable in much of the continent. The liberal and centrist parties are deciding that Europe must become defensive if it is to remain free: they have become Fortress Liberals.
Is Fortress Liberalism a new modus vivendi? If Europe’s mainstream simply gets tough on defense and migration, might that staunch the populist tide? Here, the Netherlands offers only clues.
The National Voter Survey, conducted before every Dutch election, found a national consensus that migration should be limited and that immigrants make it harder to find homes: more than 70% of Dutch voters agree on this point. Yet the discontent went deeper: the survey also found the highest level of discontent with democracy in any year since the survey was established, and that more than one-third of Dutch voters wanted a “strong leader,” even if it was someone who “bent the rules.”
These results show that even when populist political parties falter in office, the voter sentiments driving their success have tremendous staying power. The desire for order, expressed most clearly in the discontent with mass migration and the desire to have strong defense, extends far beyond those issues.
Fortress Liberals are betting that openness can be practiced in some fields of policy and not others. Liberal democracy, they argue, must become less welcoming in order to become more stable. One reason the word “liberal” exists at all is because Enlightenment theorists—like the Netherlands’ own Spinoza—identified an intrinsic connection between freedom of thought and lifestyle and the open and cosmopolitan nature of countries like the Netherlands. The new Jetten-led Dutch government, if formed, will continue to test whether that connection is a necessary one—or whether what liberalism really needs today is higher walls and bigger guns.
Leo Greenberg is a student at Yale University, where he studies History and Philosophy.
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There, I think, is a simpler explanation for what is occurring.
Liberals are wired collectivist. They are people that prefer to be governed by committee... mostly because they cannot tolerate being left out of the decision process. This works well in homogenous places where the tribal values are aligned enough that decisions and progress can be made through a committee decision process. You can see the frustration of liberals for the situation where access to more information, they would more quickly label as disinformation, causes more conflict within the tribe and thus makes committee decision-making more challenging.
Conservatives are wired to value and accept command and control hierarchies. Conservatives don't trust nor like decision process by committee. The free world tends to be more command-and-control hierarchies and not governance by committee. But some countries have a history of strong community/committee governance structure. They are generally homogenous places.
But highly diverse places, and the Netherlands has grown more diverse because of significant immigration, become more difficult to govern by committee. This does not stop the liberal attraction to collectivist governance models, but they demonstrate lower and lower effectiveness as more value and interest conflict develops from a more culturally and ethnically diverse population. Liberals are less and less capable of making progress as decisions stall or they are otherwise so watered down to appease all the participants.
In a place like the Netherlands, where the core population has become used to governance by committee, their frustration over lack of progress results in an election of conservatives with a strong leader like Geert Wilders. However, because of their nature, they quickly turn again to reject that command-and-control hierarchy to go back to collective participation. But this next try with some acknowledgement that decisions and progress have been stalled and that key decisions are required.
I do not hold out much hope for this new wave of liberal leadership to make needed decisions and to secure real progress despite the campaign promises. Without someone in charge with decision authority and the motivation to cut through the ubiquitous opposition to any and all policy ideas, decisions will stall or be too watered-down and the cycle will repeat again for the frustration of the people to elect strong conservative leadership to fix what is broken. Massive diversity has changed much about the Netherlands... and their governance model is going to have to change to fit the new population.
All This political analysis misses the institutional basis: Holland has a purely proportional electoral system: a machinery designed for consociational governance.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uW77FSphM6yiMZTGg/why-not-parliamentarianism-book-by-tiago-ribeiro-dos-santos