The collapse of the far-right coalition government in the Netherlands on June 3 marks a new stage in the political crisis of Dutch and European capitalism. After only eleven months in office, Geert Wilders—the neo-fascist leader of the Freedom Party (PVV)—withdrew his party from the ruling coalition, bringing down the four-party government formed eight months after the November 2023 elections, in which the PVV emerged as the strongest force in parliament. This marks the downfall of the most right-wing government in the Netherlands since World War II. Fresh elections have been called for October 2025.
Wilders, the most seasoned and, with 27 years, longest-serving member of parliament, has functioned as the Dutch bourgeoisie’s leading far-right ideologist, playing a pivotal role in driving state policy ever further to the right. For over two decades, he has shaped migration policy and legitimised a steady expansion of repressive state measures, including policing powers, surveillance, and anti-terror laws—setting the tone for every successive government regardless of formal coalition composition. His central role in the present crisis is not an aberration, but the culmination of a prolonged authoritarian drift within the Dutch ruling class heightened by the surge of international class conflict.
The immediate pretext for the government’s collapse, as portrayed by both international and local media, is the supposed “refusal” of Wilders’ coalition partners—the right-wing People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the New Social Contract (NSC), and the Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB)—to support his draconian “10-point asylum plan,” unveiled at a press conference in The Hague on May 26. This is a political lie.
While Wilders’ authoritarian and xenophobic proposals triggered the formal breakdown, the disagreement within the ruling elite, including the nominal left, is not over the repression of migrants—on which all factions broadly agree—but tactical issues on the form and timing of these draconian, anti-democratic measures.
In fact, the coalition’s governing agreement from May 2024 already enshrined the goal of establishing “the strictest admission regime for asylum” in the EU. All three parties were instrumental in passing legislation such as the Asylum Emergency Measures Act, restricting family reunification, instituting a two-tier refugee system, and reintroducing border controls.
The coalition parties are not opposed to Wilders’ plan in principle, but fear that an aggressive rollout could provoke further mass resistance. The collapse of the government and the accompanying rhetoric reflect not a divergence in policy, but in strategy—how best to impose a deeply unpopular agenda of imperialist war, austerity and state repression without igniting a broader political crisis that is already underway as part of an international development.
The NSC’s Nicolien van Vroonhoven admitted that the government’s asylum policies already “walked the edge of the law,” while criticising Wilders not for substance but for “presentation.” GroenLinks–PvdA and the Socialist Party (SP), the nominal left and opposition on the other hand, have supported the governing parties in backing rising military budgets and NATO’s war drive against Russia.
As the government collapses, representatives across the entire political establishment have voiced grievous concerns over any delay in enforcing its right-wing program both at home and abroad. The VVD’s Deputy Leader, Marieke de Jong, warned that “this collapse threatens the stability necessary to maintain our commitments to national security and economic growth,” emphasizing the “urgent need for swift elections to restore order.”
Pieter van Loon, leader of the BBB, expressed disappointment, stating, “Our efforts to support rural communities and maintain balanced policies have been undermined by internal conflicts, and this instability will hurt those who depend on us.” Jimmy Dijk, leader of the SP, responded to Wilders’ plan in an earlier reaction on X (May 26, 2025): “What a cry. You yourself formed this cabinet and you yourself put this failed minister in charge of migration. You have achieved nothing.”
While the ministers of Wilders’ PVV have left the government, unelected Prime Minister Dick Schoof, a former spy, is to remain in office as “caretaker prime minister.” He is attending the NATO summit on June 24 to reaffirm the Netherlands €19 billion defence budget and its pledges of F-16 deliveries to Ukraine as well as the continued political and logistical support to Israel in its genocide in Gaza.
As the Dutch financial and ruling elite contemplates the best course to push ahead its class interests, the Dutch working class, like its counterparts elsewhere, is mired in an intensifying social crisis and sharp rises in the cost of living. Inflation remains high at 3.2 percent, well above the eurozone average. Wages have failed to keep pace, thanks to the trade-union supported “collective labour agreements” yielding tiny increases, insufficient to offset years of real-term wage decline.
Essential services are increasingly out of reach: nearly 45 percent of Dutch residents cite rising costs as their primary concern. Average waiting times for social housing range from 7 to 19 years, due to systematic cuts and soaring rents. The privatised health care system continues to burden workers with a steady rise in mandatory insurance premiums. Nearly 60 percent of older workers struggle to remain employed past age 55, often forced into temporary or part-time contracts and with declining pensions that hardly cover basic expenses.
Amid this unravelling social crisis precipitated and intensified by the international and Dutch ruling elite, the political establishment, working hand-in-glove with its media accomplices, have escalated anti-immigrant rhetoric. Exploiting burning concerns over housing, jobs, adequate pay and access to deteriorating public services, they aim to pit workers against workers—to fracture class unity and obscure the real source of the crisis: the failure of capitalism to meet even the most basic needs of society.
Wilders’ newest asylum plan—which openly violates even bourgeois law such as the Geneva Conventions, Dutch law, and EU regulations—called for the suspension of all asylum and family reunification procedures, mass deportations (particularly of Syrians), the closure of refugee reception centres, and a ban on dual citizenship. It demanded military control over borders and intensified police crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protests.
Particularly over the past months, a wave of protests and strikes across all sectors have swept the Netherlands. On May 18, in a protest that was hardly under the grip of official political parties and affiliated trade unions, over 100,000 people demonstrated in The Hague against the Israeli assault on Gaza—the largest anti-war protest in two decades. Tens of thousands marched in Amsterdam a week later on May 24 against xenophobia and racism, after Wilders had announced his 10-point plan.
Starting June 6, railway workers have entered strikes nationally demanding wage increases and improved working conditions. University staff and students are expected to strike in Amsterdam on June 10 against a planned €1.1 billion in education cuts to compensate for the hikes in military budgets. Another mass anti-genocide protest is planned to take place in The Hague on June 15, followed by a major demonstration against the NATO war summit on June 22.
Wilders’ calculated exit has also been shaped by drastically falling poll numbers for all coalition parties. As of the most recent polls, PVV is projected to drop from 37 to 29 seats, the BBB to 3, and the NSC to 1—losing 19 of its 20 seats. These figures reflect growing hostility to the entire political establishment and its policies, not just to Wilders and his party. Wilders hopes to make a comeback with a stronger PVV based on a vicious xenophobic and anti-Islamic campaign, to sweep to power in October.
It is politically fatal to place hopes in pseudo-left satellites and parties such as GroenLinks–PvdA or in the trade union bureaucracy. Dick Koerselman, interim chairman of FNV (Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging), one of the two largest trade union confederations in the Netherlands with an infamous record in suppressing strikes and upholding “social partnership” with the state apparatus, called the fall of the cabinet “good news for the Netherlands.”
Eighty-five years ago, Leon Trotsky wrote: “The bourgeoisie has managed to convert our planet into a foul prison.” That prison remains intact, presided over by an oligarchy that enriches itself through war, austerity, and genocide.
The Dutch bourgeoisie finds itself in a political impasse. Following decades of austerity, the working class faces soaring levels of social inequality, deteriorating public services, broader militarisation, and the persecution of immigrants and refugees in a country, where millionaires outnumber the number of refugees. The fall of the Wilders-led cabinet is not the end of far-right politics in the Netherlands but a signal that the bourgeoisie is recalibrating its methods for enforcing authoritarian forms of rule.
The Dutch working class must reject all attempts to divide it—on the basis of nationality, religion, or ethnicity—and be at the forefront in the defence of immigrants and refugees, the most vulnerable section of the working class. It must unite with workers across Europe and internationally against fascism, war, austerity and genocide. Only through the building of a Dutch section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) can workers fight for a socialist program: for the expropriation of the financial elite, the transformation of production to meet social need, and the establishment of workers’ power.