HAARLEM, Netherlands -- HAARLEM, Netherlands (AP) — Palwasha Hamzad wants the Dutch election to be not about migration, but about tackling the chronic housing shortages in the Netherlands.For Daniëlle Vergauwen, it's about putting "our own people" first.Their opposing views sum up two of the key issues in campaigning for the Oct.
29 election for all 150 seats in the Dutch parliament's legislative House of Representatives.They also echo debates about migration across Europe as right-wing politics gain support.Far-right, anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders ' Party for Freedom, known by its Dutch acronym PVV, swept to a shock victory in 2023 on a pledge to drastically rein in migration.
He triggered the downfall of the subsequent four-party coalition government in June by withdrawing his lawmakers from the Cabinet in a dispute over implementing his crackdown.This time around, Wilders’ campaign pledge is a “total halt” to asylum-seekers.An analysis of parties’ election manifestos by the Dutch Order of Lawyers said that such a policy would be a breach of international treaties.“We have too many foreigners, too many asylum-seekers, too much Islam and far too many asylum-seeker centers,” Wilders’ manifesto says.
What he casts as the ”open-borders policy” of his political rivals “is totally destroying our country.”Wilders' party leads polls as the voting day nears, but even if he manages to win again, he is unlikely to manage to piece together a coalition, because many other mainstream parties have ruled out working with him.Other more mainstream parties also have included moves to cut migration in their manifestos as the issue cuts across political fault lines.Violent protests against new asylum-seeker centers have broken out in recent months in towns and villages across the Netherlands, with protesters lighting flares and sometimes waving a tricolor flag that was adopted by Dutch Nazi sympathizers around World War II.
Wilders says he's opposed t...