There is some dispute about who first defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. But Geert Wilders gave a first-class demonstration when he demanded a new slate of asylum rules in The Hague on Monday, writes Gordon Darroch.

Exasperated at the Dutch government’s failure to make any progress on delivering the “strictest asylum policy ever”, Wilders took the unusual step of calling a press conference to warn sternly that “the gloves are off”.

The PVV leader is rarely seen in public these days and shuns the talk show studios, but on this occasion he patiently answered reporters’ questions about why his patience in the cabinet had run out. He insisted he was not making any threats before proceeding to deliver an ultimatum: if he didn’t see progress in the next few weeks, his party would be “gone”.

Most of the ideas in his 10-point plan were recycled from previous PVV election manifestos, old tweets or the last attempt to rehash the coalition agreement in October. Ageing rockers are fond of cashing in on their Greatest Hits; this was effectively a compendium of Geert Wilders’ greatest failures. His train of thought lurched drunkenly between the unethical, the unthinkable and the unworkable.

With the PVV sliding in the opinion polls since January, Wilders had a pressing need to take back control of the agenda. Immigration has been eclipsed as the dominant issue by trade wars and global security since Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Wilders’ big triumph in the spring budget negotiations, the promise to freeze social housing rents for the next two years, is in tatters. The foreign affairs minister, Caspar Veldkamp, is no longer prepared to let the Netherlands be a cheerleader for Netanyahu as the bodies pile up in Gaza. Like Trump, Wilders has shouted loudly but achieved little. And so he went back to shouting again about immigration while offering no solutions, other than taking another shot at the “strictest asylum policy” using the spent cartridges from the last effort.

Army

Wilders’ proposal for the army to be drafted in to control the borders was immediately rubbished by the services union VBM, which said: “The armed forces are not there to guard the borders”.

He said European quotas should be suspended until the number of asylum seekers had come down. That idea has already been shot down once in the autumn, when the numbers arriving from Syria in particular were much higher, so there is now a much smaller chance of persuading the EU that the Netherlands is facing a genuine refugee crisis, as opposed to the consequences of its own bungling.

He cited Germany as an example of successful border controls, but of the 2,400 people refused entry in the first two weeks of Germany’s stricter regime only 180 were asylum seekers, and around one-third of those were eventually let in because they were categorised as vulnerable.

Wilders also said the oversubscribed asylum seeker centres should be closed and Syrian refugees sent home within six months now that the country is, in his view, safe. The government is already investigating which parts of Syria are genuinely suitable for people to return to, a measure included at Wilders’ insistence in the last package of asylum measures in the autumn.

As a result, the immigration service has stopped processing applications from Syria, which is one reason why the number of people waiting longer than 15 months for a decision has doubled since October.

Bottleneck

His solution to the bottleneck he helped create in the accommodation system is to expel refugees who have been granted settled status, but he also wants to ban councils from classing them as urgent cases for housing. Instead, they should find their own lodgings “with family, fellow countrymen who already have a house or Dutch people who claim to be concerned about these people’s welfare.”

That sneer might get plenty of thumbs-up responses on YouTube, but deliberately making people homeless straight after the state has afforded them the right of residency will go down like a lead balloon in the courts.

Wilders also had to find a way to make sure that if the cabinet really does collapse this summer, he can pass the blame onto someone else. But he also had to navigate the awkward reality that the person chiefly responsible for the failure to make any headway on asylum is the minister he hand-picked for the role, Marjolein Faber.

One of the many paradoxes in Wilders’ position is that he has heaped praise on Faber for reducing refugee numbers (even though her plans are still jammed in the pipeline) while simultaneously claiming that the government’s record on asylum has been so dire that he is prepared to walk away and trigger fresh elections.

Incompetence

Faber’s mind-boggling incompetence is not the only reason why the “strictest asylum policy ever” has run aground, but it is the common thread running through them. She has been rebuked by the Council of State for drafting inadequate legislation and failing to explain how her policies would improve the asylum system or reduce the numbers.

She has been warned by lawyers that introducing a two-tier refugee status would lead to a flood of appeals, which is the very reason the system was abandoned last time round. She has been castigated for not consulting government advisers and told that the immigration service IND lacks the capacity to implement her laws.

Far from saving €3.5 billion a year on the cost of asylum accommodation, as she promised in September, Faber has had to beg the finance ministry for an extra €900 million next year. That includes around €100 million to pay off fines imposed by the courts for failing to decide cases within six months, a figure that will become higher if the pile of unprocessed applications continues to grow.

Responsibility

Perhaps the biggest flaw in Wilders’ 10-point plan is that he continues to place the responsibility for following it through with Faber, who on the evidence of the last year would struggle to follow the recipe for a cheese sandwich.

“We, and nobody else, won the election,” Wilders said, but again the telling detail was what was left unspoken: what did the PVV actually win when it took a quarter of the votes in 2023?

Under the Dutch proportional system, the reward for finishing first in an election is the chance to work with other parties to turn your ideas into working legislation. No politician has failed so miserably at every aspect of this process, or wasted so great an advantage in such a short time, as Geert Wilders. The voters will have to decide, maybe soon, whether he deserves another chance.

Read more of Gordon Darroch’s columns via his website.