The four coalition party leaders are holding a crisis meeting on Tuesday morning to decide whether to pull the plug on the current government, following PVV leader Geert Wilders’s demands for more action to curb asylum.

The four met on Monday evening for around an hour, after Wilders threatened to pull out of the right-wing coalition if they did not agree to his demands.

“It is not looking good,” Wilders said after that discussion. “We have a serious problem.”

Wilders first issued his warning in a post on social media site X at the weekend, after other coalition leaders gave a lukewarm response to his press conference last Monday.

The three other party leaders have all said that Wilders can press ahead with his plans and that it is up to immigration minister Marjolein Faber to make progress. But Wilders wants them to “place their signature” under his 10-point plan and realise some of the measures within weeks.

Commentators say the three other party leaders have offered Wilders an escape route but that he has now backed himself into a corner. This cabinet, said NOS, is hanging by a thread.

Legal experts have warned that many of the plans conflict with European human rights laws or the UN Refugee Convention of 1951, such as sending all Syrian refugees home within six months even though the government has not declared Syria a safe country.