The Dutch parliament is currently in the grip of an outbreak of incompetence that began at the last election and has intensified since the cabinet collapsed at the start of June, after 11 months of stagnation and infighting, writes Gordon Darroch.

Far right leader Geert Wilders promised two big, beautiful bills to end the asylum crisis when the right-wing coalition came to power last July. Instead we got an ugly, drawn-out mess that descended into a democratic farce.

Wilders seemed unable to decide from one day to the next whether he still supported his own Emergency Asylum Measures Bill (the word “emergency“ was included in the title to underline the urgent need to bring in stricter rules without delay), back when they were first proposed last September).

At the start of last week week, as the summer recess and crucial votes approached, the PVV strongly hinted it would vote against the bills because they were “watered-down imitations“ of Wilders’ plans for the “harshest asylum policy ever“.

Quite who had watered them down and how was unclear, given that they were exactly the same bills that the PVV’s former asylum minister, Marjolein Faber, had drafted while swatting away warnings from everyone responsible for the asylum system, from the immigration service to the Council of State, that they would be disastrous and ineffective.

Perhaps some pesky refugees had sneaked into the Binnenhof at dead of night and changed the words while nobody was looking.

But then, on Tuesday, a series of accidents prompted Wilders to retrieve Faber’s homework from the jaws of the shredder. The PVV had tabled an amendment to the bill that would make it a criminal offence for asylum seekers to stay in the Netherlands after their application had been refused, and criminalise anyone else who helped them.

Wilders fully intended the amendment to fail, thus proving his point that his asylum policy had been sabotaged by the enemies of the people.

But instead, his opponents contrived to score a bizarre own goal. The vote coincided with Keti Koti, the annual commemoration of the abolition of slavery in the Dutch colonies. Several MPs who opposed the bill were due to attend the ceremony in Amsterdam, so they agreed with colleagues on the other side to abstain, under the “pairing” convention that enables MPs to miss votes without consequence.

Unfortunately, Raoul White, of GroenLinks-PvdA partnered with a member of the NSC party, which supported the bill but not the amendment. That left the opponents a vital two votes short.

They lost a third when Christine Teunissen of the animal rights party PvdD failed to get back from Keti Koti in time to vote because she was relying on public transport, but White’s blunder had already sealed the outcome: the amendment passed by three votes.

Wilders gleefully thanked his opponents for conspiring to bail out his party by prioritising “that weird slavery business”. His jubilation was understandable: even Geert Wilders rarely gets the chance to insult the descendants of slavery and demonise asylum seekers in one move.

Short lived euphoria

He declared that the PVV would now support the legislation that it had drawn up, foisted on the cabinet in defiance of all good sense and then thrown on the scrapheap. But Wilders’ euphoria was short-lived. The Christian Democrats (CDA), horrified at the idea that helping the needy might now be grounds for prosecution, withdrew their support, calling the amendment a step too far.

The hardline Bible Belt party SGP called for the vote to be postponed until after the summer, alarmed that church elders and Salvation Army volunteers could end up with criminal records. Diederik Boomsma, the asylum spokesman for NSC, spent a whole day asking if prisons would fill up with people who had given a bowl of soup to a hungry refugee.

Wilders went back to being his perpetually outraged self, tweeting in capital letters that CDA leader Henri Bontenbal’s defence of Christian charity was a BETRAYAL OF THE NETHERLANDS – demonstrating again that one of the main fault lines in Dutch politics is between those who respect culture and tradition and those who scream about it.

Elastic principles

In the end, it was the infinitely elastic principles of NSC that stopped the bills going down the drain. The justice minister, David van Weel, promised that nobody would be jailed for giving soup to refugees, straight after saying it was not his job to tell judges how to interpret the law.

He said the amendment would be passed but not enforced until it had been assessed by the Council of State. And NSC, the party of good governance and constitutional rigour, the party that at a previous stage angered Wilders by blocking his attempts to bypass parliament by using emergency powers to impose his asylum laws ­–above all, the party that campaigned to make government accountable again to parliament and the rule of law – now decided that the word of a minister was good enough.

If nothing else, we can be reassured that the Dutch tradition of the gedoogbeleid –­ outlawing and permitting things at the same time, such as smoking cannabis and euthanasia ­– is still alive and well.

Not Wilders’ fault?

None of this, of course, was Geert Wilders’ fault, because in Dutch politics nothing ever is. Bontenbal hit out at the “amateurishness and chaos“ in parliament that had forced his party into an ungainly U-turn. Not a word passed his lips about the cynical manoeuvrings that enabled the amendment criminalising overstayers to be tabled in the first place.

Judith Uitermark, the NSC home affairs minister, said the PVV’s amendment had tarnished a “considered and balanced“ package of laws to tackle the asylum problem.

Yet almost everyone involved in the asylum system believes Faber’s laws will make the crisis worse: longer delays, more legal challenges, more paperwork for the already overstretched immigration service because refugees will have to reapply for asylum every three years, more overcrowding now that settled refugees have been pushed down the waiting list for a house, and more cost to the taxpayer, because emergency accommodation costs around twice as much.

Teenage girls

All this at a time when viciousness towards refugees is spilling over into violence. In Coevorden, a town on the German border, the local municipality was forced to abandon plans to give shelter to 14 unaccompanied teenage girl refugees after anti-asylum activists terrorised the neighbourhood.

Unfounded rumours circulated that if teenage girls were allowed to move in, teenage boys would follow, even after the council had explicitly ruled this out. A car was torched, a trailer of wood was set on fire, windows were smashed and police who arrived to restore order were pelted with eggs and stones.

The local mayor concluded that he could not offer a “safe home for vulnerable girls” in his town. Not one political leader had the guts to condemn the thuggery that made a quiet rural town in a civilised nation a no-go area for teenage girls.

And certainly nobody blamed Geert Wilders, who campaigned against an asylum seekers’ centre this week out of a professed concern for “the safety of your wives and daughters“, for normalising hatred. Like yawning and incompetence, cowardice has become a disease in Dutch politics.