The Dutch ruling class makes use of populism and anti-populism

According to Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema's initial assessment, Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters were not known for causing trouble. The National Coordinator for Counter-terrorism and Security (NCTV) stressed that with regards to this Israeli football club, there was “no concrete threat to the home supporters, its players or the match.” However, at the time the riots broke out there were barely 1,000 police officers available to prevent possible clashes of Israeli supporters with the Dutch citizens. It was clear that, the bourgeoisie had made a “misjudgment.”

It should take no time at all for anyone who makes the effort to find out that the supporters of this football club are no wimps. They are notorious for their provocations and brawls with their opponents and, contrary to the bourgeoisie's proclamations, have resorted to violence a number of times, including outside Israel. Moreover, Maccabi supporters are notorious for their anti-Arab rhetoric. Every Arab football player, even in their own club, is targeted and “Death to Arabs,” is a slogan they often chant.

So the inevitable happened. In the run-up to the match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv on 7 November, these supporters went on the rampage. It was as if they were in the West Bank, intent on teaching the Palestinian inhabitants a lesson. They chanted racist slogans, abused onlookers and, armed with sticks, attacked random passersby. Furthermore, they destroyed property, ripped down Palestinian and Dutch flags and set them on fire. A few even tried to enter a house to remove a Palestinian flag from the wall. In other words anything but a typical crowd of football supporters. This in turn led to violent reactions from Muslim youth. After the match, a number of the Maccabi hooligans were indeed chased, threatened, assaulted and even thrown into the cold water of Amsterdam's canals. And no doubt innocent victims were caught up in the process.

It is inconceivable that the Netherlands bourgeoisie did not know about the reputation of the Macccabi fans. So why did they choose to keep quiet about it and let crowds of these people flood into the city? What led the NCTV in particular to declare that there were no particular risks associated with the arrival of a thousand Maccabi hooligans? We can only guess. What we can observe, however, is that both the ruling and opposition parties were only too happy to use the riots to publicise their populist politics.

The populist exploitation of the riots

The populist parties had already decided in advance who should be to blame for the disturbances in Amsterdam: it was the Muslim youth, supposedly driven by deep-seated anti-Semitism. Politicians of the ruling parties made exaggerated claims to justify it, speaking of a hunt for Jews, even a pogrom, comparing these attacks to those of the Nazi Stormtroopers.

A main characteristic of populism is to always look for a scapegoat. For the populist parties PVV, BBB and NSC[1] (and also for the VVD), the youth with an Islamic background in particular, “the multicultural scum” as Wilders calls them, were the real instigators of the violence in Amsterdam and should therefore be removed from “our” society.

Furthermore, the solutions proposed by populism, even by bourgeois standards, are completely unrealistic. Proposals such as deporting the 'scum' and closing the borders to newcomers, as well as closing mosques and banning the Koran, testify to a very simplistic response to the complex problems that capitalism has created.

Finally, populism is not averse to conspiracy theories either. The PVV regards Islam as “a totalitarian, intolerant and violent political ideology of conquest disguised as a religion. The goal of Islam is the establishment of an Islamic world empire”[2]. In doing so, this party deliberately ignores the fact that Islam, either religiously or politically, does not form a united whole, but has different strands and is also clearly subservient to the interests of nation states.

Whipping up these extreme reactions was designed to unleash a real smear campaign against a particular section of the Dutch population, a campaign that had to underline once again that the mass expulsion and deportation of migrants to a country like Uganda, which is a focus of the Schoof government's policy, is more than justified.

The fuss surrounding the riots before and after the football game served the populist coalition well for more than one reason:

 - It deflected attention from the shambles that is the Schoof government:

- It diverted attention from the new migration policy which, with the abolition of the bed-bath-bread measure, the overruling of the dispersal law, the drastic cuts in the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) and the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (CRA), is only leading to greater chaos. The new government's policy of drastically slowing down the influx of asylum seekers is a failure because the introduction of an emergency law, which should have given it special powers, is not supported by the House of Representatives. To prove that it is nevertheless capable of actually acting against mass immigration, one day after the riots in Amsterdam, it made the decision to introduce border controls, following the example of Germany and France.

- With this campaign around the riots, the government also wants to divert attention from the €2.2 billion cuts in the budgets for higher education and the care of the elderly that will be implemented in the coming period. This also provides it with an opportunity to limit the right to demonstrate, not only regarding protests on the bourgeois terrain but especially for those workers facing attacks on their livelihoods.

Populism and anti-populism have both polarised around the riots to cover up their basic agreements

It was not only the Schoof government that fuelled polarisation around the Amsterdam riots. By publishing amateur footage of the provocations by Maccabi supporters, the left-wing opposition condoned the retaliatory actions of immigrant youths driven by nationalistic and religious feelings of revenge, and condemned the fascist-like behavior of Israeli soccer supporters. Thus the polarisation surrounding the riots and the war stirring up tempers was complete, and the left could therefore play its part in stifling any working class opposition to the Schoof government's austerity measures. In Utrecht, for example, a planned demonstration by university staff against the austerity plans in Higher Education was cancelled “for fear of further riots.”

However, it is important that the workers of the Netherlands are not distracted by the sham divisions that the bourgeoisie tries to impose on them. They have no interest in choosing for or against Jews, for or against Muslims, for or against immigrants. The only interest for the working class is the struggle for the defence of its working and living conditions, its wages, which are severely squeezed as a result of the destabilisation of the world economy by the wars and planetary chaos.

In the first months of 2023, simultaneously with the strike movement in Britain and France, a small wave of strikes was already underway in the Netherlands, a simultaneous occurrence of strikes “of the municipal workers, workers at social workshops[3], staff at various retail chains, the Über taxi drivers, some bus and coach company drivers, hospital workers, those in the beverage industry, workers at the Netherlands Post, at Douwe Egberts, and the potato processing company Aviko.”[4]. Such struggles are important because in every strike against the effects of the economic crisis lies the seeds of the international unification of workers' struggles, which is the only force that can end populism, racism, xenophobia, Zionism and anti-Semitism, by overthrowing

 

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[1]  Le PVV de Wilders, devient le plus grand parti des Pays-Bas : Populisme et anti-populisme : Deux visages politiques de la classe dirigeante, Internationalisme 380

[2]  Explanatory Memorandum to the Proposal for an Act of Members Wilders and De Graaf on the Prohibition of Certain Islamic Expressions, No. 3, 22-09-2018.

[3] Workshops provided to people with physical disabilities or learning difficulties

[4]  La dynamique de la lutte désamorcée par les propositions fallacieuses des groupes « gauchistes »,  Internationalisme 378.