She doesn’t know much about politics, says 26-year-old Jelke Brok, but she can well imagine that the cabinet fell on Friday about the influx of asylum seekers. In her opinion, this is larger than the Netherlands can handle. “Every person deserves a place in the world,” says the interior stylist and quality employee in the food industry. “But there have to be limits.” She also deserves a place, she says. “And now I don’t have it. I have to wait for a house because there have to be houses for asylum seekers.”
Brok works in the center of Oisterwijk, a prosperous municipality where people often vote VVD, just like in the whole of Brabant. Oisterwijk is blessed with chic clothing stores, inviting terraces and well-to-do visitors.
The municipality has a sizeable council fraction of the VVD and there lives a prominent VVD MP who speaks on asylum matters, Ruben Brekelmans. The village of 20,000 inhabitants has also had an asylum seekers center for more than twenty years – at some distance from the buildings, in the woods.
Not only the asylum file is important enough for a cabinet crisis, the residents indicate, the cabinet was also unable to break any pots in other files. They are therefore not at all surprised that the cabinet has fallen. “This cabinet was on an uncertain journey. And the discussions about limiting the influx of asylum seekers apparently had a hopeless situation,” says VVD council member Rob Mallens. “We assume that a sensible decision has been made in The Hague.”
Rutte tired
There is some doubt about the person of VVD leader Rutte. The local group, through Mallens, states frugally that Rutte must make “his own assessment” whether he wants to continue. He emphasizes the “many political talent” that could succeed him.
Restaurant chef Justus van Gorp (43) votes VVD and calls it “right” that Rutte wants to limit the flow of asylum seekers. “Every political refugee must have a roof and food and drink, but it is now getting very crowded.” He nevertheless also calls Rutte “a man who has made a lot of mistakes”.
Hans van Rooij (66), retired employee in the car industry, thinks “four times Rutte is enough” and calls him “sometimes a bit too arrogant”.
Marc (54), waiting in front of a perfume shop for his shopping daughter, has also had it with Rutte. He does not want to see his surname mentioned in the newspaper, but he comes from Berkel-Enschot, a village a little further on. The financial director at an international software company is a VVD voter. He also thinks it’s good that the cabinet is closing. The ministers have proven that they cannot solve the major problems, he says: the gas file in Groningen; the settlement of the Supplements affair, the nitrogen dossier and the asylum issue. A next cabinet again under the leadership of Rutte? “It’s old wine in new bottles.”
Other Oisterwijkers are also tired of Rutte, especially residents who don’t like the VVD much anyway. “The fall of this cabinet is an opportunity to finally get rid of him,” says Ruud de Brouwer (76), a retired chemist who has been to Mozambique and South Africa as a development worker. “I have been a leftist voter all my life. The subject of asylum is close to my heart. I am in favor of helping refugees as much as possible.”
Too generous
Oisterwijk has been vigilant for disturbances at the asylum seekers’ center for years. Complaints from local residents about nightly screaming, entering the yard and leaving garbage behind have ceased, say local residents, since a new director took office who takes them seriously and knows how to nip nuisance in the bud. There are relatively many asylum seekers living in Oisterwijk who already have a residence permit and are waiting for a home.
Last year, the local VVD unsuccessfully tried to block a decision that provides for a new permit, until 2048, for housing asylum seekers. “We would like to receive asylum seekers,” says council member Mallens, “but we do not want to decide for generations to come.”
What many Oisterwijkers fear are disturbances such as in an asylum center fifty kilometers away, in Budel. What local residents get to hear there is cause for ‘great concern’, says VVD member Frans Weekers, former State Secretary of Finance and recently Secretary General of the Benelux Union.
Weekers (55) lives just across the border in Limburg, but regularly cycles past that center and hears many stories about insecurity. “The state loses authority to the street there.” Weekers’ ‘political antenna’ says that there is dissatisfaction among his supporters about the indecisiveness of politicians, including in asylum cases. He states that there is a “pumping effect” of the “generous measures” that the Netherlands is taking to reunite families and calls it obvious that Rutte wanted to meet a deadline “after months of pleading”.
“If you work with heart and soul within a cabinet, it is sour if it ends prematurely. But if you don’t address the concerns of the people of the country, it stops.” According to him, the fact that the cabinet no longer had a future was “the only correct conclusion.” The former minister also saw the parties “not coming together one-two-three” on other problems such as nitrogen and climate measures. In short, the fall of Rutte-IV was “inevitable,” said Weekers. “It was only a matter of time.”