THE NETHERLANDS | Wilders’ website causes uproar

Tuesday, 14 February 2012, 13:29

Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party (PVV), a key ally of the centre-right Dutch coalition government, opened a website in February to collect complaints about people from Central and Eastern Europe residing in the Netherlands. One of the questions posed to surfers is “Did you lose your job to a Pole, a Bulgarian, a Romanian, or any other Central or Eastern European? We would like to hear about it.” The arrival of cheaper labour from eastern Europe to the Western labour market after EU enlargement in 2004 has prompted loud scaremongering campaigns in several countries, exemplified by the “Polish plumber” of urban myth perceived as taking jobs from native Western Europeans. The anti-immigrant populist PVV claims that between 200,000 and 350,000 people from the east European EU states are living in the Netherlands. The “massive arrival of Poles in particular”, it complains, “is the cause of many problems, such as nuisance, pollution… and a squeeze on the labour market.” The Polish embassy in The Hague has voiced its anger at the PVV’s stunt, which it has branded “discriminatory”. “Such a hotline will foster a wrong image," Janusz Wolosz, spokesperson of the embassy, told the Dutch public broadcaster NOS. He added that the embassy is looking into the legality of the website, which may be in breach of the Dutch anti-discrimination laws. Henk Kamp, Dutch social affairs minister, however, refused to distance himself from the PVV and claimed “Certainly, it is a well-known fact that in some districts of big cities, there are problems of overpopulation, shelter, or crime.”