Right-wing sympathies and recession have led a small town to fly in the face of overall EU ethos, writes PETER CLUSKEYin Vaals
THE HEATED debate over immigration in the Netherlands took a new turn last night when the small town of Vaals in the southeast decided to refuse right of residence to EU nationals without a job or enough assets to support themselves.
The new regulation, which will come into effect in September, has been sparked by the fact that, of the 300 people living on social welfare in this town of 10,000 inhabitants, 40 per cent are EU nationals, according to statistics from the town council.
Vaals is in the province of Limburg, on the borders of Germany and Belgium, and ironically just 23km from where the Maastricht Treaty was signed in February 1992, leading to a single currency and paving the way for EU enlargement.
However, Limburg province was also the scene of the largest single victory for right-wing politician Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party (PVV) in the 2010 general election. This catapulted the PVV into third place nationally, ahead of the Labour Party for the first time.
It was an extraordinary result. Having polled just 10 per cent of the Limburg province votes in 2006, the PVV more than doubled its following, taking 26.9 per cent of the vote and becoming the single largest party in many electoral districts.
It was a major regional embarrassment for the Christian Democrats (CDA), who had traditionally been supported by the province’s predominantly Catholic population – and who had now been relegated to fourth place.
“Coming after the global economic downturn and the collapse of the banks, there was a lot of disaffection with the mainstream parties in the run-up to the 2010 election,” recalls political scientist Prof Paul Nieuwenburg of Leiden University. “Many people were angry. Almost everyone was affected to some degree or other. There were a lot of protest voters. Traditional allegiances had broken down. That’s one reason why Wilders was so successful, without much warning,” he told The Irish Times.
The root cause in Limburg was – as ever – the economy. Once a flourishing coal mining area, its industrial activity has declined. Limburg now has the worst rate of joblessness in an otherwise prosperous country which has both the lowest unemployment and the lowest youth unemployment in the euro zone.
As a result, Limburg feels neglected – and unemployed foreigners, irrespective of nationality, are not welcome in Vaals.
For local alderman, Jean-Paul Kompier, the local statistics tell a story he believes is both economically and socially untenable: nine out of every 100 people who arrive in Vaals planning to settle there permanently apply immediately for social welfare benefits and have no other means of support.
That, he says, is proportionately higher even than in Rotterdam – power base of the late Pim Fortuyn, the anti-immigration campaigner assassinated during the 2002 election – which is regarded as an immigration hotspot. Kompier made specific mention of Polish and Romanian immigrants, whom he maintained tended to have greater difficulty finding jobs because of their typically limited knowledge of the Dutch language.
And he said that, because Vaals was now spending some €400,000 a year on social welfare payments it could ill-afford, the town council had decided to use a little-known EU guideline to allow it to deny residency even to EU nationals who could not support themselves financially.
While this is a decision which may make financial sense to Vaals town council, internal EU immigration is an issue already causing serious political tensions between the Dutch and Polish governments, particularly since Warsaw took over the EU presidency on July 1st.
Dutch officials now admit they seriously underestimated the number of Poles who would migrate to Holland following the accession of the former Eastern bloc states in 2004. They originally said about 15,000 – but latest estimates put the real number at some 13 times that.
Minister for social affairs and employment Henk Kamp recently recommended expelling EU migrants coming from newer member states who have been unemployed for more than three months – and cutting benefits for those who failed a Dutch test.
At the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk rejected that, saying, “We cannot protect our community by creating more barriers inside the community.”
But Tusk’s view was ridiculed by Barry Madlener, an MEP for Geert Wilders’s PVV: “He doesn’t seem to realise what is going on. We don’t want jobless Poles, Romanian beggars and people from North Africa or Turkey in Europe . . .”
So while the unedifying point-scoring continues, the town council of Vaals was left yesterday to make its own decision. And it did – in a political vacuum which many analysts argue plays only to the strengths of the right wing.
“We used to be a tolerant country, but not anymore,” says 37-year-old Krijn Polder, wiping down a restaurant table in Vaals town centre. “It makes me ashamed. But still, someone has to decide.”