Slovenian police and soldiers escort migrants from the train station to a registration point in the village of Sentilj in Slovenia, on the border with Austria.
AFP
Amsterdam
Dutch King Willem-Alexander and senior politicians yesterday called for calm as tensions flared over sheltering thousands of asylum seekers in the Netherlands.
“We are worried about a climate of intimidation and threats,” wrote the leaders of 11 of the largest parties in the 150-seat Lower House of the Dutch parliament, including the ruling Liberal-Labour coalition.
Published in the centre-left daily Volkskrant, the appeal specifically referred to far-right anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders, saying he knows “how it feels to live for years under threat.”
Wilders, who is regarded as the best protected politician in the country due to his inflammatory views, did not sign the letter.
It comes as the cars of a leftist local politician and his wife were torched in a town north of Amsterdam late on Monday in an apparent anti-refugee protest.
A meeting in Harlingen in northern Friesland province was also postponed on Tuesday after the council received word that members of the extreme right-wing Nederlandse Volks Unie (Dutch People’s Union) party planned to attend.
Across the country at several other meetings, local politicians have been shouted down by angry residents and by people believed to have been specially bused in for the occasion.
“We regret these incidents. They don’t fit our democratic state,” said the letter, signed among others by Liberal parliamentary leader Halbe Zijlstra and his coalition junior Labour party counterpart Diederik Samson, as well as Green party leader Jesse Klaver, who led the initiative.
“Please let everyone have a say, even if you completely disagree,” it added, referring to the Dutch tradition of “poldering” which means resolving problems through discussion.
“In the Netherlands we debate things without threats, intimidation and violence,” it added.
King Willem-Alexander, who is on a state visit to China, added his voice, saying: “In the Netherlands we talk things over, we don’t fight about them.”
“If you resort to intimidation and threats, you violate the values we stand for in the Netherlands,” the king told the NOS public newscaster.
The Netherlands is bracing to receive around 60,000 asylum seekers this year, with some 3,000 new applications every week.
The new arrivals have triggered a rise in anti-immigration sentiment. Wilder’s Freedom Party now leads the latest opinion polls, which predict that if elections were held today the party would grab some 35 seats compared to the 15 won in the 2012 vote.
