Photograph Source: Unknown author – Txllxt TxllxT – CC BY-SA 4.0

A simple, lonely grave behind the Nieuwe Kerk in the centre of The Hague is a monument to Baruch de Spinoza. Only very determined admirers visit from time to time to pay their respects, though Spinoza was one of the fathers of tolerance in Western culture. For reasons of national pride, many Dutch like to state how his thought deeply marked the country. In many respects it was so, but today only the shadows of tolerance remain in some domains of the Dutch social life.

Politics is not one of them.

In the context of the most recent elections, it is unavoidable to point to the paradox of tolerance as a philosophical concept: if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of the notion.

Chaos in the Parliament

After the 2023 elections, a long period of hectic discussions brought on the scene a colorful coalition of right-wing parties. At the opening of the Dutch parliament last September, newly minted Prime Minister Dick Schoof, pushed to the forefront by right-wing extremist Geert Wilders, was attacked over remarks by two cabinet ministers about a conspiracy theory with neo-Nazi roots.

The opposition accused new Asylum and Migration Minister Marjolein Faber and Foreign Trade and Development Aid Minister Reinette Klever, both from Wilders’ anti-Islam PVV party, of playing with the term omvolking, the Dutch term for the “great replacement theory” that supposes that Europe’s white population is being deliberately replaced by immigrants. Both ministers have distanced themselves from the accusations, but insisted that there was a “worrying demographic development” in the Netherlands that forces the ruling coalition to implement the “strictest immigration policy ever.”

Schoof, though a veteran career civil servant from the Dutch intelligence, couldn’t find his footing in the chaos that ensued. This would have been amusing as a Monty Python skit, but it was highly disturbing when the political future of a country was at stake. The Dutch left-wing opposition accused Schoof of tolerating those who have made “conspiratorial” and “racist” remarks, and Wilders himself then launched a virulent attack on Schoof, calling him “weak” for not defending his ministers against the charge of being racists.

So the prime minister appeared isolated on all sides. Sarah Bracke, sociology professor at the University of Amsterdam noted: “I was particularly struck by how defensive Wilders was and how he tried in a frantic and authoritarian way to deny the racism that his party clearly propagates in various ways … It is intellectually and politically untenable to continue to deny that the ideas at the heart of the........

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