To many Dutch voters, it came as no great surprise. This week, the Senate rejected a package of immigration laws hailed by the outgoing Schoof government as the toughest ever devised. It was not merely the left that sank the proposals. Two members of the government’s coalition – Prime Minister Rob Jetten’s own D66 and the Christian Democrats – voted against. Remarkably, so did party behind the proposals itself: Geert Wilders’s Freedom party.

The underlying message, to many, is that it is the public that is the problem, not the failure to curb or manage immigration

The underlying message, to many, is that it is the public that is the problem, not the failure to curb or manage immigration

Wilders withdrew his support after failing to restore some original, stricter provisions, which would have criminalised illegal residence. D66 senators, for their part, opposed the measures on principle; they had never much cared for them, notwithstanding their leader Rob Jetten’s insistence during the election campaign that he, too, favoured firmer and more controlled immigration.

For more than four decades – or two generations if you wish – a growing share of the Dutch electorate has signalled its unease with the country’s persistently high levels of immigration. With left and centre politicians stubbornly unwilling to engage – and prone to denouncing those who do as far-right or far worse – voters have increasingly drifted towards the right. From the misnamed far-right Centrumpartij in the 1980s and its various splinters, to more modern insurgents.

The pattern became clear in 2002, when voters rallied behind the flamboyant and contradictory (he was both ultra-liberal and deeply conservative) Pim Fortuyn. His meteoric rise, crowned by a striking victory in the Rotterdam municipal elections, was cut short by his assassination at the hands of a far-left activist, just........

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