He wavered but did not fall: faced with the consequences of the crisis of violence which took place on Thursday, November 7, in Amsterdam, following the football match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel-Aviv, the Dutch government narrowly avoided the fall on Friday November 15.
The Secretary of State for Finance, Nora Achahbar, member of the center-right New Social Contract (NSC) party, one of the four parties in the coalition led by Prime Minister Dick Schoof, had, during the day, announced her resignation. This lawyer of Moroccan origin, former lawyer then prosecutor, said she was shocked by the racist comments made by several of her colleagues during discussions on the events which shook the country's capital.
Were the other ministers of the NSC also going to resign and, thus, cause a crisis, barely four and a half months after the entry into office of the coalition which also brings together the liberal party (VVD), the agrarian party BBB and the Party for Freedom (PVV), the far-right formation of Geert Wilders? Around 10 p.m., after a long discussion between the leaders of the four parties, the resignation of Mme Achahbar was approved but the coalition survived, the members of the New Social Contract deciding not to imitate their colleague.
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« Polarisation »
She explained, in a letter to deputies, that “the polarization of society [néerlandaise] threatens the bond between people » and results in “others are seen as adversaries, not as peers”. An allusion to the comments made by Mr. Wilders about the events in Amsterdam, but also to the public speeches of other officials.
Monday, November 11, the Minister of Finance, Eelco Heinen, would have estimated that the perpetrators of the violence in Amsterdam were “the worst of society”. But, according to certain sources in The Hague, this liberal official, in reality, wanted to mention anti-Semitism to judge that this problem could not be resolved as “a button that is pressed to expel the pus”.
Jurgen Nobel, another liberal member of the government, Secretary of State for Participation and Integration, judged that the country was faced with “a very large integration problem” young Muslims who “a very large number of them do not respect the standards and values to which we subscribe”.
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