Violent protests against closure sweep Netherlands

Violent protests erupted in the Netherlands for the third night in a row, with rioters setting on fire and clashing with police in defiance of strict coronavirus closure measures.

Nearly 500 people have been arrested in cities across the country since the protests began over the weekend, including more than 180 who were arrested Monday night. Riots have taken place in larger cities such as Amsterdam and Rotterdam, but also in smaller cities across the country. Rioters broke the 21:00 evening clock and looted businesses, made fires and threw stones at buildings and at police.

“This is the biggest riot in 40 years,” Laura Groenendaal, a research and project manager of the German Marshall Fund, in Houten, the Netherlands, told me. “Normally we say that the Netherlands is blissfully boring, so of course it is the opposite.”

The Netherlands has been under orders at home for weeks, with non-essential matters closed and restrictions on gatherings. In early January, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte renewed the exclusion orders, citing concerns about the more virulent B.1.1.7 coronavirus variant first discovered in the UK.

And this weekend, the government set an evening clock until February 21 to help slow the spread of the virus, the first time since World War II that the country has set an evening clock.

The rioters include anti-government groups and Covid-19 skeptics, but also criminals trying to exploit the chaos, and bored people – mostly young men – who have been shrouded inside and have now been released. According to the Financial Times, the police in Amsterdam said that ‘football hooligans’ were part of the crowd in the city.

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“All these different things form this toxic cocktail, and the announcement of the evening bell, which started last Saturday, became the spark that made everything explode,” Groenendaal said.

The protests were widespread, and some smaller towns saw quite dramatic violence over the weekend, including the southern city of Eindhoven, where rioters burned a car and looted a supermarket at the train station on Sunday. In Urk, in the central part of the country, rioters set fire to a Covid-19 test center.

Rutte called it “Criminal violence,” and rejects the idea that these protests are about freedom. “We must win the battle against the virus together, because only then can we regain our freedom,” he said on Monday.

The country is preparing for more protests

The violence of these protests was a bit surprising, but Dutch officials and police are preparing for the unrest to continue.

Experts I spoke to said that there was dissatisfaction with the current government, especially about the slow vaccination of vaccinations in a country with a reasonably efficient health care system. The Netherlands was one of the last countries in the European Union to receive the vaccine, and the vaccination rate is still slow.

The Dutch government received decent marks for dealing with the coronavirus at the beginning of the pandemic, but it relaxed the restrictions during the summer and initially did not advise the mask wearer and did not strictly enforce the rules for social distance. Cases flared up again in the autumn, and the Netherlands became one of the countries hardest hit during the second wave of Europe.

This forced the government to introduce stricter measures to slow down the distribution, to close pubs and restaurants in the autumn and to close non-important businesses and schools in December. Affairs declined, but the Dutch government expanded the measures and added the evening clock to defend against the B.1.1.7 variant, which spreads much more aggressively.

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Some opposition lawmakers on both the left and right have criticized the curfew. Geert Wilders, a right-wing populist politician, said the curfew meant “to lose freedom en masse and it is no pleasure.” But in the end, enough legislators supported the measures.

The rioters represent a small and diverse section of the public. How the rest of the country feels about the closure measures, and the Dutch government’s handling of Covid-19, will probably be clearer in a few weeks, as the Netherlands holds general elections for its House of Representatives in mid-March.

Rutte and his party, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, remained fairly popular. But an unrelated scandal involving child welfare benefits forced the Dutch governing coalition earlier this month. Rutte, who is a member of the largest governing party, remains in office until the election as caretaker minister. But together, the pandemic, the vaccination hiccup and the welfare scandal caused a feeling of tiredness.

“I think it’s a kind of general malaise,” Harvey Feigenbaum, a professor of politics and international affairs at George Washington University, told me. “The government has been in power for a long time, and although the prime minister’s party is probably still the most popular party in the Netherlands, I suspect there is some fatigue,” he said.