Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, Azizana Monschang and Jack Smith.

Today we talked about the far right. We had elections in Poland. We had the collapse of the government in the Netherlands.

The far right is ever present in European politics. Jack, you wrote about the Dutch elections.

Tell us what happened there and especially what sort of Gert Wilde's role was in the collapse of the government and what his sort of game plan is.

The government that just collapsed was a four-party coalition with Hurt Wilder's party, so that's the PVV, and they were in coalition with three other parties, which were broadly speaking closer to the political center than Wilder's party was.

Now, these parties initially

said in 2023 to 24, when the coalition was being negotiated, that they would not be willing

to join a government where Wilders was prime minister. So because of that, Wilders stepped back,

and there was an agreement that none of the

party leaders would be in the cabinet. But then what you have was a four-party government that

was being like by Dick Schoof, who doesn't belong to any particular political party. He was a civil

servant. What happened recently was, I mean, there have been like various disagreements and tensions

between the different parties and especially

between Wilders and the other party leaders for quite a while.

But what happened was last week, Wilders submitted a series of very, very tough demands

on asylum.

I mean, effectively, he wanted to close the Netherlands off to asylum seekers,

and he wanted to do it as quickly as humanly possible. He said that if this wasn't going to happen,

then the government was going to collapse. The other party leaders came back and said,

well, we haven't implemented what was actually agreed on asylum policy. You know, when we negotiated

the coalition in the first place, the migration minister is

from Wilders' party. The actual thing to do is for her to get on with implementing what they

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