A recent column seems to have summed up the last few Dutch years pretty well.
''I don't know if anyone from abroad is listening but this is a cry for help. We are being held hostage, we're about 18 million people. From the outside there seems to be little going on, but we can't go anywhere because a small group of dangerous idiots have been holding us hostage for years. So far they let us live but on one deadly tiring condition that we keep talking about asylum seekers no matter what we try, no matter how often we raise the problems that are really eating away at the country it doesn't matter, it has to and will be about asylum seekers.
Wars and pandemics can break out, the pope can die, Swiss mountain villages can be buried under crumbling mountains, the climate can go out of control, families with children can live in garage boxes because of the housing shortage and a meteorite can hurtle towards the earth at a terrifying speed. They just don't care.
We have slowly become just as obsessed as our hostage takers, due to the years of monotonous pounding on our brains. There are a lot of these hostage takers by the way, but the most prominent is a rather inflammable guy with white hair and a southern accent, unsavory ideas, fascist friends, a Hungarian wife and a Russian sugar daddy. He's a fan of the Efteling and ethnic cleansing but beyond that we know little about him because he can only talk about asylum seekers. The longer we try to talk about something else the angrier he gets with the result that yesterday he blew up the cabinet of that prime minister who was so colorless even for a Dutch prime minister that his name has already been forgotten.
The other kidnapper has taken the country's second largest party hostage. She's a somewhat lisping woman with the diction of a
kindergarten teacher but the speeches of a deranged junta general, which is a quite confusing combination. She has blown up the previous cabinet because of thousands of asylum seekers who later turned out not to exist and has of course got away with it because it was about asylum seekers and then the facts no longer matter. Blow up a cabinet because of the gnomes living in the river near the Binnenhof, and the country will turn its back on you but invent a few refugees and you will come in a neat second place in the election.
This is a cry for help! We want to move on but we are stuck, and they are robbing our treasury, are forcing us to spend loads of money on pointless border controls, on expensive ways to block migrants, and on hopeless legal processes. Meanwhile we must cut cost on all important matters that we care about and needs doing.
Send the Canadians to liberate us, pay the kidnappers their ransom money, give us the means to give that white haired man a job in Hungary as a parking attendant, or if there really is no other way...then for gods sake grant us asylum.''