The growing continent-wide crisis caused by mass immigration into Europe has claimed another country with the collapse of the Dutch coalition government led by veteran centrist politician Mark Rutte. The Dutch prime minister announced that he will hand in his government’s resignation to King Willem-Alexander today because of ‘profound differences’ among the four coalition parties over how to handle immigration.

Applications for asylum from migrants into the densely populated Netherlands have been running at almost 50,000 a year and likely to hit 70,000 by the year’s end. Rutte proposed to limit the numbers by drastically capping the rights of foreign family members to join migrants already in the country.

Mass migration has become a hot button issue in the traditionally liberal country

But his plans were opposed by two of his junior coalition partners, the family friendly Christian Union, and the socially liberal D66 party. Now Rutte is likely to stay in office as a caretaker until new elections are organised in November.

Mass migration has become a hot button issue in the traditionally liberal country,  leading to the rise of populist anti-immigration parties like Geert Wilders’ Party of Freedom. Nor is the Netherlands alone. Right-wing populism is sweeping across Europe with anti-migration parties holding power in Italy, Hungary and Poland or waiting in the wings in France, Spain and even Germany.

Another issue that has undermined the pro-EU Rutte is his insistence on pushing an unpopular Net Zero policy on farming dictated by the unelected European Commission. Even though the Netherlands is the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural produce after the USA, they want to close or expropriate 30 per cent of Dutch farms to limit nitrogen emissions. This move which has caused mass protests by farmers and the rise of a new populist farmers’ movement, the BBB, which captured 15 seats in the Dutch senate in elections in March.

Along with the cost of living, immigration – especially from the troubled Middle East – is now the top political issue in almost every EU nation. The issue is changing the face of conventional European politics.

Rutte’s moderate conservative VVD party, like its sister parties elsewhere in Europe, is under growing pressure to move to the right because of the populists in its ranks. Meanwhile, traditional social democratic parties on the left are haemorrhaging support in working class areas most affected by mass migration.

The populists lack convincing proposals to halt or even slow the immigration flood. But the fact that they are daring to raise a burning issue that the traditional parties only want to sweep under the carpet, is gaining them kudos and votes.

The Dutch legend of the boy who saved his village by sticking his finger in a leaking dike is a useful metaphor for viewing the migration crisis. In Rutte’s case the dike has burst and is now threatening to sweep him away.