Humanius, 1 year ago (edited 4 months ago)

Netherlands here. We’re dealing with a couple of difficult problems, each of which making each other worse:

Nitrogen oxide emissions crisis

Nitrogen oxide emissions are a serious problem for biodiversity, and as a consequence the EU has put limits on how much nitrogen emissions can be emitted close to Natura2000 areas (which are a form of official nature reserve).
However, the Netherlands is a very densely populated country, and also has a lot of these Natura2000 areas.

Now it turns out that basically all human activity emits nitrogen oxide in some form, and it’s completely paralyzing the ability for anything to get done.
This problem is core to a lot of the other problems my country is dealing with right now.

The government is trying to limit nitrogen emissions, for instance through means such as buying out animal farms, but this is not very popular.

Housing availability crisis

About a decade ago the government abolished the ministry of people’s housing, because it was believed at the time that such a ministry was no longer necessary to provide enough housing. This coincided with the after effects of the 2008 housing crisis.
As a result, every year since too few houses have been built to meet demand, and now we are dealing with a crippling shortage in the housing supply.

The government has since realized the problem and is attempting to tackle it, but the aforementioned nitrogen oxide crisis also makes it very difficult for new housing development to obtain the necessary permits.

So instead the government tries to push hot-fixes like rent-caps, which ultimately just reduce the supply of rental properties even further. This is because land-lords cannot make a profit renting out these properties with the proposed rent-caps, so they just sell the property instead.

High inflation / High cost-of-living / High interest rates

Last year, like much of Europe, we were dealing with pretty high cost-of-living and inflation rates.
This is a direct result of our prior dependence on Russian gas, and the war in Ukraine disrupting the supply of that gas.

I stand with Ukraine, and I think it is good we quit cold turkey on our addiction to cheap Russian gas, but it had a lot of serious knock on-effects on the cost of living and the inflation rate.

The ECB (European Central Bank) has tried to fight the inflation rate with interest rate hikes (and it would appear they are succesfull at doing that). But by raising inflation rates, they do slow down the ability to invest in the economy. This in turn affects things like the ability for property investors to build housing, which worsens the housing crisis again.

Full electricity net

On top of all this, we are also running out of capacity on the electricity net.

This is going on at the same time that we are trying to eliminate our natural gas consumption for environmental reasons, as well as the need to reduce our reliance on potentially hostile foreign powers (see Russia).

This is causing numerous issues with regards to businesses switching away from gas, new businesses opening, new housing construction, etc…

Severe employee shortages

Despite everything, the Dutch economy has been running pretty well, and as a result there has been very low rates of unemployment. It’s gotten to the point that there are significantly more jobs available in basically every field, than there are people to work those jobs. That is causing other serious problems in turn.

As an example, public transit cannot find the necessary workers to get all the trains to run reliably on time.
Another example is a shortage of workers in the construction industry, which worsens the aforementioned housing availability crisis, and the electricity net being at capacity.
Another example is a shortage of engineers able to plan out extensions for the electricity net

This shortage can pretty much be extended to every industry right now.

Asylum crisis

On top of the other stuff going on, we also have a large amount of asylum seekers trying to obtain refugee status in the Netherlands.

Under normal circumstances these asylum seekers would apply for asylum in Ter Apel, which is an asylum processing center. They would stay there until they obtain refugee status, after which they would find a regular place to live elsewhere in the country.

However, the severe housing shortage is making that last step impossible, which is causing refugees to stay in Ter Apel for far longer than they reasonably should be. This is clogging up the system with people to the point where Ter Apel has long since exceeded capacity.
This causes numerous problems, and politically it’s very difficult to get other parts of the country to carry their weight in dealing with this crisis.

The main concern is that refugees take away houses from the Dutch people who are also unable to find housing.

14 years of a mainly liberal-conservative government (VVD), and a future mainly populist government (PVV)

While I think the VVD (liberal conservatives) is not as bad as some people make the party out to be, they are liberals… And liberals seem to be allergic to interfering with market forces, even if those market forces are actively making things worse.
Because of this, government action on all of these crises over these past 14 years has largely been too little, too late.

The people are fed up with the inability of the government to solve these issues, and have voiced their displeasure in last year’s general election.
But instead of voting for a party which will tackle the fundamental issues mentioned above, they largely voted for the PVV (populists) who blames all problems on the refugees and migrants.

They propose to significantly reduce the number of people coming into the country.
However, they seem to ignore that our economy is highly dependent on skilled migrants coming in to work for companies such as ASML. They also seem to ignore that reducing the number of people coming into the country will worsen the general employee crisis we are already dealing with.

So while I hold out hope that they might be more effective than the VVD, I’m not holding out hope for any meaningful change in the next term.

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I probably forgot a few things, but these are the main issues my country is dealing with right now.
Sorry for the long post, but there is just a lot we are dealing with.