Fascists Torch Police Car, Storm Toward Dutch PM's Party HQ in The Hague

Riot police in The Hague dispersed several hundred far-right demonstrators on Saturday after a banned march descended into open street violence, with rioters torching a police car, throwing fireworks and projectiles at officers, and storming toward the headquarters of Prime Minister Rob Jetten's centrist D66 party.

The protest, organised by the far-right group "We Are the People" against the Dutch government's immigration and asylum policy, was banned by municipal authorities after violence broke out among crowds gathered at the Malieveld park in the city centre. A court then ordered police to clear the area. Officers used pepper spray and a water cannon; at least 24 people were arrested.

Dutch Justice Minister David van Weel called the scenes "disgusting" and demanded an "extremely firm" response, saying demonstrators made Nazi salutes, chanted antisemitic slogans, and attacked police directly. The unrest echoes riots that erupted around a similar far-right demonstration in The Hague exactly a year earlier — a pattern our audience should read as escalation, not a one-off.

This matters beyond the Netherlands. It lands the same week Germany's AfD posted a historic 44% result in Saxony-Anhalt's state election, and only months after mass Pride-adjacent and anti-fascist mobilisations across Europe. A crowd of self-declared fascists attempting to physically reach a sitting prime minister's party office — not a fringe MP's office, the actual seat of government's leading coalition party — is a direct assault on the machinery of liberal democracy from its right flank, using the language and gestures of open Nazism in the street. That the state's response was water cannon and two dozen arrests, while ministers reach for adjectives rather than structural measures against organisations like "We Are the People", is the kind of asymmetry between rhetorical alarm and material consequence that has let this movement grow across Europe for a decade.

Antifascists in Germany, the Netherlands and beyond should treat Saturday's riot as confirmation that the far-right street movement is not retreating after electoral gains — it is testing how far it can push physically, in the capital, against the government itself.

Sources

Washington Times / AP: Dutch riot police break up far-right protest in The Hague

Firstpost: 24 arrested as violent protest breaks out in The Hague