Tax, healthcare, immigration: why Dutch people voted for Geert Wilders

It differs on a per-municipality basis. There's no national system.

Very bad. Houses have doubled in price in just a few years. Many first-time home buyers cannot afford a house at all, and some say they never will as things look right now.

The government introduced various policies to remedy this, but all has failed. A few years ago they made it easier to fund young people, e.g. by allowing parents to gift 100k EUR to their children in a tax-free manner as long as it's used for buying a house. This resulted in higher housing prices because more people can afford higher prices, and it also disproportionally benefits people who have rich parents.

Now they've backpedalled on that, and the focus is now on disincentivizing investors. They raised ownership transfer taxes for people who buy a house for the purpose of renting it out. They also raised rent taxes. This works a bit better, but not enough. The core problem is just not enough housing. Also, renting out has become less profitable, so some landlords are selling those houses. This has raised concerns that we'll have too few rental housing.

It's not even just a matter of not building quickly enough. The electricity grid is full (not enough capacity), so there are more and more places where new houses can't even be attached to the grid.

Weird to read a post here from a foreign newspaper trying to describe what happened in my own country. But largely it's true, many people are unhappy with the amount of migration, the housing crisis, the rising cost of living and also what they feel is too much environmentalism. They feel that the parties that were in the government during the last 10 years did not take their concerns seriously or even made them worse.

Whether the PVV can turn things in their favor is questionable, it's easy to shout things from the sideline but many of the current problems are still there because they are inherently difficult to solve. For instance, PVV proposes to stop all immigration. Apart from the economic problems that this might cause, it is simply not possible due to EU legislation. For which he has a solution as well; NL should step out of the EU. Being primarily an export country, the consequences would be disastrous for the Netherlands.

The housing crisis is another example of an ongoing problem. A major cause is the fact that NL is a very crowded country, it's just very difficult to find any fee space to build on. What makes this even more difficult is certain environmental regulation that forbids any project that increases nitrogen deposition. Again this regulation comes from the EU so NL can't just change it.

Ah I see. Here I think it's funded by your council, but can be used nationwide.

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