Dutch civil servants blocked two deputy prime ministers from weaponising women’s rights policy against Muslims, leaked emails reveal

THE HAGUE (MNTV) — Two deputy prime ministers in the Netherlands’ previous right-wing government made repeated attempts to hijack the country’s women’s emancipation policy as a vehicle for targeting Muslims, according to an investigation by Investico based on more than 600 internal government emails and text messages obtained through the Dutch Open Government Act.

The investigation reveals that Fleur Agema of Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) and Mona Keijzer of the populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), both serving as deputy prime ministers in the Schoof cabinet, pushed to have a November 2024 parliamentary letter on women’s emancipation declare headscarves an obstacle to women’s freedom. They also sought to insert language framing Muslim men as a collective threat to Dutch women and LGBTQ+ communities.

Civil servants at the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science resisted the pressure and ultimately prevented the most inflammatory language from reaching parliament — but the emails paint a picture of sustained political interference in which two of the country’s most senior politicians repeatedly attempted to turn equality policy into an instrument of anti-Muslim messaging.

What ministers wanted

At the insistence of Agema and Keijzer, a draft version of the parliamentary letter included the sentence: “People who no longer dare to be visible out of fear of the reactions of Islamic men.” The phrasing was designed to cast Muslim men broadly as agents of intimidation and to frame Islamic religious practice — specifically the headscarf — as inherently incompatible with women’s autonomy.

Ministry officials pushed back directly. One civil servant observed in internal correspondence that the proposals consistently singled out Muslims and projected them as a threat to Dutch women and gay people. Others described the suggested additions as untrue, polarising, and stigmatising. The offending sentence was removed before the letter was finalised.

According to Investico, this was not an isolated attempt but part of a pattern. Internal communications showed that civil servants had anticipated pressure from the Council of Ministers to attribute problems affecting women and LGBTQ+ communities to Muslims specifically. The emails reveal that Agema and Keijzer — whose ministerial portfolios were health and housing respectively, not emancipation — repeatedly intervened in the policy domain of State Secretary Mariëlle Paul of the VVD, who held formal responsibility for emancipation.

Political context

Agema had set the tone for her tenure from the cabinet’s first day in office, when she posted about headscarves on social media in a way that contradicted the government’s stated position while Prime Minister Dick Schoof was simultaneously presenting that position to parliament. Other coalition figures from the PVV and BBB had separately described Islam as a “woman-hostile ideology” in committee settings and made dismissive remarks about gender-related terminology and LGBTQ+ rights language.

The Schoof cabinet, which took office in July 2024 and collapsed in February 2026, was a coalition of the PVV, BBB, the conservative-liberal VVD, and the centrist NSC. It was the first Dutch government in which Wilders’ party held governing power, and it was defined throughout its brief existence by tensions between the coalition’s harder-right factions and the civil service.

Civil servants as last line

The Investico investigation highlights a dynamic that has received increasing attention across Europe: the role of career civil servants as a check on political actors who attempt to embed discriminatory objectives into official policy. In this case, ministry officials did not merely flag concerns — they actively refused to allow language they considered factually wrong and socially harmful to be transmitted to parliament under the authority of the state.

The episode also illustrates a strategy that has become familiar across the continent: the instrumentalisation of women’s rights and LGBTQ+ equality as rhetorical tools against Muslim communities. The pattern is consistent whether it appears in French debates about the headscarf, Austrian legislation framed as protecting girls’ self-determination, or Dutch deputy prime ministers trying to insert anti-Muslim framing into emancipation policy. In each case, concern for women’s freedom is invoked selectively — applied to Muslim communities but not extended to the structural inequalities, workplace discrimination, or gender-based violence that affect women across all segments of society.

The leaked emails confirm what Muslim advocacy groups in the Netherlands have long suspected: that the previous government’s approach to Islam was not confined to its immigration and security portfolios but extended into policy areas with no obvious connection to migration — and that the resistance came not from parliamentary opposition but from civil servants who recognised that what they were being asked to do crossed a line from policy into prejudice.