Lamyae Aharouay: 'Doing business with the far right is no longer an issue' – and why she is now leaving

In recent years, it has almost become a sport in The Hague: normalising the unthinkable. We all watched it unfold, some feeling powerless, others shrugging it off with a resigned ‘that’s just how politics works’. But now Lamyae Aharouay has definitively put down her pen, and it feels as if someone has thrown open a window in the meeting room. In her farewell column, she does what she has always done best: using her razor-sharp insight to lay bare the heart of the matter. And that heart? It’s grimmer than we often care to admit.

“Doing business with the far right is no longer an issue.” That one sentence from her final piece lingers in the mind. It isn’t a conclusion drawn from a theoretical study; it’s the observation of someone who has had her finger on the pulse of the Binnenhof for years. What was once an unwritten rule – a firewall against parties that undermine the rules of democracy – has been washed away. Not by a sudden landslide, but by steady erosion. And Lamyae Aharouay refuses to accept that as the new normal.

The price of ‘just going along’

In the corridors of power, there’s soft murmuring about ‘pragmatism’. As if calling on radical-right forces to secure a majority is simply a matter of arithmetic. But Aharouay pricks that bubble. She demonstrates, with meticulous precision, that it isn’t about pragmatism at all, but about a choice. A choice to give hatred and racism – which were once kept politely outside the door – a permanent seat at the negotiating table. It’s the political equivalent of the Overton window: what was once unsayable, through repetition and a lack of resistance, eventually becomes ‘just another opinion’. The price for this is not only the credibility of our institutions, but also the safety and sense of belonging for entire groups of people in this country.

Her departure, then, is more than a personnel change. It’s a statement. Someone who so precisely articulated what was going wrong is stopping. Not because she can’t handle it anymore, but because she refuses to get used to the cold. In recent years, her work has consistently filled a role that is easy to overlook in the chaos of day-to-day politics: that of the uncomfortable questioner.

• How can a government that claims to stand for ‘normal behaviour’ structurally work with parties that undermine the rule of law?
• Why is rhetoric that was taboo for decades now being dismissed as ‘a different opinion’?
• And what does it mean for the future of democracy if the moral compass is replaced by a calculator?

These are the questions Lamyae Aharouay asked. And because the answers were increasingly uncomfortable or simply absent, she chose a different platform. Not to fall silent, but to make her voice heard in another way. It is a loss for political journalism in The Hague, which has so often seen sharp voices leave in recent years.

The silence after the blow

What remains when the dust settles? The reactions to her farewell are telling. While some politicians dismissed her work as ‘know-it-all’, the recognition among a large part of the public was overwhelming. In the corridors of parliament, but also on the street, people acknowledge she was a seismograph. She felt the tremors before the rest of the country realised the ground was shaking. That she is leaving now forces us to reflect: have we truly lost the boundary? And if that boundary still exists, why is no one guarding it anymore?

For anyone who has followed politics in The Hague even a little over the past few years, it is clear: the departure of Lamyae Aharouay is a turning point. It is the moment when the warnings are no longer scribbled on a note, but written in large, black letters on the wall. Whether The Hague will take this lesson to heart is the big question. But one thing is certain: she leaves a void that won’t be easily filled. And as the negotiating tables fill up again with the same people who pushed her to her limit, the question lingers: who will still dare to say that the emperor has no clothes?