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Holland looks back on a weekend of violence.
Shops were looted in Eindhoven, cars burned, the police fought thousands of opponents.
Similar scenes in Amsterdam, where water cannons were used.
But there were also massive riots in the tranquil fishing village of Urk.
There young people set fire to the health department.
The protests were triggered by the strict curfews to contain the high level of Covid infection.
Since Sunday evening, citizens should no longer leave the house after 9 p.m.
What happened?
Ironically, in the fishing village of Urk, northeast of Amsterdam and beautifully located on the IJsselmeer, the anger against the nationwide curfew first boiled up.
Rioting youngsters provoked the police and kicked the doors of the corona test center at the port.
Shortly afterwards, the property of the local health department was set on fire.
Particularly disturbing: Dozens of drivers stopped at the scene and honored their approval.
The police struggled to restore calm.
Protests in Museum Square in Amsterdam on Sunday
Source: AFP
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Before it cracked on Sunday night, the right-wing opposition leader Geert Wilders had called out to the government in parliament in The Hague: “We are being taken prisoner.
People are locked in their own home.
We are losing our freedom, I know what I'm talking about. ”With this, Wilders was alluding to his own police protection: The avowed enemy of Islam has been under police protection for more than a decade.
Because radical Muslims could attack him.
Wilder's messages, which openly combined corona measures and Islamism, could literally have acted as a fire accelerator.
Urk consists of a strictly Christian community with a "thousand year history", as is often emphasized.
The residents there are considered stubborn and difficult to discipline anyway.
Wilders called for "resistance"
Wilders and his freedom party PVV, together with the right-wing “Forum for Democracy”, called for the curfew not to be accepted.
The ultra-right movement “Forum for Democracy” recently received around 15 percent of the vote in the regional elections.
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But also on the whole, many Dutch people see the restriction of freedom rights much more critically than in Germany.
Despite almost twice as high new case numbers as in Germany.
The mask requirement is also discussed much more controversially.
The government under Prime Minister Mark Rutte imposed a curfew to get the infections under control.
That apparently broke the barrel.
Despite the bans on demonstrations, people took to the streets in many Dutch cities on Sunday.
In the southern industrial city of Eindhoven, the Dutch counterpart of the anti-Islam alliance Pegida also called for protest.
Thousands gathered in front of the train station and encountered a large police presence.
Stones flew from the crowd at the officers, a police vehicle was overturned and set on fire.
A supermarket in town was ransacked.
Pictures of the protests also show young people with an obvious migration background.
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Mounted police tried to disperse the aggressive crowd, and two horses slipped.
One police horse got so nervous that it galloped down the shopping streets and knocked over an old lady.
The woman had to be operated on in the hospital.
According to the authorities, the damage from the riots amounted to hundreds of thousands of euros.
In the station hall, a piano was destroyed, which was set up there for the general public like in many large cities in Holland.
It was again uneasy in Amsterdam.
Thousands of protesters came to the central museum square for the second time on a Sunday.
Police officers with water cannons and squadrons with shepherds were already waiting there.
The prominent event entrepreneur Michel Reijinga had registered the demonstration, despite the ban.
Reijinga said: “We just go there for coffee.” His group calls itself “Netherlands in Resistance” and has joined forces with the anti-Semitic virus deniers around Willem Engel.
In the run-up to the riots, resistance had been called on social networks.
Entrepreneurs and restaurateurs who protested against lockdown measures were joined by a mixture of soccer hooligans, right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists of the QAnon movement.
The police used batons and several hundred people were arrested.
"These are the worst riots since the Krakers riot," said Koen Sommers, head of the police union.
He was reminded of the squatter violence that rocked Holland in the 1980s.
"That is criminal violence," said Prime Minister Rutte.
The Liberal has been in office for ten years, even if only executive.
The Dutch government had recently resigned over a year-long childcare subsidy scandal.
An unstable situation that the political activist and event manager Reijinga apparently wants to take advantage of.
"I can't see anything good that Rutte has ever done," said the political activist and event manager Reijinga.
He announced that he would now protest in Amsterdam every Sunday.