Soon after she moved into her new neighborhood, Ijburg, on the eastern outskirts of Amsterdam, in 2005, Xandra Lammers started a blog about it. Ijburg is a curious place, an architectural wonder, built in the middle of a lake on reclaimed land and partly on water. She still keeps the blog alive, but curiosity has given way to frustration: It's all about the unpleasantness of living next to Muslim immigrants.
"I used to vote Labor," Lammers told me. "I was quite politically correct. But now I no longer am." She is a determined supporter of Geert Wilders and his anti-immigrant, anti-Islam party, PVV, the front-runner in the Netherlands' March 15 election. She is also a character in a book by nationalist writer Joost Niemoeller, called "Angry," published last month and already on the best-seller list. The anger fueling the Wilders campaign is real and tangible in the Netherlands, but — like the anger of Donald Trump's voters in the U.S. — it's rooted in the existence of parallel realities in a society where efforts at social and cultural integration have run into major obstacles.
Lammers' reality is stark. The owner of a translation bureau, she's a native Amsterdammer, forced out of the city center by steeply rising real estate prices. When she and her husband bought their house on the water in Ijburg, she says the real estate agent didn't tell her the neighborhood would become the arena of what she calls a "social experiment" — an effort by the city government to put middle class homeowners and social housing renters in one innovative urban development.
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