How Covid-19 poured cold water on Netherlands' EU romance

Dutch opposition to recovery spending has overtones of British disillusionment

Isolated in a recent European Union council of ministers, with attitudes described by European leaders past and present as "repugnant".

It sounds like an old script of Britain in the EU. Yet it is the Netherlands that has found itself at the heart of the union's most bitter row during the coronavirus pandemic. As EU leaders meet on Thursday for their fourth virtual crisis summit in seven weeks, the Dutch will once again be in the vanguard of opposition to plans for big spending on the recovery.