The Netherlands faces an increasingly unstable and unpredictable world order as well as rising extremism at home, the Dutch domestic intelligence service AIVD has warned in its 2025 annual report.
The threat to national security has not come from so many directions and for so long since the founding of the AIVD after World War II, AIVD director Simone Smit said at the presentation.
Russian hackers carried out cyberattacks on the Dutch police and on the Signal and WhatsApp accounts of senior officials and military personnel. At the same time, the report says, the Kremlin has been portraying European freedoms as perverted and threatening, and attempting to undermine unity within and between European countries.
China also poses a growing threat. Despite being welcomed as a trading partner, China has “for years been covertly and illegally attempting to acquire knowledge from Dutch companies and research institutions, and that threat both broadened and deepened in 2025”, Smit said.
Both countries are part of a broader pattern, the AIVD argues, in which several states – including Iran and North Korea – are seeking to expand their power and reshape the world order in line with their autocratic ideologies.
Terrorism in the Netherlands
On the domestic front, the AIVD says it believes it has once again prevented jihadist attacks. The service issued at least 11 official intelligence reports leading to arrests by police last year. Six of those arrested were under the age of 24.
The report also focuses on the continued rise of the “sovereign citizen” movement, a group of people who believe an evil elite want to take over the country, and who regard immigration as a way of further pressuring the general population.
Eight anti-institutional alleged terrorists were arrested last year who were found to have weapons, a large stockpile of ammunition and castor beans, which are used to produce the deadly poison ricin, the AIVD said.
Far-right groups
In addition, the police arrested eight people on far-right terrorism charges in 2025, on the advice of AIVD reports.
Within this movement is a group that is trying to normalise far-right ideology and make it feel more acceptable, the report said.
“But behind the scenes, extreme right-wing groups are striving for a white ethno-state. A good illustration of this is the use of the word ‘remigration’ which has come to mean the mass departure of people with ethnic minority roots from Europe.”
The term is popular with politicians from the far-right Forum voor Democratie, which has seven MPs and won 299 seats in roughly 100 local council areas in the March elections. Several Forum councillors are known to have links with extremist groups.
