Former junior finance minister Nora Achahbar has said her decision to quit was not prompted by alleged racist comments in a cabinet meeting last week.

Achahbar told SBS6 show Hart van Nederland that she had read “bizarre statements that were untrue” in the wake of her departure. “I didn’t leave because of racism,” she said. “It’s damaging.”

She denied that anonymous claims about ministers making racist remarks during last Monday’s meeting came from her. “I have no idea what happened. It’s like the old game where you whisper something in someone’s ear and at the end of the circle a completely different word comes out.”

In her resignation letter the former NSC party minister did not mention racism, but said the “polarising” language and the “tone and content of the debate” around immigration had led to her decision.

She criticised public statements by Jurgen Nobel, the junior minister for integration, who said “A large share of Islamic youths do not subscribe to our Dutch standards and values”, and Chris Jansen, the PVV transport minister.

Jansen recently defended party leader Geert Wilders’ outburst 10 years ago in which he led a chorus of “Fewer Moroccans” at a post-election rally.

“Driving a wedge”

“If they say that a large share of Islamic youths don’t subscribe to our values or people say we have an integration problem, you drive a wedge between people,” Achahbar said.

“You lay the blame on a group even though they’re Dutch. It just magnifies the differences.”

Asked why she had not clarified what was said during the meeting earlier, after two days in which ministers faced questions about which of them had made racist remarks, Achahbar replied: “I didn’t respond sooner because I’ve been in a rollercoaster for the last few days. I hope it stops now.”

Two NSC members of parliament quit their seats on Tuesday in the wake of Achahbar’s decision, saying that the cabinet had failed to adhere to “basic standards of decency and civility”.

Hertzberger: “sliding scale”

Femke Zeedijk and Rosanne Hertzberger will leave parliament, allowing NSC to replace them with other candidates. Folkert Idsinga, who quit as junior finance minister last month after claiming he had been hounded out of office by Wilders, has already accepted one of the vacant seats.

Zeedijk said the row had left the impression that “somebody with her [Achahbar’s] background is not welcome” in Dutch politics. Achahbar, 42, was born in Morocco and grew up in poverty in the multi-ethnic Schilderswijk district of The Hague.

Hertzberger said in an interview with the NRC newspaper that the tone of the debate around migration had been getting worse “on a sliding scale, for months”.

She said she had argued at a meeting of the parliamentary group that the party should walk out of the coalition because of the provocative behaviour of Wilders and his PVV colleagues.

Scapegoating language

“I said: ‘I think we can’t go on like this. We’re hamstrung in every sense.’ And they agreed with me that what had happened with our junior minister was unacceptable, but the MPs still saw opportunities to improve things.”

She also said that she was shocked, as a member of the Jewish community, at both the anti-Semitic violence in Amsterdam around the football match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv and the political reaction to it.

“Amsterdam was such a gruesome experience,” she said. “It was good that we as a coalition reacted strongly to it, but the reactions from the other three parties [PVV, VVD and BBB] were completely off the scale in their language and in the way groups were set against each other. The way scapegoating language was used to talk about other sections of the population. Language matters.”