🇳🇱 Netherlands

Median age 42.8 makes the Dutch one of the EU's oldest populations — older than Germany, on par with Italy. The 'tight' 4% unemployment is partly real (skilled sectors) and partly an artifact of 200,000+ Polish workers staffing logistics and agriculture and tens of thousands of Romanians and Bulgarians in cleaning, distribution, and back-office roles. Youth unemployment is creeping up (8.1% → 10.9%) despite — not because of — the inflow, suggesting even the receiving model is saturating. When automation hits logistics hard (and it will, by 2028-2030), those imported workers will be displaced simultaneously with aging Dutch natives exiting the workforce, and the tax base cracks on both sides.

The Dutch government has produced glossy AI strategy documents and a 'Dutch AI Manifesto' that read like a tech consultancy deck — heavy on 'responsible innovation,' 'human-centric AI,' and 'ecosystems,' light on confronting 200,000 logistics workers' obsolescence. There is no industrial policy, no reskilling moonshot, no sovereign wealth fund for transition. The model remains: attract foreign labour, keep wages flexible, hope the next Rutte doesn't have to deal with the fallout.