With the coincidence of the upcoming Dutch and UK elections taking place only weeks apart (that is, if the assumption that Brown will call for elections in late May) and the increasing worries about what will happen if neither the Tories nor Labour will be able to form a majority government, now it’s time to give a quick lesson in how to deal with hung parliaments. It is symptomatic of the inward looking world of Westminster politics that a process that’s at the heart of so many European democracies, the forming of coalition governments after election is here described as something to fear, a hung parliament, something outside common political experience. But really, there’s nothing to fear, as long as British politicians for once are able to learn from their neighbours’ experiences.
Here in the Netherlands, elections will always result in a divided parliament, with any party at best able to capture a third of the available seats and the resulting governments needing at least two and often three parties to have a majority. Which means that there are well tried processes for establishing such a government.
It all starts with our dear old queen recieving the various party leaders to learn of their preferences and wishes. Once that’s done she appoints a socalled informateur, whose role is to research the possiblities and impossibilities of potential coalitions. The most likely of the coalitions will be explored further, with the parties negotiating under the formateur’s leadership to come to a preliminary agreement. If everything goes well, the informateur then hands over to a formateur, who forms the actual government and who’ll usually become the prime minister afterwards. The parties divided the government posts, deciding who gets what ministry, with junior ministers (staat secretarissen as trade ins. Should the Christian Democrats get the education ministry, the Social Democrats will probably have a junior minister for schools or something.
The other important fuction of the informateur and formateur is to come to a government agreement (regeerakkoord) between the coalition partners. This is a declaration of principles in which the future government lays out its budgetary priorities, its expectations towards new laws, the problems and challenges it wants to concentrate on and everything else the partners want to have hammered down before they start. This agreement is not legally binding and can often be made obselete by new developments, but it shows the direction in which the government wants to travel and gives it a foundation. It’s when one or more of the parties starts to disregard these agreements that coalition governments get into crisises, as happened with our last government, which fell because the CDA wanted to renegotiate about extending the Dutch presence in Afghanistan and the PvdA would not.
The whole process can be incredibly cumbersome, especially at times when the parties are radicalised and less willing to compromise, as in the mid-seventies. On the whole though it works rather well, producing governments as stable and workable as anything coming out of a first past the post, district system like the UK’s. It just takes a little bit of preparation.