Dutch football to Wilders: F-off

amateur football

Sometimes rightwing populism backfires, as Geert Wilders’ party the PVV found out last week. A PVV member of the Den Haag city council proposed an “allochtonenstop” in amateur football, in response to the supposed “flood of problems” football clubs with too many non-western immigrant members were having. According to Richard de Mos (also a PVV member of parliament), such people don’t volunteer for their clubs, are disrespectful and responsible for daily violence on the football pitch. To combat this behaviour clubs should stop accepting new non-western immigrants as members.

Deliberately controversial, this sort of proposal is what helped make the PVV into the third biggest party in the Netherlands. You just make up a lot of stupid but tough sounding shit about Muslims or “non-western immigrants” that reinforce already existing stereotypes in your base, let the experts explain why you’re wrong but emerge as the party of common sense, in touch with the public mood, unlike the elitist eggheads who refuse to see deportation of all muslims to Texel is the right answer to Holland’s crime problems.

This time, it failed spectacularly. Because this time the PVV talked nonsense on a subject their voters actually knew something about. Too many people voluntarily spent their weekend running around wet and cold football pitches to believe this nonsense about foreigners running amateur football. this time therefore the backlash came not just from the experts, but from the very same people the PVV normally has on their side. Richard de Vos forgot that if you want to bullshit people, best not attempt that on subjects they actually know something about…

In short: the PVV got roundly thrashed on this proposal, with everybody from the Dutch football union on down ridiculing it.

And now to get a coalition

2010 Dutch election results

The graph above shows the end results of Wednesday’s parliamentary elections. Unlike what it looked like on the night itself, the right now does have a slim majority in parliament, which makes my on the night prediction that the most likely coalition will be a rightwing one look right. However, as we Dutch know, a lot of things can happen in the post-election coalition negotiations and it is by no means sure that we will end up with such a government.

In this context it was quite funny to see how stressed the English became last month when faced with a hung parliament and the prospect of a *gasp* coalition government. Where they were annoyed a new government took a week to form, we are skeptical that Mark Rutte’s promise of a new government before 1 July will be kept. If it is, Rutte will have played a strong part in it, as he’s the leader of the VVD, the rightwing party that for the first time in its existence emerged as the largest party in parliament. This however is not entirely due to the VVD’s own strength, but rather more to the extreme divide between voters. Traditionally we’ve had two to three big parties dividing most of the votes between them; now there are five or six, depending on your definition. The VVD therefore needed to win less seats to become the biggest.

Which also explains the difficulty Rutte or anybody else will have in forming a new government. Usually it’s possible to form a coalition with only two parties, or two big ones and a little one to make up the numbers. After this election however, at least three big parties are needed.

On the right, it would be natural for the VVD to go into coalition with the PVV, Wilders’ party, but will still need the CDA to make up the numbers, even if the CDA was the big loser of this election. Now the CDA has never been too embarassed by this sort of circumstances to not try and get into power, but with Balkenende gone and all the soul searching that such a loss brings with it, it’s anybody’s guess whether they will actually want to or like to sit this one out. It all depends on what they can get, obviously.

The other big question hanging over a rightwing coalition is the PVV’s relation with the VVD, of which Wilders used to be a member. There is some personal antagonism there, even if economically their politics are largely the same. Finally, there’s also the worry about how the PVV will hold up under the pressures of government — everybody is looking at what happened to the LPF, Pim Fortuyn’s party when they won the elections just after his assassination. Wilders has done a lot to ensure the problems the LPF had won’t happen to his party, but even before the elections some faultlines appeared and it’s the question whether he has done enough.

Moving on to the centre, it is also possible that there will be a coalition between CDA, PvdA and the VVD, but hardly likely considering the bad blood between CDA and PvdA and the exclusion of the PVV, which goes against the unwritten rules of Dutch coalition making. You don’t exclude such obvious winners, though that did happen to the SP in the 2006 elections. A PvdA, VVD and PVV coalition is the next option, though how sensible it would be for the PvdA to be wedged in between two rightwing parties is anybody’s guess. Let’s not even mention how much the PVV and PvdA are opposed to each other anyway. Last option here is a monster coalition with both PvdA and VVD, joined with left-liberal D66 and very christian-democrat CU, what’s called “Paars-Plus”, in recognition of the nineties VVD-PvdA-D66 governments.

Then there’s the leftwing. This is the most fractured part of the political spectrum, with the PvdA at thirty seats, the SP as second biggest with half that, followed by D66 and the green GroenLinks at ten each and finally the PvdD (the animal rights party) with two. They’re stuck at sixtyseven seats then, not enough to form a majority government and impossible to keep together anyway with so many parties. Not going to happen.

My money therefore is on a PVV-VVD-CDA coalition, which is going to be awful, as that would be a government where the CDa was the most leftwing party in it… It will mean a government united in its desire to enforce budget cuts and “liberalise” the economy further, demolishing the welfare state further. Even worse, all the Islamophobic rhetoric the PVV has engaged in now has a chance of becoming law, though both VVD and CDA would be likely to temper it somewhat. We won’t see the deportation of all Moroccan-Dutch people, but there will perhaps be laws against their religion and harassement of them. You don’t need sweeping changes in law to make the lives of a lot of people more miserable.

On a positive side, actually being in government may actually destroy the PVV LPF-style, or at least moderate them once it becomes clear it’s easier to shout than to govern. Best case scenario sees an implosion of the PVV followed by a collapse of the coalition, new elections and another roll of the dice..

Why am I not suprised?

It’s long been demonstrated, by such purveyors of wingnuttia like Alicublog and Decent Leftspotters like Aaronovitch Watch, that wingnuts tend to run in circles. Get slightly dotty about the Muslims and before you know it you don’t believe in evolution anymore, think giving women the right to vote was a bad idea and abortion a crime against humanity. It’s not enough to just believe in one patently false evil belief, no, once you go wingnut, you go wingnut all the way.

So it came as no suprise when, according to DutchNews, one of the Islamophobes of Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration party is revealed to be clueless about climate change as well, denying the melting of the Arctic:

‘Our schoolchildren should be learning to spell and do sums not that pathetic polar bears are drifting around on ice floes because we go on holiday by plane,’ the paper quotes him as saying.

And yet this party won nine seats at the last elections and is consistently predicted to do even better next time. Makes you proud to be Dutch.

Wingnuts over Holland

The socalled “freedom party” is a Dutch extreme righwing party founded by professional Islamophobe Geert Wilders. In an effort to prove that all Wingnuts over Holland, it has now proposed to force women undergoing abortion to pay for it themselves and so stop the government subsidising abortion clinics. This proposal is so absurd that even the main anti-abortion organisation in the Netherlands, the VBOK, has rejected it. They prefer (sex) education in schools and practical support for unplanned pregnancies as ways to minimise the number of abortions.

The Netherlands, which has always had a large population of conservative Christians, was late in legalising abortion, only doing so in 1984. Since then it had largely stopped being a controversial subject, playing little to no role in politics, with none of the battles waged against it as seen in the US. Opponents largely concentrated either on limiting the need for abortions through sex ed and use of birth control or on providing support for women going through unplanned pregnancies.

With the worldwide return of conservatism since 2001 however wingnut ideas about abortion have been introduced here as well. It’s not just a fringe party coming up with such ideas to make abortion more difficult, the government as well has floated ideas to make it harder, Dutch police has taken an interest in prosecuting women for undergoing “illegal” abortions abroad, etc. The wingnut right thinks it’s in the ascend, so is now much more confident in attacking hardwon liberties.