The Dutch parliamentary elections were held a month after the British elections, yet where the latter had a new government in less than a week, almost two months later we’re still governmentless. Which has everything to do with the fragmented results of the election, as you can see from the graph above. No big winners emerged, instead you had four parties with twenty seats or more and three others with ten to fifteen seats. Which means that to get a majority of 76, at least three parties have to agree to govern, which hasn’t proved easy. None of the traditional coalitions were viable, so instead several other possibilities were explored.
The first was a rightwing government of the PVV (Wilders), CDA and VVD, which went nowhere as the CDA refused to negotiate until VVD and PVV had set aside their differences. Then it was the turn of two other possibilities, a centre left cabinet of no less than four parties: VVD, PvdA, D66 and GroenLinks which seemed promised but fell apart, as did a proper centre coalition of VVD-CDA-PvdA, which would’ve been the first time all three parties worked together in one government…. So now the process has moved full circle as VVD, PVV and CDA are once again negotiating.
Which is worrying. With the current worldwide mania for cutting government spending and slashing social services, having three rightwing parties each firmly convinced of the validity of neoliberal market uber alles thinking, chances are we will see quite a few government services under threat. Already there’s talk of cutting unemployement benefits to one year (even though we’ve always paid employee contributions based on getting multiple year benefits, depending on time of service), as well as e.g. dismantling the central benefits agency UWV in order to “tackle waste”, devolving its tasks to the municipalities instead. To be honest, that would probably do wonders for my own employment, with my extensive experience working for it and its predecessors — imagine all the IT systems a city council needs to buy, install and maintain for this. Imagine also the chaos as every other council decides to buy different software…
Of course, having Wilders and the PVV in government will also be disastrous for anybody not of pure aryan stock, so to speak. The idea at the moment seems to be that CDA and VVD will form a minority government, with strategic support of the PVV, leaving Wilders free to agitate against Muslims. Despite his populistic noises, in economic matters there’s little daylight between PVV and VVD, both happy to slash government budget and mollycoddle the rich, while the PVV in social matter will probably demand some symbolic measures against the “Islamisation of the Netherlands”. Not a happy view to look forward to…