Geertje Wilders

Holland is becoming a human rights pariah

Civil liberties, Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
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That’s the conclusion an Amnesty International led symposium reached last Friday, due to our immigration policies and especially the detention of socalled illegal immigrants. Between eight and ten thousand immigrants are jailed each year without having comitted a crime and they stay there on average some 97 days, with twenty percent being in prison for half a year or longer. These are people who have applied for asylum or leave to remain but were rejected and/or who didn’t have the right kind of documents and I.D. Perhaps the worst thing about it is that many of those jailed will leave prison without being either deported or leave to remain, but are just thrown out on the streets again, to be jailed again the next time the police taks to them.

Once in prison you can’t do anything but sit in your cell. Neither work nor study is allowed, contact with the outside world is limited and there is little to no organised activity within prison. In some cases the detention centre is worse than a regular prison is ever allowed to be, which means murderers and rapists are treated better than people whose only fault was to not have the right kind of papers.

The criticism isn’t new, as it’s largely unchanged from the criticism in the 2008 Amnesty International report on migrant detention in the Netherlands (PDF). What’s worrying is that the current government is much more hardlined on migration, actually planning to make not having valid papers a crime. It also wants to “intensify” deportion policies i.e. wants to deport more people more often. Already the government tried to deport Iraki Chritians depsite having recieved a letter from the European Court of Human Rights forbidding this. Incidently the responsible minister, Gerd Leers, was once mayor of Maastricht but had to leave his post because of alleged corruption — nothing proven, but enough smoke that the city council was afraid to find fire and sacked him.

But that’s just a coincidence. It doesn’t matter whether Leers is corrupt or not, because we’ve seen the immigration policies of successive governments in the Netherlands only get worse during the past decade. For a certain part of the electorate, being tough on immigration is a good thing and whether or not the methods use are illegal or immortal is not important. With the PVV feeding the flames of xenophobia (loudly drumming on their desks during the emergency debate about the deportation of those Iraqi refugees) and our rightwing minority government dependent on their support, I expect things will be getting worser still. There certainly doesn’t seem to have been any great rush in improving migrant detention after the publication of Amnesty’s first report two years ago…

Dutch football to Wilders: F-off

Dutch politics, Football, Geertje Wilders, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
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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.

Disaster averted

Dutch politics, economic crisis, Geertje Wilders
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Negotiations for a rightwing government collapsed today, as the VVD and Wilders were no longer sure they could trust the CDA to keep up its part of the deal. Within the CDA critics of cooperation with Wilders had mounted a campaign against the coalition in the last week, with things coming to a head on Wednesday. Yesterday it may have seemed as if the conflict had been resolved, but since the three rebel CDA members of parliament could not commit to a guarantee to support the proposed government (which is not even constitutionally binding anyway), the VDD and Wilders pulled the plug on the negotiations.

It’s about the best result we could’ve gotten, even if this does mean that we’re back where we started, almost four months further and still no government. At the moment I’m not too unhappy about this anyway, as no new government means no spending cuts either. Had the VVD-CDA-Wilders coalition worked, we would’ve gotten two parties hell bent on slashing the welfare state combined with an out and out Islamophobe, not the best of combinations. Any other government can only be better, though I still expect cuts whatever combination of parties takes power.

Recipe for disaster

Dutch politics, economic crisis, Geertje Wilders, Islamophobia
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wilders picking his nose

Everyone involved with politics understands the current dynamic. It’s not hard to grasp. You take very tough economic times, add them to a heavy dose of political opportunism, and multiply both by the aggravating factor of a nihilistic commercial media, and what you get is ethnic scapegoating on a massive scale.

Matt Taibbi is talking about the teabaggers, but he could just have well been talking about Wilders. He started out as somewhat of a Fortuyn clone, but trading in much of Fortuyn’s anti-establishment vibe for more straightforward anti-Islam rhetoric, first within the VVD, then with his own party. Since the economic crisis reached the Netherlands however, he has not just talked about the dangers of Islamic terrorism and the Islamisation of the country, but also about the economic cost of non-western immigration to the Netherlands. So e.g. he takes a populist stance against raising retirement ages, but ties it to cutting down foreign aid.

The scary thing is that this shift in emphasis might just have been the key to his succes. Two elections ago, the first in which his party participated, he got only the same number of seats as had been shared between him and the remnants of Fortuyn’s old party (nine). This election he got twentyfour seats, making his party the third largest. And despite continuing conflict within the CDA, it seems likely the next government will have PVV support, if not participation, leaving Wilder in a position where he does not need to compromise yet can demand concessions for his support. So we would have the nice explosive mixture of a rightwing government wanting to push through huge cuts supported by an xenophobic party eager to start the scapegoating in earnest….

Holland moving to a rightwing government?

Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders
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2010 Dutch election results

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…