Dutch politics – Page 11

New rule

Published on March 16, 2010

Any political leader who, when asked about government debt/necessary spending cuts of tens of billions of euros and two-three times as large as the biggest normal government programme, proposes to save this kind of money by “cutting government waste” or “reduce government bureaucracy” is an idiot (bad) or thinks I am an idiot (worse). It is one thing to dispute the necessity of such severe cuts, but anybody who thinks tackling bureaucracy and waste will matter just does not understand the issue or is afraid to answer the question honestly. Both tendencies are bad and therefore any politician who answers in such a fashion has to be dismissed as a dilettante.

Unfortunately it was the new leader of the Dutch Socialist Party, Emile Roemer, who today revealed himself in this way, reacting to the news that budget estimates for 2015 show a deficit of 29 billion euros…. It’s a safe answer to tackle bureaucracy, but it would show more vision to either reject the need for spending cuts entirely, or to name government programmes that should be cut. The rightwing parties never hesitate to call for spending cuts in e.g. social security, why shouldn’t the leader of a leftwing party be equally bold in calling for cuts in defence spending, or propose putting up taxes for higher earners. But Roemer’s pandering shows he’s either afraid to lose voters that way, or he has no clue about his own spending properties.

How to deal with a hung parliament

Published on March 14, 2010

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.

Wouter Bos resigns

Published on March 12, 2010

The news had resigned his position as leader of the PvdA (the Dutch Labour Party) came as a bolt out of the blue. He had given no previous indication of being tired of his job, nor had there been any pressure on him to resign. The local elections last week had seen his party, if not win, at least limit its losses and in the national polls the downward trend seemed reversed as well. In no small part this was due to the PvdA’s refusal to agree to another extension of the Duch occupation in Afghanistan and subsequent collapse of the CDA-PvdA-Christenunie coalition government, which had re-energised the party’s base and played well with those voters who had left it for the SP, the Socialist Party, back in 2006. So why did Bos resign, when he had managed to lead the party so well, especially knowing how despised and weak it was when he took over in 2003.

The official reasons he gave was that he wanted to spent more time with his wife and family, that the long hours and pressure of politics had taken its toll and he wanted to step back. It’s certainly true that he has aged a lot in the past two years or so. Nor is he the only prominent politician to announce his retirement for these reasons – Carmiel Eurlings, one of the youngish up and coming talents of the CDA had done it the day before.

But as any fule knows, you should never trust a politician’s reasons for retirement, especially when they give their families as the reason why. Nobody becomes a politician to built a good family life, but you can certainly decide that the work-family balance needs to be altered if the job has lost its glamour and the work got harder. And if there’s one thing that’s certain, after the upcoming elections the job will get a lot harder.

Because there never has been a time when the Dutch electorate was as divided as it is now, or the parties as far apart. CDA and PvdA for obvious reasons can’t get back together, certainly not with Balkenende remaining the Christian Democrats’ leader, though it helps that Bos is resigning. A leftwing government of PvdA and SP is impossible because even with one or two of the other leftwing parties like GroenLinks or even D66 they won’t have enough seats. A straightforward rightwing government, the rightwing liberal VVD joining CDA runs into the same problems, while the elephant in the room is Wilder’s PVV. Wilders is supposed to become the big winner of the June elections, his party on track to become the third-biggest party in parliament and therefore in a key position for coalition negotiations.

The problem is, Wilders doesn’t really want to be in government — his entire schtick is based on being radical and uncompromising, being in government undermines that completely. PvdA meanwhile has already ruled out being in government with them anyway, while other parties are also weary. It all mkaes for quite a headache for whoever gets the task of preparing a government after the election, with no clear coalitions possible yet. Government is going to be a hard slog, knives in the dark stuff, bad compromises and betrayals. No wonder Bos let this opportunity pass…

That Bos’ announcement, while surprising, wasn’t completely unexpected at least in his own party, came slightly later today, when the current mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, announced his bid for the leadership of the PvdA, which he is reasonably certain he will win. Cohen has bee asked before to fullfil a role in national politics when Bos suggested he could become prime minister if the party won the elections back in 2003. Then he wanted to stay in Amsterdam, now he’s ready to do so. A good choice he would be to, having a national profile as a well liked and respected mayor amongst voters of all parties. He has a reputation as a bridgebuilder and appeals to those voters who are repulsed by Wilders and his histrionics. It will also help that he hasn’t been involved in the last government of course, to repair relationships with the CDA…

Hans van Mierlo (18 augustus 1931 – 11 maart 2010)

Published on March 11, 2010

Hans van Mierlo

I just heard the news that Hans van Mierlo has died. Though most of y’all outside the Netherlands won’t know who he is, he was one of the most important figures in Dutch postwar politics, a towering giant admired both inside and outside of his own party. He was also a somewhat tragic figure, the founder of a party that was supposed to transform the Dutch political system, who saw his party make an end to the Christian Democratic domination of postwar governments, but also saw his party become part of the very same system it was founded to destroy. He was a decent man, a honest man, a politician you could respect though you disagreed with his politics, unlike most of his succesors in his party.

It all started back in 1966 when van Mierlo, together with some forty-odd other people concerned about the state of the Dutch democracy founded Democraten ’66, or D’66, later D66. The postwar consensus between the Liberal, Christian-Democrat and Social Democratic parties meant that voters had little or no influence on politics, with important decisions being made in smoky backrooms and paternalistic, elistist governments out of touch with the citizens. D66 was an attempt to break this system by providing a new kind of politics, outside the old traditions and wanting a complete remodeling of the Dutch political system. It was immediately succesful, winning seven seats in parliament in the elections the next year, at a time when such broad shifts were largely unknown. D66 paved the way for a whole wave of new parties in the sixties and seventies, forcing the older parties to respond or lose seats.

But the succes did not last. By the mid-seventies the party had almost died out, before revamping itself as a more properly liberal party, less orientated towards political transformation. Its fortunes waxed and waned over the decades, usually rising in opposition and falling again in government, with its zenith in 1994, when it won twentyfour seats and — for the first time since World War I– a government was formed without the Christian Democrats, the deadlock it had on Dutch politics finally broken. It meant that finally there was a political consensus for such liberal measures as gay marriage, long after the public consensus had reached this point.

And yet, this success didn’t last either. Since 1994 D66’s electoral fortunes have kept waning, with last elections being their worst ever, with only three seats in parliament, though polls have since then seen its fortunes rising again. What’s worse however is how little has remained of its ideals. From grand ideas to change the political system they degraded to a checklist of demands, to be traded in during coalition negotiations, finally to be discarded entirely for another shot at power. Perhaps the worst moment for D66 and van Mierlo may have been when Thom de Graaf, just resigned as minister in the then government because his plans to introduce elected mayors were torpedoed by parliament, buggered off to become an unelected mayor himself… It was symbolic for the shambles the party was in at the time and must’ve hurt van Mierlo somewhat.

Since then the party has once again resurrected itself as the voice of reasonable anti-Wilders voters, but any respect I used to have for them –I voted for van Mierlo in the 1994 elections, my first– has long been lost. But van Mierlo himself has never lost my respect, because he has always stayed true to his ideals even with all the trouble he has had realising them.

Balkenende sees his fourth government fall

Published on February 20, 2010

But still doesn’t think it could be him, not his coalition partners who are to blame. The split that caused his fourth cabinet to finish pre-maturely was the War on Afghanistan. Balkenende and his party, the christian democratic CDA, as well as the junior partner the ChristenUnie wanted to extend the mission for a second time, while the social democratic PvdA wanted to leave Afghanistan this year, as agreed when the mission was extended for the first time. While the PvdA was always conflicted about Afghanistan, it had allowed itself to be won over for extention back in 2007 because of this promise that this would be the last time and the argument that not doing so would lose the Netherlands face in NATO, that Dutch troops were doing good work in the country and it would be a shame to stop this.

With the end of the current mission in sight — August 2010 is the deadline — the same approach was tried again by the CDA but for once Wouter Bos showed he could learn and didn’t fall for Lucy yanking that ol’ footbal back for the second time. Not that there’s much evidence of principles being at stake here, rather than more mundane party political reasons for refusal — local elections are imminent and the PvdA is not doing well. But if this means Dutch troops will finally leave a country they never should have entered in the first place — and fuck NATO.

The talking heads on the television have been having a field day with this. Much of the commentary has been bemoaning the fact that this silly argument is endangering tackling the very real problems facing the country. Why couldn’t the two parties have put aside their differences for the sake of the country as a whole? Which is the sort of recieved wisdom that always makes me want to hurl a shoe at the television. Afghanistan isn’t a trivial issue and neither should the differences between the various parties be. We used to understand that, but thirty years of pretending that political differences are only possible within a narrow neoliberal consensus has left both our politicians and commentators unable to do so. But even to them it must be clear that the “solutions” Balkenende IV offered for the economic crisis –spending cuts on all sorts of social programmes, more freedom for businesses to do what they want — goes directly to the heart of what the social democrats still stand for. Had it not been Afghanistan, something else would probably have shattered this coalition, which never was that strong to begin with.

Sadly, for socialists the outlook is bleak. The 2006 elections delivered the most leftwing parliament in decades, but still only gave us a rightleaning centrist government. With the rise of Wilders, the slow collapse of the PvdA and the Socialist Party, chances are the next parliament and government will once again govern from the right. On the other hand, having a strong, undivided leftwing opposition may be useful too, as we saw between 2002 and 2006, forcing the government on the defensive.