Dutch politics

Why am I not suprised?

Climate change, Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders
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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.

The collapse of the Dutch post-war consensus

Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders, Islamophobia
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Oh dear. The latest opinion polls do not look good for the government parties, with the social democrats in particular polling at a historic low point (link in Dutch/PDF). How did it get to be this way?

latest figures show a collapse in support for the centrist parties

Until about 2002 the Dutch political landscape was relatively uncomplicated. Power was shared between the social democrats (PvdA), liberals (VVD/D66) and Christian Democrats (CDA) in various centre right (CDA/VVD) or centre left (PvdA/CDA, PvdA/VVD/D66) coalitions, with a few smaller parties on the fringes for those who chose principles over power. Sure, there were times when several of the big three and a half (D66 being the half) parties were not on speaking terms, but on the whole it was a cozy and mutual profitable consensus. Even the exclusion of the Christian Democrats from power for most of the nineties –something that hadn’t happened before — did not really threaten the system.

But then came Fortuyn and the whole house of cards collapsed. As I explained at the time, Fortuyn’s party won the 2002 general elections through a combination of the voters being sick to the backteeth of the existing parties and their arrogance, the general dire economical and political situation making the party’s populist message attractive and a general wave of sympathy for the murdered Fortuyn. When the party went into government only to crash and burn completely, it looked at first as if the old consensus had re-established itself, but since then we’ve seen the rise of two more would-be Fortuyns, Geert “Islamophobe” Wilders and Rita “talks the talk but does not walk” Verdonk, both coincidently ex-members of the VVD. Especially the rise of Verdonk’s party, Trots op Nederland (Proud of Holland), is remarkable, getting 18 seats without having done anything at all. Verdonk has barely shown her face in parliament, prefering to go on begging tours of the country instead…

To draw longterm conclusions out of one poll is of course silly, but the polls have been trending this way for a year or so now and even if things will shake out differently at election time, it’s still a somewhat worrying development. Not so much the establishment parties losing their traditional voting base –they deserve it– but where those votes are going. Both Wilders and Verdonk play on a nascent xenophobia and Islamophobia that, if not quite unknown before 2001-02, only came into full flower after the September 11 attacks and the murders of Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh. Sentiments that had been taboo for decades (Islam as a violent religion, the need for all foreigners to integrate and learn Dutch, the usual stereotypes about workshy, criminal wifebeating minorities etc) went mainstream, were seriously debated by political commentators who, if pressed, would’ve called themselves leftwing. Don’t take my word for it, The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance said so too, earlier this year.

Meanwhile the options for the real left look bleak. Two years ago it looked likely that we’d see a genuinely leftist government in power, but as per usual the PvdA opted instead for the familiar and went with the Christian Democrats. Now this choice has brought them well deserved ruin, but the votes they lost are not picked up by the only genuinely socialist party in parliament, the SP. Instead the SP is losing the competition with Verdonk and Wilders for the populist vote, as the country is continuing its rightward drift.

In short term then things look bleak, but we shouldn’t panic. The SP needs to keep mounting a strong opposition against both the establishment and the populist right, keep holding to their principles and not go for the easy option of joining in the scaremongering. Currently Wilders and Verdonk are doing well because they don’t have to worry about anything but political point scoring. They’re not in power, they’re focused completely on parliament, not local government and therefore they can be as extreme as they like without suffering the consequences. Like Fortuyn’s party, these movements are likely to splinter once they do have to take on real responsibilities and inevitably have to compromise. Not a reason to be complacent and sit on our hands, but a reminder that things may look bleak now, but they won’t always remain so. The destruction of the old consensus opens opportunities for the left as well as the right.

Modern Christians: martyrdom without inconvenience

Dutch politics, wingnuts
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So the police stopped a Dutch woman during a routine road safety check, asked for her licence and found out it had expired eleven years ago. When questioned, she explained she couldn’t get an extension as the new style licence, brought out in 1997 featured the symbol of the European Union, a circle of twelve stars and it’s against her religion to use this symbol. It’s unknown which bizarre sect this woman is a member of, but Dutch nieuwssite FOK thinks she may be a member of the Vrije Herbvormed Gemeente (Free Reformed Community) in Ijsselmuiden. In any case, it’s a good if extreme example of the modern Christian, who wants to be a martyr for their belief, but doesn’t want the hassle that comes with it.

In this case we have a Christian who refuses to get a new drving licence because of her beliefs, but who also refuses to stop driving. In other, more serious cases we’ve seen Christian civil servants who refused to marry gay couples but expect to keep their job, Christian pharmacists refusing to sell condoms or morning after pills but expect to keep their job, a Christian political party that discriminates against women but expects to keep its state subsidies, and so on and so forth. In all these cases these socalled Christians want to be able to force their morals on us, but not to pay the price for it. It’s the worst aspect of modern Christianity, of feeling victimised without being victimised, of not being able to see that if you make a moral chocie you have to pay the price for it.

You refuse to get a drivers licence because you dislike the symbols on it? Fine, it’s your choice. But if you do so, don’t keep driving.

Balkenende says: stop whining

Dutch politics
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Balkenende as Harry Potter in a fake movie poster

The British might think that their prime minister is dour, but Gordon Brown has nothing on Jan Peter Balkenende, our national Harry Potter lookalike. He has been a national embarassement from the first moment he awkwardly moved into the spotlight, especially when meeting with foreign leaders, having the knack to even make Bush look good in comparison. You can be a Christian politician and still have a certain style and grace, as his fellow Christian-Democrat Andre Rouvoet shows. But then Rouvoet comes from a proper traditional protestant background, whereas Balkenende is sort of a retro-protestant, not so much a conservative as someone who wants to reinvent the past. A common accusation against Balkenende is that he wants Holland to move back to the fifties, but the fifties he wants us to move back to never existed; Balkenende himself was only born in 1956, so he never experienced the fifties personally. Instead he seems to have build up this idealised vision of a time when Holland was still Holland, with the family as the cornerstone of society, where everybody knew their place and there was a place for everybody, the churches were full on Sunday, brussel sprouts were the national vegetable and everybody worked hard and trusted their betters.

Therefore, unlike previous leaders of the CDA, e.g. Ruud Lubbers, who were largely pragmatic doers, Balkenende sees it as his job as prime minister to scold the rest of us into behaving. Which is why a few weeks back he started complaining that we complain too much in this country, that we should be pleased we are such a rich and prosperous country, grateful that most of us are quite well off. It’s ture that, to put it bluntly, we’re a nation of whingers, as anybody who reads the papers in the runup to and during a major football tournament — like the one which coincidently started this Saturday — knows. This is not a bad thing, unless you’re a moralistic sourpuss like Balkenende, who wants to see us as a nation of happy, uncomplaining worker bees. In my experience, the people who whinge the most about how cynical we are, or how distrustful are almost always snake oil sellers and Balkenende fits that pattern beautifully.

If he had his way, he would prescribe that new drug that makes you trust strangers to the entire Dutch nation, the better to sell his own plans. Apart from his fetish about politeness and respect he’s an empty suit, a hypocrite who obsesses over the motes in our eyes while ignoring the beam in his own, to speak in his own lingo. He worries about the lack of respect the police get while under his leadership we took part in the illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, while at home the gap between rich and poor grew so much that we now have food banks in almost all major cities while CEOs get record salaries. No wonder he doesn’t want us to complain: he knows he is the number one target of our complaints.

Interestingly, a majority of the Dutch population does seem to agree with Balkenende that we complain too much. If we can believe the results of a poll doen by one of the free newsrags, sixty percent of us thinks others complain too much, though only nine percent thinks the same about themselves, because whent hey complain, they have good reason to. Myself, I think whinging is a human right and being slightly cynical and whingy makes you less vulnerable to snake oil merchants like Balkie.

No free speech for animal rights activists

Activism, Dutch politics
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At least not in Zaandam, where a peaceful demonstration opposite a petshop was broken up by the police, who also arrested several of the people involved. As syou can see on the video below it’s clear that these activists were no threat to anyone, didn’t do anything criminal, just
leafletting, but still the police went in heavyhanded:

You do not need a permit to leaflet, you don’t need permission to demonstrate and while some cities demand advance notification of demos, even the lack of such a notification does not make it illegal –the courts have rapped the police on the fingers when they have used this excuse to break up a demo. There was no reason for the police to interfere here, yet they did. Why is that?

Because unfortunately and despite the electoral succes of the Party for the Animals, animal rights activists have the tide against them. In the post-9/11 world, the ploice and security services are suspicious of any kind of activism other than organising bake sales for the local church, and the long tradition of direct action the more radical animal rights groups engage in makes them an easy target. One example was the fight against a science park, which included animal testing facilities, under construction in Venray, where animal rights activists demonstrated at the homes of the managers of the project development bureau that was building the park. This company withdrew and the animal testing facilities didn’t get build, but once again the animal rights movement was seen to engage in terrorism, or something that looked a lot like it. Again, the activists did nothing illegal, but for many people less sympathetic to the movement’s goals, it all looked a bit dodgy. At the very least what happened in Venray is an example of the hardening attitudes within the movement, the willingness to use more radical methods to achieve things that couldn’t be achieved through other methods.

But this radicalisation inevitably brings a backlash, which is what I think happened on Saturday. Because there’s a heightened awareness of the radical nature of at least some segments of the animal rights movement, some police officers are less willing to cut the movement some slack, either because they dislike it more or because they genuinely believe it’s a threat, even in this situation. Which ties in neatly with the discussion I refered to yesterday, in that it shows the dangers for any radical movement in abandoning mass mobilisation for more direct, more agressive forms of protest. Relying on violence, or the threat of violence can lose you legitamicy, can mobilise the forces of the state against you, can isolate you from those that should be your supporters and can hurt less radical members of your movement, as we saw last Saturday.