Dutch politics – Page 3

You leave the country for one weekend…

Published on April 24, 2012Leave a comment

And the government falls again. You’d think the old rightwing parties, VVD and CDA had learned from their experiences with the LPF, but once again an extreme rightwing populist party has brought down a neoliberal government. This at the end of seven weeks of very serious negotiations about the 16 billion euros of spending cuts the three parties were engaged in, spending cuts that are now off the table.

Though unlikely to remain so for long, at least this will give the opportunity for the leftwing parties in parliament to minimise these cuts and steer them in the right direction, e.g. by ending the Dutch participation in the JSF. The collapse of the PVV support for the minority government will also mean the likely end of already agreed upon cuts, e.g. in the social workplaces, as well and just as important, the end of support from the other two parties for the PVV’s idee fixes, like the burqa ban.

Even more importantly, though Wilders and co will still be around after the next elections, this will probably be their high water mark, their moment of greatest power. As I’ve written about time and again, Wilders had to walk the tightrope between populism and power. He knew that if he had gone into a proper coalition government, he ran the risk of ending up like the LPF, splintered between the two old dirty fighters of Dutch politics, while if he had gone into opposition, his base would’ve deserted him because he couldn’t achieved anything that way, as had happened to the SP before. So he ended up with what looked like the best of both worlds, supporting a minority government while not having any governmental responsibility himself, yet he and his party still got into trouble anyway. And the voters have started to leave already, even before this happened.

The final result of this fall is the end to the myth that we need to make tough, harsh decisions right now, as no earlier date than 12 September for elections seems likely to be decided upon, while any drastic measures before that seem unlikely as well. And with that, the idea that we do need to conform to the EU demands for a budget deficit no larger than three percent of GDP seems less likely too.

A win all around than.

Dutch government wants immigration razzias

Published on March 23, 2012Leave a comment

The newest brainfart of our supported by bigots rightwing government is to throw a bone to those bigots by imposing a quota on the police to catch at least 4800 “illegal” immigrants. Many mayors, as the heads of police in their districts, are less than enthusiastic about this idea. After all, as the Amsterdam mayor said, everybody was outraged when the police had a quota on fining bicyclists for broken tail lights…

And it’s not as if illegal immigration is all that big a problem in the Netherlands anyway; we’ve made ourselves less than appealing to anybody who isn’t white, “western” and preferably rich.

Meanwhile, continuing on the same theme, one of the ministries that’s most likely to have its budget slash to the bone once the government has made up its mind how much and where to cut is that of economic development aid, as Wilders’ PVV is dead set against spending money on foreigners. Something that worried Bill Gates, currently the world’s most generous philantrope as he’s attempts to work off his bad Windows karma, enough to call on the government in an interview with Dutch radio to not implement these cuts. It’s yet another great advertisment for the Netherlands, coming after last month’s anti-Polish website set up by the PVV. If you had any illusions that Holland is still a liberal, tolerant country, this should disabuse you of them…

Liberal paternalism and the burqa

Published on February 22, 20126 Comments

I want to highlight part of a comment Alex made at a recent post:

Strangely, I’m strongly in favor of the burqa ban, which you referred to as foulness. My philosophical reasoning here is strongly affected by my emotions and the way I was brought up. I was brought up as a strongly conservative Christian, and sent to Christian schools my entire life, including boarding school in high school, and the dress codes were very strict. I look back on my entire childhood as abuse and torture, that affected me absolutely as much as the beatings. Given that most “women” are expected to start wearing these costumes at puberty, when they are not in control of any part of their lives, is giving too much control to parents. I know this raises issues of what an adult woman can choose for herself, but the adult women I know in any kind of conservative religion are mad and usually poor or no education which would enable them to have the economic freedom to choose, and they are kept from making real outside social connections which might offer them the support to make real choices.

As he himself acknowledges, this is a fine example of paternalism in action, where you’re so convinced these women wearing burqas need to be delivered from their oppression that you’re willing to send them to jail for it. This sort of attitude has a not very proud history on the left (*cough*eugenics*cough* and we should be very careful with it. For a start, just because your reason for wanting to ban the burqa is all meant in the best interests of its wearers, it doesn’t mean that the people actively trying to do this are motivated by anything more noble than a spot of Muslim bullying. Modern bigotry often hides behind a phony concern for “western” values and liberties.

Furthermore and quite obviously, a burqa ban denies agency to the very women who we are supposedly trying to liberate from their oppression, by making it clear that they cannot be trusted to make the right choice on their own. A burqa ban also supposed that the view of the burqa as a symbol of male oppression of women is the only correct one and that women cannot choose to wear it for any reason other than that somebody is forcing them. It therefore denies the existence of any woman who has made that choice for religious or other reasons. Finally, it also supposes that “we” know what’s best for “them”, when it may very well be that the burqa is just a minor issue or no issue at all in the lives of most Muslim women living in the Netherlands.

A burqa ban also means that those women who wear them for religious reasons are forced to choose between the law and their religion, never a happy occurrence, while those who are forced into it through social pressure or their evil husbands will have other tensions to worry about…

Let’s not forget also that the number of women who wear the full burqa, rather than just a headscarf, is very low: probably less than twohundred in the entire country. Not really a “problem” we need a law for, in other words.

Wilders branches out into anti-Polish bigotry

Published on February 8, 20122 Comments

wilders picking his nose

One of the more frustrating aspects of the rise and rise of Geert Wilders and his Freedom (sci) Party has been the general unwillingness of serious people in the media and politics to actually call them what they are: bigots and racists. That the average Dutch person was never as tolerant of foreigners as our reputation of a liberal, tolerant country would imply I long knew, but I assumed that at the very least his leftwing political opponents would have the courage to call him out on his bigotry, rather than hiding behind terms like “populist”. Yet with some honourable exceptions, Wilders and his ideas have been taken seriously by the political establishment, both on the right and the left, in so far as they are not rejected out of hand, but as viewpoints that can be debated and taken seriously into consideration, even if you disagree with them, as normal bits of political thought. Hence such foulness as the upcoming burqa ban, now in parliament, where the bullying of a minority group in Dutch society by forbidding its members their traditional clothing is sold as somehow feminist and serious people debate the merits of this.

But now Wilders may have gone too far. Not content with being an anti-Muslim bigot, where in the past decade he had the political climate with him, he has now branched out into more traditional territory for bigots, by starting hating on Eastern and Middle European migrants — and he doesn’t mean Austrians by that. Polish and other Eastern European migrants have been coming to the Netherlands in large numbers in the past ten years, ever since these countries became part of the EU and they gained the rights of all EU citizens, to work and live in any country in the union. These migrants fit the classical pattern of the labour migrant, first coming over for short term work Dutch workers are hard to find for, slowly branching out into more permanent work, finally bringing over their families and settling in the country for good. There’s the usual exploitation, as Dutch employers under pay or under report their Polish workers, landlords rent them awful flats and charge them a fortune for it, which in turn brings along the usual fallout of social problems any city with a huge influx of unexpected migrants has to deal with: lack of living space, lack of amenities for these people in their own language, culture clashes, heightened visibility of social conflict (petty crime, drunkenness et all) the more noticable because it’s done in a new language, and so on. Nothing new, but the same Wilders voter who dislikes Islam is more than likely not to find these Poles all that attractive either.

Which Wilders has now attempted to cash in on, by opening an online registry for complaints about those people, about how they took your job, they were criminal, they were violent, noisy neighbours, spoke filthy foreign languages, just are not properly Dutch. Classic racist dogwhistling, in other words. Surely now the fiction that Wilders is just a populist, a too strident critic of Islam and certain of its practises but not a bigot or a racist, oh no, can no longer be maintained. Or can it?

I hope I’m right and serious political commentators will finally have the courage to say what is plain to see, that he is a bigot and should be treated as such, but I’m not hopeful. If nobody twigged on three years ago, when he’d said he would like to deport millions of ~~Jews~~ Muslims from Europe, why will they now?

Can’t see this happen for any Dutch politician

Published on August 25, 2011

The tribute Jack Layton got, with hundreds of people chalking down enough messages of support and remembrance to cover a whole square, is not something that I’ll ever suspect to see for a Dutch politician. There are no Jack Laytons in Holland, nobody on the left with the charisma and honesty to inspire such outbursts of solidarity. The closest who had was Jan Marijnissen, but he retired from active politics a few years ago. Instead we mostly seem to generate third rate Blair clones, media trained non-entities with no soul and no ideology fully bought into capitalist realism.