Dutch politics

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….

Once more around the sun

Dutch politics, posts interesting only to me
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Completed another year on this planet and the best present I could get today would be if Holland was forever excluded from any attempts to host either the Worldcup or the Olympic Games. For some reason best known to themselves the national football association and the lobbying circus surrounding that august organisation have decided we all would love to have the Worldcup come to the Netherlands in 2018 or 2022, a prospect that fills me with about as much horror as the periodic threats of a new Olympic bid for Amsterdam do. Holland is too small for these events, even if we co-host with Belgium. Getting ready for a worldcup means upgrading a lot of stadiums to capacities they will never ever use again, saddling the responsible clubs (or more like, their respective city councils) with an expensive white elephant. Economically most of the big money would be earned by FIFA and drained away abroad (untaxed of course), the big sponsors would demand exclusivity and local firms would notice little or nothing of the games. The big carrot hold in front of us is tourism, but we’ve got those coming out of our ears anyway and it’s a well known fact that big sporting events like this chase away as many tourists as they lure, as South Africa saw this year and Beijing did in 2008. Hosting a Worldcup or Olympic Games would cost a lot of money for dubious gains and what’s worse, the costs would be borne by society as a whole, through public investment while the gains would be limited to a few big businesses. A perfect microcosm of contemporary capitalism perhaps, but not in my backyard.

On a more personal level, being thirtysix today feels no different from being thirtyfive and 364 days yesterday and what with all the stuff we’ve had to deal with this year I’m not feeling particularly birthday like. Not depressed either, just not finding it that important — much more important was that S. could finally come outside for five minutes today for her first fag in weeks, having caught a case of chicken pox on top of everything else and having had to stay in quarantaine until today. The doctors are now optimistic about the possibility of quickly scheduling her hopefully last operation, which would “clean up” some of the issues the kidney transplant left behind, help lower risks of infection and yank up her resistance a bit without endangering the donor kidney. She may actually be free of the hospital this year — a far better present than physical gift, but don’t let that stop you…

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…

Geert Wilders not wanted anywhere

Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders, Islamophobia
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So Geert Wilders may have won the elections last week, but it seems for now he’s getting nowhere in organising a coalition. Negotiations with the other big winner and currently biggest party in parliament, the VVD are going slow, while the CDA, the party he wants for the third partner is so far still politely but firmly declining to talk. What’s more, many of the CDA’s members are vehemently opposed to any coalition with Wilders, as they find his politics and ideology abhorrent. And without the CDA it will become very difficult to form any coalition with Wilders in it. The other big party — the PvdA — is right out, having been diametrically opposed to him before and during the elections, while all other parties are just too small.

Which puts Wilders in a difficult position. If he wants to get in government he’ll have to make big concessions to the VVD and CDA, disappointing his voters. If he decides it’s not worth it, he will again disappoint his voters. They after all were led to believe that if he won the elections, he would get down to business and not let anybody stop him. Another four years or so in opposition may find his votes drained away again. This is what happened to the SP after the 2006 elections, when it became the third largest party in parliament and the biggest winner of the elections, yet excluded from government, so it will prey on Wilders’ mind a lot. Also preying on his mind, what happened to the LPF, Pim Fortuyn’s party after they won the elections in 2002, who did get into government but squabbled so much it lasted less than a year and virtually annihilated the party….

The good election results for Wilders therefore are proving to be a double edged sword, as they have created expectations that will be difficult to fulfill. Good news for those of us who dislike him and his islamophobic ways.