After the elections the fun will start…

Dutch politics, Pim Fortuyn
Published on Leave a comment on After the elections the fun will start…

I did promise to spend some time looking at coalition possibilities, didn’t I? To recap, the election results were as following:

Party 2002 elections 1998 elections
CDA 43 29
Lijst Pim Fortuyn 26 –
VVD 23 38
PvdA 23 45
Groen Links 11 11
SP 9 5
D66 7 14
ChristenUnie 4 5
SGP 2 3
Leefbaar Nederland 2 –

Looking at the above figures, what are now realistic options for a coalition, keeping in mind it has to have at least 76 seats to have a majority in parlement. Meaning that a new government needs the support of at least three parties, possibly four. Four party coalitions are rare however as well as difficult to keep together. If we look at it realistically, there are now three coalitions possible: 1) CDA-LPF-VVD, 2) CDA-LPF-PvdA or 3) CDA-VVD-PvdA of which the first one is the most probable.

CDA-LPF-VVD

This coalition would be rightwing, with ironically enough the CDA, the christendemocrats as the left most party. VVD and CDA are coalition partners of old, having governed together for most of the 1980ties. LPF is somewhat of a wild card, having lost focus with the death of their leader, but their policies as stated in Fortuyn’s book De puinhopen van Acht Jaar Paars [1] have some similarity with those of the VVD. This would lead to an even more neoliberal economic course, with the CDA cast in the role of the defender of the public interest and the weaker members of society.

Lots of tension between the CDA’s more conservative, christian[2] right of center policies and the VVD’s and LPF’s more neoliberal freemarket rightwing policies as well as a strong, leftwing opposition from D66, PvdA, Groen Links and SP may mean an early end to this coalition…

CDA-LPF-PvdA

A more left of center coalition, though leaning more to the right then the old Paars coalition of VVD, PvdA and D66 did. The counterweight of D66 against the VVD is gone and replaced by a party to the right even of the VVD. Less plausible then the CDA-LPF-VVD coalition if only for the animosity betweent he PvdA and LPF. The PvdA was the party attacked the most by Pim Fortuyn and responded by mounting an unheard of for the Netherlands hard and at times personal campaign against him. After the murder, both the LPF and a substantial part of the electorate held the PvdA and especially its leader, Ad Melkert personally responsible for Fortuyn’s death. Not a good sign for a fruitful alliance between the two parties.

Furthermore, the PvdA is also the party which lost the most during the elections. They went from 45 seats to just 23, a greater loss then that of the VVD. To reward them for it with participation in government is more than dodgy. It certainly wouldn’t restore the confidence of the public in the political establishement.

CDA-VVD-PvdA

This is the worst of the three possible coalitions and really only possible if the LPF collapsed or splintered even before a new government is formed. It wouldn’t take into account the voters’ wishes at all and may permanently damage their (our) trust in politics. Riots in the streets if this one happens without the LPF disintegrating. It also rewards the losers of the election instead of the winners.

Other possibilities?

Not many. There may be a possibility that one of the smaller, leftwing parties joins a CDA-LPF-VVD coalition to balance it more to the centre, but experience teaches that this is hellish on the party in question.
Every time D66 was in power, they have been punished for it at the next elections, simply because as a smaller party they carried not enough weight to push through their own visions. The rare occusion when they
did manage to achieve something, the bigger parties took the credit…

More thoughts on this will follow.

[1] The Debris of Eight Years of Purple, the old coalition being called Paars, “purple” because of its mixture of the red PvdA, the blue VVd and green D66.

[2] with which I don’t mean the sort of fundamentalist Christianity y’all may be familiar with in the States, but the older traditional Christianity as defender of the weak and
safekeeper of traditional ways of life, without this being codewords for bigotry or intolerance.

Tougher than the rest

US politics
Published on Leave a comment on Tougher than the rest

A group of New Jersey activists wants Bruce Springsteen to run for senator. The group called “Independence for New Jersey” has the guidance of Doug Friedline, who was a campaign aide to Jesse Ventura in the 1998 Minnesota governoral elections. Springsteen has not been contacted yet.

I wonder if he would be interested. Many of his songs have been political after all, from his cover of Woody Gurthie’s This Land is your Land to Born in the USA and American Skin. He always seemed to me to be an old fashioned sort of blue collar Democrat, it would be interesting to see what and how he would do in real politics.

I would vote for him.

We Won!

Dutch politics, Pim Fortuyn, Socialistische Partij
Published on

Just came back from the SP election party. As it looks now, we’ve more or less doubled our seats in Parlement, from five seats in 1998 to at least nine, possibly ten now. In Amsterdam we got just short of eleven percent of the votes, which was incredible.

Apart from us, the other big two winners were the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF) who got 26, setting the record for most sears won by a new party in an parlementary election and the CDA, who went from 29 to 43 (!) seats, becoming by far the biggest party, followed by the LPF. The big losers were the three government parties PvdA, from 45 to 23, VVD, from 38 to 23 and D66, from 14 to 8. The other left wing party, Groen Links also lost one seat, going from 11 to 10 seats. Also “losing” big was Leefbaar Nederland, who once were thought to win as much seats as LPF did now, but who now got only two seats, the result of their principled decision to kick Fortuyn out of their party.

So what does this all mean? Is this a move to the right, as television pundits repeated constantly? Or is there more to it?

I think there is. This was not as much a move to the right as it was a punishment of a coalition which managed to lose almost all voter sympathy over the last two years or so. People were sick and tired of Paars, of the way the three coalition partners stifled debate and wanted something new and exciting, something that would break open debate again. At first this was Leefbaar Nederland, but with the entry of Pim Fortuyn, he became the crowbar which forced open Dutch politics. In my opinion, only he was able to do it, because the other alternatives, like CDA were seen as part of the Den haag establishment or like my own party SP and Groen Links, but also the Christenunie too much of a fringe party. There has always been a tradition of new parties doing well in elections when established parties became too arrogant (D66 started out that way) and LPF fitted in nicely. What is new is the margin with which they won, probalby explained by the combination of revulsion of Paars, the charisma of Fortuyn as well as the populistic message he brought of simle answers to complex problems.

It’s tempting to ask what would’ve happened if Fortuyn was still alive. Personally I think his party would’ve become even bigger as I think a lot of people who would’ve voted for him saw what a nitwits the rest of the party were and voted for others. The CDA, the christendemocrats profited from this, picking up Fortuyn voters as did the VVD perhaps, not as much in winning voters from them as in stopping losing voters to them. PvdA otoh and also Groen Links were I think damaged by the witchhunt against the left after Fortuyn’s murder, losing votes to CDA and LPF. For the SP, it mattered less, we stayed mostly out of it. The fact that we nearly doubled is also a sign that it wasn’t just a battle of left versus right wing parties.

I had intended to speculate about possible coalitions now as well but a) it’s late and b) I’m not
entirely sober anymore so I’ll save it till later.

Election Day

Dutch politics, Pim Fortuyn, Socialistische Partij
Published on

It’s finally election day and the polls are predicting that 90% of the twelve million people who can vote, will vote today. Which is an unheard of turnout. The previous two parlimentary elections, in 1994 and 1998 had an turnout of about 78 and 74 percent respectively [1]. According to News Planet at 15:45 42 percent of the voters had already voted, compared to just 38 percent in 1998. This included your humble narrator. I of course voted for the party I’m a member of, the SP and will be at the election party later this evening. How much of a party it will be after everything that happened this week is anybody’s guess.

And the same goes for the results of the election. With Fortuyn’s death it’s uncertain of the people who said they were going to vote for his party will still do so. On the one hand, some people may do so as a sign of respect, of grief and sympathy. On the other, many people are wondering whether voting for the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF) without Pim Fortuyn is a sensible idea. Since Fortuyn’s death, the other LPF parlementary candidates have emerged from the shadows into the full glare of the media and are now seen for what they are.

I posted yesterday about how Peter “chairman-for-a-day” Langendam ranted about the leftie conspiracy against Fortuyn, but his is just the tip of the iceberg. Two other parlementary candidates made even worse remarks:

First there was porn king Eberhard who said the following in an somewhat incoherent
rant [2] about immigration:

“In 2015 is Amsterdam een negroide moslemstad, dan is de laatste oorspronkelijke bewoner neergestoken op de Zeedijk door iemand met een getinte huidskleur”.
(“In 2015 Amsterdam will be a negroid Muslimcity, with the last original inhabitant stabbed on the
Zeedijk by somebody with a tinted skincolour.”)

Then there was the horsebreeder Wiersma, whose views [2] were just as nuanced:

“Het biologisch fenomeen doet zich nu voor dat de meest succesvolle ondersoort bij de mensen;
het europese ras in aantal met rasse schreden achteruit gaat.”
(“The biological phenomenon now occurs that the most succesful human subspecies; the european race declines rapidly in number.”)

Not good for a party already suspected of being a platform for extreme rightwing, even racists views. No wonder both are already chucked out of [2] the party and will leave after the elections.

[1] Source: http://www.sp.nl/nieuws/kamer98/uitslag.stm
[2] Link leads to a Dutch language site

Lobsters

geekdom, science fiction
Published on

Charlie Stross is a hacker (in the respectable sense of the word), computer journalist, weblogger and science fiction writer. It’s because of the latter he just fried my brain. If Neal Stephenson was the Bruce Sterling of the nineties, Charlie is the Neal Stephenson of the noughties.

You see, Charlie’s short story Lobsters has been nominated for the 2002 short story Hugo Awards which inspired Asimovs to put it online. Charlie linked to it in his weblog as a bit of shameless self promotion, so I read the story during my lunch break.

Whoa.

That was … weird. Weird and dense and wonderful. Exhilirating in a way I only get from good science fiction, the sort of science fiction where you actually feel your neural pathways expanding because the writer is throwing so much new stuff at you, the sort of science fiction that gives you a bigger sugar buzz then a crate of Jolt cola, the sort of science fiction that leaves you bouncing new ideas of the edge of your cranium.

Not bad at all.