Politics and Elections in the Netherlands: Rutte III era

[parochial boy]

I also never had the idea that the referendum would be remotely close (except for the hours before the result) and still don't quite grasp what happened and how the polls got it so wrong. I'm so glad I still took the effort to convince less politically oriented friends of mine to vote against, and to have a big poster on my window, despite never even believing in it.

Referendums are very tricky to poll - the Swiss pollsters get to practice them all the time and never seem to do much better than educated guessing.

As far as I can tell, it mostly comes down to a combination of
a) the nature of a referendum is that you can't weight by how people voted last time"è
b) For these sorts of topics, which are ones where people tend not to have strong, pre-existing opinions, they are far more susceptible to be swayed by the campaign than in a normal election or an referendum on a more "hot button" topic

[parochial boy]

Speaking of PvdD, and I swear I saw someone mention at some point that they got quite a lot of a protest in the kinds of places you wouldn't necessarily expect. So, beyond the obvious kind of person who would vote for a party like them, who is voting PvdD as a protest option?

[parochial boy]

So these are dividends that are paid by the companies directly? or by the investors receiving the dividend? As in, I would imagine most of Unilever's shareholders live outside the Netherlands - so how would this impact the taxes paid by, say, a shareholder in Canada?

In any case, it would probably be a fantastic boom for the kitchen industry of paying-yourself-through-your-own-personal-company, so pretty good for the tax "planning" crowd anyway

[parochial boy]

Interesting, thanks MVD (and I find tax accounting fairly interesting unfortunately, you should try "audit and assurance" if you want dry )

Figures the UK would be the source of tax shenanigans, but you would have thought the whole Brexit thingy would have made any threats on the part of Unilever/Shell a little bit emptier

[parochial boy]

So, are privatised hospitals going bankrupt and kicking out patients a testament to the success of the Dutch healthcare system?

[parochial boy]

I'm curious about that Denk number; my impression is that they are an almost exclusively Turkish-Moroccan party. Wouldn't that leave them basically with a hypothetical maximum of about 7-8 seats? Also, given that the party seems in practice dominated by Turks, do they actually have that much support among Moroccans?

[parochial boy]

Doing for South-Holland, Dutch translates hillariously badly into French. Highlight so far being "The province needs to stop shooting at animals, even if they cause damage".

Also, almost all of the questions seem to be enviornment related - is there any particular reason for that?

Anyway my results

CU - 70%
PVDA - 67%
PVDD -67%
GL - 67%
SP - 63%
D66 - 53%
50 PLus - 53%
Jesus Lives - 50%
Denk - 47%
NIDA - 43%
CDA - 40%
SGP - 40%
LPZH - 40%
Code Orange - 33%
VVD - 17%
PVV - 13%
FVD - 13%

[parochial boy]

This is probably a really stupid take re-pillarisation. But is there an argument to be had that part of the reason for the Dutch political scene being so fractured down to the fact it is small, densely inhabited, very closely connected, and sort of seems (especially given the declining salience of religious sectarianism, "traditional" class structures...) to have relatively little cultural heteroginity between regions, especially given how much of the population is concentrated in the Randstad (happy to be pointed out that I am wrong about this of course).

As in, in the Netherlands, there would seem to be particularly little in the way of cultural reasons for people to stay loyal to certain parties in the way you get in other countries?

(like even countries like England or Sweden that don't necessarily have ethnic or linguistic divides you have big cultural and historical divides between, for example North and South that you don't seem to have so much of in the Netherlands? Maybe I'm just ignorant though)

[parochial boy]

So, er, slightly tongue in cheek, but the conclusion to draw is that there isn't a single left wing person in the entire Netherlands?