Politics and Elections in the Netherlands: coalition agreement presented

[parochial boy]

The trouble with any sort of FPTP voting though, is the emergence of a viable third (or more) party can have a real randomising effect.

thinking of places that have forms of FPTP voting but several major parties (Canada, Scotland and the Swiss Council of States come to mind), you quite regularly get seat allocation that is quite distorted from the popular vote.

I guess the PR side would mitigate that to some extent, and I tend to agree that parallel voting looks like the best system; but is there not a risk that you have France style parties forming alliances for single member constituencies (eg GL, PS, PvdA all standing one combined candidate) which would leave you with de facto grand coalitions at the end of the day?

[parochial boy]

Pirates, PvdD and SP - 76%
Atrikel 1- 74%
GL - 71%
PvdA - 61%
D66 - 54%
PVV - 32%
VVD - 25%

Spent ages trying to find out who "Artikel 1" are. Apparently someone who split off from Denk? Good God that's obscure.

[parochial boy]

Spent ages trying to find out who "Artikel 1" are. Apparently someone who split off from Denk? Good God that's obscure.

Sylvana Simons is a former tv anchorwoman and nowadays an anti-racism activist known for her opposition to the controversial figure of Zwarte Piet. She subsequently became the most prominent Surinamese Dutch DENK candidate, received a lot of media attention and an awful bunch of racist death threats which, according to her, weren't handled the right way by DENK, who, according to her, were only interested in using the threats against Simons in a political way instead of caring about her. In addition to that, Simons found out DENK didn't actually appreciate her speaking out about LGBT and women's rights. So she left and established her own party, Artikel 1, which has three women at the first three slots and is all about intersectionality, racial diversity and feminism.

Ah thanks, that rings a bell for some reason.

My main take on the test is that I have really annoying political views.

[parochial boy]

Does the Netherlands generally experience the phenomenon of "swing back" to the incumbent party in the run up to the election, as voters end up picking the "safe choice"?

Could that not explain some of PVV's recent drop? It would seem to tie up with what happened to the SP last time

[parochial boy]

They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

[parochial boy]

Is there any way of telling how many non-Muslims voted for Denk? I am guessing virtually none?

[parochial boy]

For non-Dutch speaking people (do any non-Dutch speaking people read this anymore ?)

Hey, no, this was a really interesting conversation - Atlas at its best.

My one question to add is, is there any crossover between CU/SGP voters and the Right Wing Populists?

Abusing the French analogy a bit - the FN has always had a Conservative Catholic wing to it, even where the core of the contemporary vote, employés and ouvriers outside urban areas are largely secularised and indiffirent to traditional religious-style social conservatism.

[parochial boy]

I'm a bit surprised at how much the CU and SGP numbers diverge there. Is that to be expected?