🇳🇱 Politics and Elections in the Netherlands: General Election (Nov 22)

[Estrella]

Winning in the province that includes Amsterdam and getting a mega-landslide (by Dutch standards) in their strongest province? Wow.

BBB leader looked like she was going to pass out on live TV after that Overijsel result. Good for her.

[Estrella]

Omtzigt may be popular, but the fact he chose to spend two years sitting on his hands instead of building up a party doesn't inspire much confidence in his political skills – if he wants to stay in politics at all, that is.

[Estrella]

Is drug trafficking considered a major problem, as Lubach seems to think? Does anyone have proposals to do something about it?

[Estrella]

Maybe it's just the translation but Stemchecker phrased their questions pretty weirdly (or maybe it's that they based them on grandstanding of other politicians: "they said this needs to be done before Christmas and the whole cabinet should resign over that issue, yes or no?") so I tried Checkjestem.

Denk 81
Volt 77
GroenLinks-PvdA 69
PvdD 69
D66 62
SP 62
BBB 58
CU 58
Bij1 54
CDA 42
SGP 42
PVV 38
JA21 38
NSC 35
FVD 31
BVNL 31
VVD 27

So as I understand it, Denk is now acting as a Turkish CDA but their platform was probably written by Sylvana Simons before she left. Other than that, Volt > GLPvdA > D66 is pretty much what I expected at the top and it's nice that PvdD has thrown the kooky voodoo weirdness overboard. I'm surprised to see NSC so low and VVD dead last behind even the far-right — but then they're basically Dutch Tories anyway.

[Estrella]

Weirdo intellectual —> leader of a microparty —> (provincial) election winner —> Covid denialist —> Putin simp —> purveyor of Roman Empire themed pyramid schemes —> ?

https://twitter.com/populismupdates/status/1716489022078632015

[Estrella]

Below is a chart of the percentage parties gain within certain segments of the electorate (as self-identified) in 5 categories: left-wing, relatively left-wing, centrist, relatively right-wing and right-wing. Note that the size of these five groups is not equal. De Hond points out the electorate is clearly more right-wing than 15 years ago and that GL-PvdA's room to gain is limited: they already gain 60% of voters self-identifying as left-wing.

Is this just a change in how voters see themselves because #globaltrends, or does the electorate support more right-wing policies now? It seems like 15 years ago we were already living in a post-Fortuyn world, PvdA was a fairly urban middle-class party, the SP surge was a one-off, all sorts of right-wing populists were already doing well with the people who now vote PVV and the Rutte governments were very right-wing both on economics and immigration... so it doesn't seem like that much should've changed for either reason.

Also, it's interesting that PVV gets literally 0-1% with left-wing voters. I know this is more complicated in the Netherlands because the Catholic working class wasn't left-wing to begin with, but I'd have expected that there'd be at least some voters in like rural north who now vote for PVV but still see themselves as left-wing, plus the SP > PVV switchers you mentioned.

[Estrella]

Talking about thresholds… just a thought: FvD’s and BBB’s big provincial victories (and in hindsight, their fifteen minutes of fame) both came after they established themselves by winning one/two seats in parliament. If Netherlands had, let’s say, a Danish 2% threshold (or any number that will keep 1-2 seat parties out), very little would have changed in national politics but provincial politics would be unrecognizable.

[Estrella]

A bit off topic, but why were Dutch governments so unstable in the 50s and 60s? If my counting is right, there were 14 cabinets in the twenty-eight years from the end of the war until 1973 and 17 cabinets in the fifty years from 1973 until today. Was it just that KVP, ARP and CHU were separate and more parties = more instability, or were there some other issues?