Politics and Elections in the Netherlands: Rutte III era

[DavidB.]

Quite a bit of a backlash now. Klaver's e-mail towards all people on the GL mailing list (ironically including a lot of people who simply signed Özdil's petition against the student loan system, LOL) was incredibly harsh towards Özdil, especially as he's giving up his seat instead of taking it. And the party itself definitely seems to blame too: Özdil went to the confidential counsellor of the parliamentary group and admitted he had sought to tape a heated conversation between Klaver and him, who then immediately informed Klaver about it. Which is sort of exactly the thing that a confidential counsellor isn't supposed to do. This marks the fourth out of the top-8 GL candidates in 2017 leaving and the third for party discipline reasons or disagreement with Klaver. Behind the façade perhaps still that same old cult after all, with Klaver as Messiah.

In other student loans news, the government was planning on increasing the interest percentage on student debts. This wasn't part of the original 'promise' towards students when the student loan system was introduced by Rutte-II, which is why students felt betrayed, but presumably the VVD introduced it at the negotiating table for Rutte-III. Painful for 'student party' D66, whose membership adopted a motion to drop this proposal earlier this year amidst loud protests, and now it seems as if this is not happening anymore. The next Senate will take office next week (in which the government doesn't have a majority and would need PvdA, GL or FVD to support it, which they won't), and the government lost its majority in the current Senate following the VVD's sacking of Anne-Will Duthler for corruption last month. Duthler took her seat and said she leaned towards opposing the proposal (mega FF), and D66 had issues too. Ultimately, Education Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven (D66) took her loss while unsuccessfully defending the proposal in the Senate and now seems to have taken the proposal off the table before it came to a vote. One more example to show why the Senate is useful.

[Former President tack50]

Hopefully GL being on disarray and PvdA's amazing result at the EU election means they can make a comeback and either lead the next Dutch government or at least lead the opposition

[DavidB.]

Guess it's happening: PvdA keep gaining. GL are now back at the level of GE17 despite having been in opposition to a center-right government for two years. Özdilgate really happened at the worst moment possible for GL - a huge strategic miscalculation by Klaver. VVD gain at the expense of Forum. Peil.nl today:

VVD 27 (+2)
Forum 22 (-2)
PvdA 18 (+2)
CDA 15
GroenLinks 14 (-2)
D66 10
PVV 8
SP 8
PvdD 8
ChristenUnie 7
50Plus 5
DENK 4
SGP 2
Others 2

Coalition 59 (+2)

[DavidB.]

Ankie Broekers-Knol (72, VVD) will succeed Mark Harbers as the new Deputy Minister of Justice and Security, responsible for Asylum and Immigration. Broekers-Knol had been a Senator since 2003 and the Speaker of the Senate from 2013 until now. She was a legal expert at Leiden University and is known for breaking with the party line when she disagrees. She also explicitly supports Edith Schippers, not Klaas Dijkhoff as the next VVD leader.

Coalition negotiations between Forum-VVD-CDA-CUSGP in Zuid-Holland broke down because of CU's problems with a video Thierry Baudet retweeted that was made by the Austrian Identitarian Movement. It is clear the national CU leadership intervened here. Subsequently, national SGP leader Kees van der Staaij tweeted that the negotiations were terminated by CU, not by SGP. He calls it a 'missed opportunity'. Different views on the relationship with Forum is causing the relationship between CU and SGP to be more strained and there is quite a lot of media attention for it. Patience with CU's attitude is visibly running out among SGP politicians and members. The next painful moment for this relationship will be when CU leave ECR in the European Parliament as Forum will enter it, but SGP will stay in.

https://twitter.com/keesvdstaaij/status/1136247857034473473

[DavidB.]

CDA, PVV, FVD and VVD have formed a coalition in Limburg. It will have a less elaborate coalition agreement than usual to leave more room for debate in the Provincial States, a key FVD wish. It is only the second time the PVV enter a provincial government (Limburg 2011 with VVD and CDA was the first time, which collapsed prematurely) and the first time for the FVD.

[DavidB.]

It's been a fun four years, but I will quit updating this thread regularly. May not be able to restrain myself from popping in sometimes and and may be around whenever an election takes place (the next one is supposed to be the March 2021 GE, which feels lightyears away anyway), but don't expect the main coverage to come from me anymore, that's all. Only love

[Grand Wizard Lizard of the Klan]

Thanks for all your updates, all very informative.

[Zinneke]

Old news now but as predicted Otten has been ousted by Baudet and is pressing charges against the latter for defamation (as far as I understand?!) and will predictably be setting up his own party soon.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Recent poll:

VVD: 32
GL: 17
PvdA: 16
CDA: 15
PVV: 13
D66: 11
FVD: 11
SP: 9
CU: 8
50+: 7
PvdD: 6
SGP: 4
DENK: 1

Basically, an almighty fight for second, although in most polls PvdA seem to be more often up top over GL. PVV seem to have stolen back the mantle of the populist right from FvD.

[Zinneke]

Wilders was at least open about his Ponzi scheme you see. And he didn't get people to sign up for it and try to sell them

Anyway strange that both VVD and CDA have actually held their opening season conferences talking about left-wing economic policies (for their standards). 

[xelas81]

Wilders was at least open about his Ponzi scheme you see. And he didn't get people to sign up for it and try to sell them

Anyway strange that both VVD and CDA have actually held their opening season conferences talking about left-wing economic policies (for their standards). 

What are they selling?

[Zinneke]

Wilders was at least open about his Ponzi scheme you see. And he didn't get people to sign up for it and try to sell them

Anyway strange that both VVD and CDA have actually held their opening season conferences talking about left-wing economic policies (for their standards).  

What are they selling?

(Assuming you mean Wilders and Baudet), they are selling their image, both domestically but of course with an eye abroad. Wilders has always wanted to make inroads with the neo-conservative Republican establishment in the US - and his endgame was likely building a contact book in the Belt Road to land him a nice position somewhere there. I'm not sure what it is now - he talks of his succession more now but he's also still locked up in his armed bunker, which is never an easy life to have, and paradoxically to leave.

Baudet, as a public intellectual, wants to sell books and conference talks more than anything - and they became national bestsellers at least with his fame. I'm skeptical a political arsonist such as him was ever serious about making FvD into a more government friendly force to swing VVD/CDA rightwards, whereas Otten, who he disposed of, was. Baudet really pushed the mass membership party idea, getting to VVD-size in members, but if you actually look into the institutional mechanisms behind it, it was anything but democratic, with the executive boards, under Baudet's control, being the key decision makers in the inner workings of the party. His stalinist-like purge of Otten confirmed that.

Until the Dutch far right, one of the more "respectable" ones in Europe given its lack of, er, WW2 revisionism and foundation in Fortuynism, gets away from personalism its doomed to just be an electorate that props up a guy wanting to make a career somewhere bigger and better than the Second Chamber.

[Zinneke]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/19/netherlands-narco-state-dutch-lawyer-murder-fear-fury

big debate around this in the NL. TItle is a bit sensationalist but its an aspect of Dutch drug policy often overlooked.

[Zinneke]

Marianne Thieme is going to step down from her mandate and as leader of the Partij van de Dieren. She has been at the top of the party 17 years. It comes as PvdD have to decide whether to become "the biggest of the small parties" or the "smallest of the bigger parties"...a very Dutch problem

RIP God Empress FF

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Marianne Thieme is going to step down from her mandate and as leader of the Partij van de Dieren. She has been at the top of the party 17 years. It comes as PvdD have to decide whether to become "the biggest of the small parties" or the "smallest of the bigger parties"...a very Dutch problem

RIP God Empress FF

[Zinneke]

Shame to see this great thread go on the second page so its worth bringing up the farmer protests that have hit the Netherlands, claiming that the government's measures on fuel taxation and particularly the EU's nitrogen limit laws threaten their livelihood. Rutte met with some of them yesterday but it was pretty formulaic "our problems are never heard" stuff with him reassuring them in manager-speak.

This is a rather biased account of protests but it shows you the scale, and how it has slowly built up and not gone away :

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/10/20/thread-about-the-recent-farmer-protests-in-the-nl/

You can see the hanging of effigies and the coffin's with Jesse writen on them tell you what type of people these protesters are.

[Zinneke]

We have new polls showing the VVD actually tumbling...

https://imgur.com/Ls7R0Oa

https://www.ad.nl/politiek/vvd-zakt-fors-weg-in-peilingen-door-verlaging-maximumsnelheid~a2f43317/?referrer=https://www.reddit.com/r/thenetherlands/comments/e1ycy9/vvd_zakt_fors_weg_in_peilingen_door_verlaging/


Likely reasons are climate issues (they introduced unpopular measures like max 100km/h speed limit) and the handling of the farmer protests not pleasing their more cynical hard right voters

[Zinneke]

D66 are losing it a bit. Their youth wing forced the parliamentary group to put forward a debate on legalising all drugs. Needless to say every single party rejected it. It did however somewhat tone down PVV and FvD's consistent attacks on "Nanny state Netherlands" after a ban on some fireworks was pushed through (RIP Pyro in the away sectors at football games). FvD's Thierry Baudet came out with a reasonable response saying it was a daft thing to think but worth debating over in a democracy. Wilders was less compromising :

https://twitter.com/geertwilderspvv/status/1219238014020456448

PvdA looking increasingly like a better alternative for your average D66 voter in the mean time...

[Zinneke]

First polls of 2020 :



Source : https://app.nos.nl/data/datavisualisatie/peilingen/

(Yep, I hate boomers too)

Baudet got into a bit of trouble after falsely reporting that two of his friends were harrassed by Morrocans in a train. They turned out to be police in plainclothes...
Baudet, in typical fashion, refused to deny or apologise.

[Intell]

Maybe I am being dumb, but the numbers exceed 100%?

[Zinneke]

Maybe I am being dumb, but the numbers exceed 100%?

Its number of seats projected.

[mileslunn]

Netherlands has always had a reputation as a fairly progressive country yet looking at vote totals, polls and past elections, it looks like more vote for right wing parties than left wing pretty much every election.  Any reason for that?

[Zinneke]

Netherlands has always had a reputation as a fairly progressive country yet looking at vote totals, polls and past elections, it looks like more vote for right wing parties than left wing pretty much every election.  Any reason for that?

Woah big question, you may have to read not one but two threads of political discussion on this forum about the past few years , plus a whole bunch of literature about the decay of pillarisation, of traditional party politics. I would not generalise about the Netherlands as a progressive society, even if it has socially progressive legislation on euthanasia or drugs for example. Its more traditional in some parts than almost any place in Western Europe (it has a Bible Belt with theocratic tendencies), and more progressive in other affairs. On the economic political spectrum a party like D66 would be outright rejected in most countries south of the NL due to its its vehement pro-market stances as too right-wing. I think the words you are looking for is a tolerant society that now has a contradictory "nativist" political tendency.

Keep in mind that a lot of the right-wing populist parties in the Netherlands are voted for as a backlash to perceived overdose of the social liberal 70s-80s-90s: drug policy, somewhat exaggerated tropes about city centres going to sh**t ( a dog whistle for brown people at times, but somewhat due to other factors like housing, tourism, etc.), obsession with multilateralism (even though I would argue the Netherlands is the classic example of a country that hits above its weight because of multilateralism) and last but definitely not least, the very idea that their progressive values are threatened by specifically non-EU immigration.

I think the main explanation is that the issues since the 70s and 80s and especially early 90s when Dutch "progressivism" was at its zenith have changed thanks to a re-framing of the debate particularly by the emergence of Pim Fortuyn. These are accentuated by the fact that being a gay ex-Marxist who called himself a social democrat of sorts sometimes, he was seen as a clear break from the unfrequented collaborationist predecessors of the far right, the Centrum Partij. He was also brutally and disgustingly martyred, alongside the likes of Theo Van Gogh, by lunatics, presenting the far right-wing as the real anti-establishment victims they have craved to be since the Second World War.

Let's get one thing clear though, and that is  that the 31 seats out of 120 that the far right are projected to win are only seen as a "surge" like every election cycle* because the rest of the 90 seats are so deeply fragmented, such is the atomisation of Dutch politics, where political entrepreneur can start a political movement, get invited on to a talk show or create an internet buzz, and the electoral system can allow them to make impressive inroads by simply creating a new cleavage and attracting subsequently a section of the electorate that previously either did not vote or did not have their niche. An entire political class is now dedicated to being as edgy (or in the case of 50PLUS, as cynical) as possible about certain issues - exemplified by D66's drug pledge - to make headlines and ultimately make a career.

After the experience of 2010-2012 though, and the Lijst Pim Fortuyn before it, the traditional parties (what Baudet calls the "party cartel") are not keen on working with the far right, which means any right-wing government inevitably has at least one progressive force of some sort. The far right are not unfrequentable in the Netherlands because they are not the successor parties to Nazi collaboration like in Belgium with Vlaams Belang. They are just not trusted since the last two governments they supported were collapsed prematurely and were in general a circus. FvD's "moderate" wing tried to change this but Baudet took control of the party and their mini-collapse is symptomatic.

* the Sunday Times thought that Baudet was a kingmaker with two seats last election...you see my point.

[Zinneke]

Dutch Healthcare Sector Minister Bruno Bruins (VVD) has resigned. He collapsed at a parliamentary debate due to tiredness levels, likely burnout, and is thus replaced. Fourth Minister to resign from cabinet. Sport and General Health of Population Minister Hugo De Jonge takes over, most famous for his choice of shoes

[Zinneke]

Another wonderful demonstration of far right patriotism :

https://euobserver.com/foreign/148099