Politico: O Dutch government, where art thou?

The center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) of incumbent Prime Minister Mark Rutte was the biggest party in the election, followed by the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) of Geert Wilders. [...]

The average time taken to form a governing coalition in modern Dutch history is 87.6 days, with the shortest gap being just 31 days in 1948. Still, negotiators are nowhere near the record held by neighboring Belgium, where parties needed 541 days to agree on a federal government after the 2010 election — a world record.

Discussions are ongoing between the VVD, CDA, D66 and the conservative Christian Union, with Dutch media reporting that a deal could be close. Even if they reach an agreement next week, it’s likely to take another couple of weeks before they can be sworn in. Here’s a look at what’s happened during the past 208 days.

read the article

Quartz: The far right is reeling in professionals, hipsters, and soccer moms

Last Sunday (Sept 24), German voters put a far-right party into parliament for the first time since the Second World War. Right-wing nationalists Alternative for Germany (AFD) won 13% of the vote, easily overcoming the 5% threshold needed to enter the German Bundestag. A previous study (link in German) showed that AFD supporters come from different social classes, including workers, families with above-average incomes, and even academics. The study concluded that what was common among AFD voters was their dislike for Angela Merkel’s so-called open-door policy to refugees. [...]

In France, the far-right Front National (FN) enjoyed support from almost 40% of voters aged 18-24-year-old in the run up to the election. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the FN, courted young voters by taking up traditionally left-wing causes, such as women’s rights, and championing the welfare state (albeit for French citizens, and not foreigners). At the end of the first round of the election, 21% of young people cast their vote for Le Pen (young voters had broken for the far left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon in the first round). But by the second round of voting, which saw Le Pen against Emmanuel Macron, the former won 34% (paywall) of the vote among 18-24-year-old. [...]

It’s not just men shoring up right-wing populists. Le Pen was backed by a quiet army of women. Le Pen’s attempts to rebrand her party has clearly had an effect on women; a study by French pollster Ifop found that women made up 48% of voters who have voted for the FN previously. Women played an important role in the US too. While women did vote overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, white women did not. Overall, 52% of white women voted to elect Donald Trump. That figure jumps to 62% when looking at non-college-educated women. [...]

Yes, angry, working class men disillusioned by globalization have supported right-wing populism. But so did the hipsters, the soccer moms, and well to do suburbanite, highlighting the deep chasms in societies across the Western world.

read the article

FiveThirtyEight: Donald Trump Is Making Europe Liberal Again

The beneficiaries of the right-wing decline have variously been politicians on the left (such as Austria’s Van der Bellen2), the center-left (such as France’s Emmanuel Macron) and the center-right (such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, whose Christian Democratic Union has rebounded in polls). But there’s been another pattern in who gains or loses support: The warmer a candidate’s relationship with Trump, the worse he or she has tended to do. [...]

So if you’re keeping score at home, right-wing nationalist parties have had disappointing results in Austria, the Netherlands, France and the U.K., and they appear poised for one in Germany, although there’s a long way to go there. I haven’t cherry-picked these outcomes; these are the the major elections in Western Europe this year. If you want to get more obscure, the nationalist Finns Party underperformed its polls and lost a significant number of seats in the Finnish municipal elections in April, while the United Patriots, a coalition of nationalist parties, lost three seats in the Bulgarian parliamentary elections in March.

Despite the differences in electoral systems from country to country — and the quirky nature of some of the contests, such as in France — it’s been a remarkably consistent pattern. The nationalist party fades as the election heats up and it begins to receive more scrutiny. Then it further underperforms its polls on election day, sometimes by several percentage points. [...]

While there’s no smoking gun to attribute this shift to Trump, there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence. The timing lines up well: European right-wing parties had generally been gaining ground in elections until late last year; now we suddenly have several examples of their position receding. Trump is highly unpopular in Europe, especially in some of the countries to have held elections so far. Several of the candidates who fared poorly had praised Trump — and vice versa. He’s explicitly become a subject of debate among the candidates in Germany and the U.K. To the extent the populist wave was partly an anti-establishment wave, Trump — the president of the most powerful country on earth — has now become a symbol of the establishment, at least to Europeans.

read the article 

Jacobin Magazine: Defeat in Victory

First of all, the PVV won in purely numerical terms. Wilders managed to increase his vote to thirteen percent, giving him twenty of one hundred fifty parliamentary seats.

Meanwhile, the two government parties — the free-market conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and the center-left Labour Party (PvdA) lost significantly. [...]

To the PVV’s five seats, we should add the two seats claimed by the new Forum for Democracy — the Netherlands’ answer to the United States’ alt-right. During the campaign, party leader Thierry Baudet called for ending the “homeopathic dilution of the Dutch people” by foreigners. He has also claimed in his writings that all women secretly long to be raped.

Apart from these numerical gains, the far right managed to set the agenda for the entire campaign season. Both the VVD and the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), which ended at nineteen seats, waged a more explicitly racist and Islamophobic campaign than ever before. [...]

Thus, Wilders gained both numbers and political influence. He lost only in comparison to the even larger gains granted to him in the virtual reality the polling agencies created. This demands an important aside, for in recent years such opinion polls themselves have become a major force in politics. [...]

The rot goes deeper: the PvdA did not come in first in a single municipality, ranking fourth in Amsterdam and fifth in places like Zaanstad and Groningen, once cradles of the Dutch socialist movement. In working-class Rotterdam, still Europe’s largest harbor and a city where social democracy once was completely hegemonic, the PvdA came in seventh.

read the article 

Politico: Le Pen’s Dutch bummer

The Dutch were in a tetchily Euroskeptic mood in the days after Britain’s Brexit vote, with nearly half saying they wanted out of the EU. But the anti-Brussels mood has since cooled. A poll by TNS Nipo for Deutsche bank in February showed a whopping 79 percent of Dutch voters did not agree the Netherlands would be better off outside the EU. [...]

Le Pen should take note. The Dutch vote marks the second time in a year that a Euroskeptic candidate came up short on polling day. Last December, far-right candidate Norbert Hofer lost Austria’s presidential run-off. His supporters blamed arch-Brexiteer Nigel Farage for suggesting that Austria would hold a referendum on leaving the EU if Hofer won.

Given that polls in France show a rising majority in favor of EU membership, and an even higher share in favor of staying in the euro, Le Pen is trying to tone down her own Frexit proposal. Yet she, too, is branded with the Euroskeptic seal, and her efforts to change tack with a plan that would somehow combine a revived franc with a single European currency have left voters confused. [...]

While voters rate the National Front president very highly on metrics such as “sincerity,” “desire to change” or ability to “understand them,” nearly two thirds of voters said that she was “worrying,” according to an Elabe poll conducted in February. The scandal-tainted Fillon also rated highly on the worry-meter, while Macron registered lower at 41 percent, according to the poll.

read the article 

Political Critique: Elections in the Netherlands: Can Europe Be Saved?

The Netherlands, however, is still many of these (positive) things, and thus fears about a cascade of populist victories in Europe appear to be somewhat exaggerated. Both the U.K. and the U.S. feature political systems which tend towards single-party (and/or single-person) rule. Both have also spear-headed a neoliberal ‘spirit of the times’ and currently suffer the most dramatic backlash from it. The Netherlands, apart from maintaining a functioning welfare state and enjoying steady economic recovery, can contrastingly be characterized as a ‘democracy of minorities,’ featuring a system of proportional representation in a single constituency. This assures any party that wins 0.67% of the vote a seat in the Second Chamber (or Lower House). Since no single party ever manages to win a clear majority (76 out of 150 seats), coalition governments and a spirit of compromise have been the rule for more than a century.

Recent decades have witnessed a sharp decline in support for the three main governmental parties of the centre-right and centre-left: the Christian Democrats (CDA), the Conservative Liberals (VVD, the party of acting prime minister Mark Rutte), and the Labour Party. Apart from these, eleven other parties are forecast to gain seats in parliament, but none of these parties currently exceeds 12 percent in the polls. Conforming to a Europe-wide trend (excepting the German SPD), the Labour Party, now at a pitiful 8 percent, is heading towards a shattering defeat. Their coalition partner, VVD, is currently the largest party, hovering around 16 percent. The Christian Democrats already suffered their historic defeat in 2012, after participating in an ill-fated and short-lived coalition (which gave the PVV the role of conditional supporter). After having led the polls throughout 2016, Wilders’ party has steadily declined since the beginning of this year, and is now second at around 15 percent. Three other parties – the Progressive Liberals (D66), the Green Left Party (GroenLinks), and the Socialist Party (SP) – are following closely on the heels of both VVD and PVV, polling between 10 and 12 percent. [...]

This timely offer of a ‘politics of hope’ is crucial if we look at the deeper anatomy of the nationalist protest vote, which has fueled populism everywhere, including Brexit and Trumpism. The decline of traditional heavy industry has abolished many working-class jobs and undermined working-class pride, from the American Rust Belt to those of Northern France, the U.K. Midlands, Polish Silezia, the Donbass, and South Limburg (the last being a  Dutch province that still suffers phantom pains from the closing of the coalmines in the 1970s, and which constitutes Wilders’s heartland). Everywhere ‘honest work’ itself has been destroyed, while working-class, male-identified culture lives on as a ‘zombie culture.’ Economic grievances have been transformed into fears about cultural identity, social dignity, and meaning (or, rather, the lack thereof). Zombie or phantom identities such as these turn inward and become poisonous, opening themselves to the lure of gratuitous identities, as with those that are provided by nationalism, ethnicity and machismo. Many of Wilders’ core voters do not seem to care whether or not he is capable of effectively governing the country, and neither do they seem to believe in what he says. This is similar to many Trump voters, who voted out of desire to kick the elite’s ass, regardless of the consequences.

read the article 

The Atlantic: 'This Is Exactly What He Wants': How Geert Wilders Won by Losing

In fact, according to Paul Wilders, losing the bid to become prime minister may be the optimal electoral outcome for Geert, who has campaigned on a platform of leaving the European Union, tolerating “fewer Moroccans,” imposing a “head rag tax” on hijab-wearing women, and paying settled Muslims to leave the Netherlands—promises on which it would be difficult to deliver. [...]

Paul spoke to me about what his brother was like as a child, how he developed into “the Dutch Trump” (as he is sometimes known today), and what’s next for him now that the elections are over. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. [...]

Geert’s momentum may have slowed down, but those voters are still out there, just more dispersed than they were. I’m pretty sure he will try to draw those voters back and that might mean a rethink in how he expresses himself. Up till now he has behaved in a very, very extreme way. Whether or not to tone down the rhetoric is going to be a difficult decision for him. On one hand, he still won the four seats [in addition to the seats his party already had] by being extreme. On the other, the three or four seats he lost to the newer, smaller parties, he’s losing because those smaller parties have the same message but deliver it in a more toned-down way. He’ll have to formulate a strategy that will work to both keep the extremists and attract more moderate voters. [...]

Yes, he grew up when he went to Israel. He was 18, I drove him to the airport in Amsterdam. He’d wanted to go to Australia but settled on going to a kibbutz on the border with Jordan, by the Allenby Bridge, instead. He stayed there for two years. He had a hard time over there and that made a difference. In Israel he spent all his money in about a week. He lived like a king and [then] was forced to work. It was dangerous. And you could tell, after that. He came back a far more serious person, far more likable. He started looking for jobs and studying. I think the seed was planted there—the emotional and intellectual seed.

read the article 

Al Jazeera: Dutch elections: Not a populist revolt

Though the exact results are still to come in, Wilders ended up with no more than around 14 percent of the vote. Indeed, if 1 percent had gone the other way Wilders would have ended fourth rather than second.

The big story coming out of this Dutch election, then, is the further and possibly final disintegration of the two parties that have dominated Northern European politics since World War II: The Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats.

Thirty years ago the Dutch Labour Party and the Christian democrats still had more than two thirds of the vote between them. This time the Labour Party and the Christian Democrats did not even get one third of the vote taken together.

In their place have come a wide range of parties. There are now two green parties in the Netherlands, one pro-EU and one anti. There are two left-wing parties, the decimated Social Democrats and the now much bigger Socialist Party. There is a single issue party for senior citizens and two parties for strict or even fundamentalist Christians.

This election also saw the breakthrough of a populist party for immigrants, DENK. It is led by two Dutchmen of Turkish descent who use the same kind of conspiracy theories and personal attacks on opponents that served Trump so well.

read the article 

CityLab: Geert Wilders Didn't Take Over The Netherlands After All

Like Dutch politics in general, the situation is complicated and not especially sexy. The Netherlands has a pluralist system where 13 parties (yes, 13) are now represented in parliament; multi-party coalition governments have been the rule for over a century. Despite the chorus of worried thinkpieces, the number of buyers for Wilders’s PVV remains static in an extremely busy political marketplace. Indeed, the very nature of Dutch politics makes something of a mockery of the idea of “winning the popular vote”, which doesn’t in any way mean the same thing as it would in the U.S.

The overplaying of the Wilders threat cuts both ways. It was false to present his party and its extreme-right policies as poised to take over the Netherlands. It’s also simplistic to label Wilders’s restrained success as a “beautiful blow against Trumpism,” as did a recent email from Avaaz pushing this letter of congratulation to Dutch voters. The tenor of Dutch politics has still shifted rightwards and Wilders’s PVV has shaped the debate more than it electoral showing might suggest. In a bid to woo PVV voters, for example, Rutte’s VVD published a full page press advertisement this January warning migrants to “be normal or be gone”, a move picked up by the PVV as an attempt to out-Wilders Wilders himself. [...]

The Dutch elections have still broken something. That’s the belief in an unstoppable right-wing populist march through the West’s institutions, one that would start with Brexit, gain power from Trump’s election and inevitably deliver more extreme-right governments in Europe. Trump’s power may be unaffected and the slow, grim unfolding of Brexit, and its implications are no less inevitable. But maybe after Wednesday’s results, we will stop viewing European states as mere dominoes waiting to fall.

read the article 

The Guardian: The 'Jessiah': the Dutch progressive trying to turn back the populist tide

Klaver’s father has a Moroccan background, his mother is from mixed Dutch and Indonesian stock. He is unashamedly “pro-EU and pro-refugee”. And in a few short months, while the far-right Freedom party’s Geert Wilders has been complaining about “Moroccan scum”, Klaver has quadrupled his party’s standing in the polls. And he’s done it with his shirt sleeves rolled up and a smile on his face. [...]

The Green Left party in the Netherlands was formed 25 years ago by the merger of four political groups: the communists, pacifists, evangelicals and the self-styled political radicals. Unlike many green parties elsewhere in Europe that emerged from environmental activist groups, Groen Links has always had a social dimension to its politics and traditionally done well in a general election after the Dutch Labour party has been tainted by being in power. But the Greens have never before managed to connect with the highly educated segment of the electorate as Klaver appears to have done, let alone had the chance to be part of a Dutch government. [....]

Along with the collapse of the Dutch Labour vote from about 25% to as little as 8%, another ingredient of Klaver’s success is the stark contrast he offers to Wilders. Klaver says that in his dealings with the leader of the PVV, who was convicted of racist speech in December, he tries to keep things civil. But asked whether the rhetoric Wilders aimed at Moroccans had ever touched him personally, given his family roots, there is a discernible edge to the response. “No, only when... Most of the time not,” Klaver says, pausing. “Only once. I am a father of two sons. One and three years old. When the oldest was a couple of weeks old he [Wilders] yelled in this cafe ‘less, less Moroccans’. It was why he was in court.

read the article 

Bloomberg: Dutch Election: A Who's Who Guide to the Candidates

Dutch voters head to the polls on March 15, with a whopping 28 parties vying for the right to form a new government. Given the fractured political environment, it could take as many as six different groups to form a ruling coalition, making this year’s race the most complicated—and pivotal—in years.

Here are the main players, their party associations and the number of seats each currently holds in Parliament:

read the article 

BuzzFeed: The Man Who Turned Gay Rights Into “A Weapon” In A War Against Muslims

For months they had endured an increasingly strident debate about immigration ahead of elections on March 15, and they were tired of being caught in the crossfire. The race has been dominated by Geert Wilders, the bleached-blonde leader of the Party for Freedom who polls show could win the largest bloc of votes in parliament. His candidacy is being watched as the next test of the nationalist wave that drove Britain out of the EU and put Donald Trump in the White House.

But the race is also uniquely focused on gay rights, because Wilders has framed his crusade against Islam in part as a defense of national values in the country proud to have adopted the world’s first marriage equality law and has remained a leader on LGBT rights in the years since. And several more moderate politicians have echoed the message that Muslim immigrants threaten gay people.[...]

Wilders’ professed support of gay rights once put him out of step with other nationalist politicians in the West, who generally have also been social conservatives. But today Wilders seems like he was just ahead of his time, with politicians from Donald Trump to France’s Marine Le Pen following his lead and saying they are defending LGBT rights by opposing Muslim immigration. [...]

Immigrants are constantly being subjected to a “pink test,” said Dino Suhonic, founder of the queer Muslim organization Maruf and organizer of the evening’s gathering. Politicians are “using gay rights, as almost a [trait of] national identity,” Suhonic said, but only when debating the place of “asylum-seekers and the immigrants.” It’s an attitude Suhonic calls “homonationalism.” [...]

Ineke cited a 2009 study commissioned by the Department of Justice that found that 86% of people accused of violence against LGBT people in the Netherlands were of Dutch background and 14% of immigrant background, roughly equal to their representation in the population as a whole. Another analysis by researchers at the University of Amsterdam of anti-LGBT violence just within their city did find that people of Moroccan descent were overrepresented among suspected perpetrators, but also found that people from Turkish backgrounds were underrepresented and less likely to commit these crimes than people of Dutch descent. Religion was not the issue, the researchers concluded, but rather a “street culture” specific to Moroccan young men that “enforces hyper-masculine behavior.”

read the article 

Associated Press: With economy up, crime down, why are the Dutch discontent?

"It's not the economy, stupid," Professor Gerrit Voerman of the University of Groningen said, tweaking the campaign message Bill Clinton used in his successful 1992 march to the White House. Instead, Voerman said, "It's about identity." [...] 

 In the Netherlands, pollsters predict that Prime Minister Mark Rutte's People's Party for Freedom and Democracy will lose about 15 of the 40 seats it holds in the 150-seat House of Representatives. Wilders' party, which currently has 12 lawmakers in the chamber, is on track to become one of the biggest, if not the biggest, parliamentary faction, despite a recent decline in polls.

However, Wilders' hard-line anti-Islam, anti-immigration platform and rhetoric has driven away potential coalition partners among mainstream parties, meaning that he is unlikely to be able to form a government even if he wins the popular vote in this country whose elections all but guarantee coalitions.

Wilders' one-page election manifesto leads off with two "us-against-them" themes. The Party for Freedom pledges to "de-Islamize" the Netherlands by shutting all mosques, banning the Quran and halting all immigration from majority Muslim nations. It also commits to remove the Netherlands from the European Union, which it helped found 60 years ago.

read the article 

Politico: The man who invented Trumpism

Wilders admires Trump and encourages the comparison, delighted to cast his campaign as part of a global populist wave if it adds momentum ahead of the March 15 vote, in which polls indicate his Freedom Party (PVV) is neck-and-neck with Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD).

“It’s the revenge of the rust belt,” said Tim de Beer, an opinion and policy research expert at the Dutch polling firm Kantar Public. “The Netherlands was among the first to have this revolt.”

But Trump and Wilders differ in important ways. Trump’s lack of focus is completely at odds with Wilders’ singular, dogged determination to pursue his proclaimed mission: stop Islam in the Netherlands.  And where Trump is a newcomer to politics, Wilders is one of the longest-serving lawmakers in the Dutch lower house, with a formidable command of parliamentary procedures. [...]

Wilders is mostly silent about the other side of his family tree. His mother was born in what is now Indonesia. She arrived in the Netherlands as a baby after her parents fled the collapsing Dutch colony that would later become the country with the world’s largest Muslim population. [...]

Wilders severely restricts media access to the party. Attempts to contact it, or any of its lawmakers, are typically met with a wall of silence. This is combined with carefully rationed pronouncements designed to outrage and grab headlines. Wilders specializes in coming up with insulting compound words, such as straatterroristen (“street terrorists,” or foreign-looking men hanging around); haatpaleizen (“hate palaces,” or mosques); or his infamous kopvoddentaks proposal (a “head rag tax” on headscarves). [...]

Over the course of Wilders’ life under armed protection, his views have become increasingly radical, casting Islam and the West as ancient enemies locked in a civilizational war for survival. In 2005, his manifesto allowed that not all Muslims were dangerous, noted the importance of freedom of religion, and advocated that only radical mosques should be closed. Nowadays, he claims there are no moderate Muslims, just liars, or people who haven’t read the Quran.

read the article