This week marks four months since last year’s Dutch election, which we covered at the time. Last time around it took nearly ten months for a new government to be formed, so it’s perhaps no surprise that there is still no new government this time. But progress of a sort has been made.
Readers will probably remember that the election was an unexpected triumph for veteran far-right leader Geert Wilders, whose Party for Freedom (PVV) topped the poll with 23.5% of the vote. The incumbent right-liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), which fell to third place with 15.2%, had tried to steal Wilders’s thunder over immigration and paid the price for it. As I said at the time, “Faced with different leaders telling them that Muslims were the source of all their problems, voters not unreasonably opted for the one who had been saying it more loudly and consistently.”
Much of the media reported this as Wilders “winning” the election, and assumed without further analysis that he would become prime minister. But the Dutch electoral system is strictly proportional; the PVV had only 37 of the 150 seats, and three smaller far-right parties had another 11 between them. To put together a majority, Wilders would need another 28 seats from somewhere.
The VVD won 24 seats, and the New Social Contract (NSC), a breakaway from the VVD Christian Democrats that debuted in fourth place with 12.9%, had 20, so if they were willing to support Wilders in a broad right-of-centre administration they would have a comfortable majority. Talks duly began with a view to such an arrangement, but it didn’t take long for them to strike trouble.
VVD leader Dilan Yeşilgöz ruled out joining a Wilders-led cabinet, but said she was willing to consider lending it external support. NSC leader Pieter Omtzigt, who had campaigned strongly on support for the rule of law, made it clear that Wilders’s assorted plans to trash the constitution were a major stumbling block – although he continued to participate in the talks until walking out last month over financial questions.
Wilders had already indicated a willingness to shelve most of his distinctive policy positions (including banning mosques, leaving the euro and ending aid to Ukraine), but his potential partners were still unconvinced. Finally last week he threw in the towel, giving up, at least for the time being, his attempt to become prime minister. Instead informateur Kim Putters is recommending a technocratic government which would include representatives (but not the leaders) of the PVV, VVD, NSC and a moderate far-right party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement.
Parliament will debate the recommendation this week; even if it’s accepted in principle, it’s by no means certain that the parties concerned will be able to agree on a neutral candidate for prime minister. (There is some speculation it could be Putters himself, a former Labor senator.) It certainly seems as if the levels of trust between them are pretty low.
But the task for the mainstream parties – including not just VVD and NSC but the opposition parties who could conceivably support them in forming a non-Wilders government – is a tricky one. To lock out the PVV would risk boosting its support by feeding its “outsider” narrative; opinion polls show that its support has only grown since the election and that the majority supports giving it the chance to govern.
Best perhaps to admit the PVV to a share of power, in the hope that the experience will either discredit or tame it, while keeping it on as tight a leash as possible. The world will be watching to see how well they can manage.
The World is Not Enough 
HRC, Brexit, the Voice etc. all show that if you stop listening to the “members of the public”, they will turn to those that *will listen*.
Sorry, Charles, i get emotionally strained quickly. As one of the integration children of the 1980s (when disabled kids were first mainstreamed, i found out the hard way how both adults realise you are helpless and what they can do to you. It got worse at puberty when i bloated up due to systemic issues – this time, “mean girls”, helplessness and… various intimate lady’s bedroom wear. Kennett had just changed the EO Act even if my Mum wasn’t suffering the first debilitating effects of the tobacco addiction that killed her.
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The founder came from the CDA, not the VVD.
The current proposal seems to be for something called ‘an extra-parliamentary cabinet’. I gather that something which was called ‘an extra-parliamentary cabinet’ was tried a century ago and it didn’t succeed, and I suspect nobody has worked out in detail what it would mean this time. From what I read, what they might be agreeing to is to set up a jury-rigged cabinet to stagger haplessly through a year or two of bickering and squabbling before it collapses, forcing another early election in which at least some of the government parties lose a lot of voter support. It’s not a deal I’d take, but maybe they have some other scenario in their minds.
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Oops, quite right, I meant Christian Democrats. Now fixed.
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No, it certainly doesn’t seem to have been worked out in detail, but perhaps that will come. An early election would have to be a strong possibility, but not until one or more of the participants can be confident that they won’t be blamed for it.
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If they agree to set up this ‘extra-parliamentary cabinet’ and it does take office, then it’s not just a probability but a certainty that it will be worked out what it means, but it may be worked out in an unplanned way instead of a planned one, which I don’t take as a hopeful possibility.
My impression from what I’ve read is that part of what Pieter Omtzigt (at least) means by it is that parties represented in the cabinet will be free to oppose in parliament proposals already agreed by the cabinet, which seems to me to be a recipe for conflict between the party’s representatives in cabinet and its leading figures in the parliament, a problem which can only be exacerbated by the apparent agreement that all the party leaders will be left out of the cabinet and will thus remain in the parliament. If that’s how it works out, I can’t figure any way that it can be good for a party (and, particularly, for its prospects in the next election) to set it up with two separate leaderships with licence to oppose each other. (Mind you, my personal feeling is that if turns out to be bad for all the government parties, so that they all lose support in the next election and the next government is of a drastically different political complexion, that might be good for the country even if it’s bad for the parties, but I can’t believe that’s the prospect that Pieter Omtzigt and the other party leaders are planning for.)
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J-D, that’s why i am deeply opposed to PR in the House of Reps.
We in the ALP spent 31 out of the next 34 years out of government when we last tried genuine socialism with Chif”s attempt to nationalise the banks. We have no desire or intention of repeating that experience and few Australian voters have a desire to return to an ideology that is dead.
They feel the same about letting the Greens have the BOP in the Reps after Gillard — 2013 should have taught Bandt something but, as with failing to stand up to the Faruqi-Shoebridge-Rhiannon Trotskyist-Islamist internal faction in the NSW Greens, he has shown himself to clearly be a weak and cowardly man.
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I think the best way to convince the Greens that socialism is dead (as many of them are already convinced) is to give them some experience of government. I’m certainly not convinced that Australia is better governed than the European countries that use PR.
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