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Netherlands Update: Victory for Rutte
2017-03-07 16:03:51 HILVERSUM – Lijsttrekkers Mark Rutte (VVD) en Geert Wilders (PVV) tijdens de politieke spelletjesavond van het NOS Jeugdjournaal. De lijsttrekkers van de zes grotere partijen in de huidige Tweede Kamer beantwoordden, aan de hand van gezelschapsspellen, vragen over politieke onderwerpen. ANP REMKO DE WAAL
Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s party has won the most seats in the Dutch Parliament, defeating Geert Wilders by a larger margin than the pollsters expected. It was a clear victory for Rutte, though he won with fewer seats than in the last parliament. The Euro rallied on the news. Merkel told Rutte: “I look forward to continuing our good cooperation as friends, Europeans, Europeans.”
The way it’s being reported now is that Erdoğan gave Rutte “a beautiful gift,” in the words of Cas Mudde (not, as they’ve spelled it, Muddle, unless this is someone else entirely). Mudde’s Dutch, at least, so his views about this might be more, shall we say, detail-oriented, than those of the bots on Twitter who’ve overnight developed exceptionally strong views about the Netherlands. It seems to me, though, that no matter how these elections had turned out, we’d be saying the victor benefited from Erdoğan’s wacky hijinks. Had Wilders done better than expected, you’d be hearing everyone (including me) say that Erdoğan gave Wilders a gift, right?
Anyway, from the department of gifts that keep on giving, Turkey deported 40 Dutch cows, reports the Hindustan Times, a news organ that took a particularly lively interest in the story:
Turkey’s red meat association has ordered a consignment of prize Dutch cattle to be sent back to the Netherlands, saying it no longer wants to farm the cows due to the diplomatic crisis between the countries.
Bulent Tunc, the head of the Turkish Association of Red Meat Producers, told Turkish media that a symbolic consignment of 40 Holstein Friesian cattle was already being sent back to the Netherlands. …
He said Turkey should start focusing on breeding its own cattle. “We have our own quality breeds,” he said.
A few notes about the Netherlands, in no special order:
Rutte ran on what I’d call a conservative platform. Supportive of the free market, focussed on tax and benefit reductions, pro-trade, a stress on strengthening national security. We’ll probably see a center-right coalition. Labour, on the other hand — the traditional center-left — was thrashed.
All the parties have said they want to increase military spending to 2 percent of GDP, with the notable exception of the Greens, who are only a modest revision away from their communist roots. The Greens won big, too: They went from four to 14 seats. (Out of 150 total).
It’s not an epic defeat for the far right, as some headlines would suggest. Wilders’ party picked up four seats over the last election. Or to be precise, Wilders’ candidates did. (He’s the only member of his party.) Only a few years ago it would have been a huge shock that Wilders did this well.
I don’t know what motivated voters to break the way they did. (And no one does yet, for goodness sake — why do people seem to think they do?) But it seems plausible to imagine that it was because Rutte portrayed himself as a palatable alternative to Wilders even as he adopted part of his agenda. He certainly positioned himself, right before the election, as the politician who’d accept no guff from Turks.
Two new parties will enter parliament. The supposedly pro-immigrant DENK (which looks to me like a front for Erdoğan) won three seats. The far-right Forum for Democracy, which is for people want Wilders’ agenda but not Wilders, won two. So what we’re in fact seeing is the erosion of the center, although not its obliteration, by any means.
Turnout in the election was high: 82 percent, up from 74.6 percent in the last parliamentary election, five years ago.
Voters were given a choice of pro- and anti-EU candidates and parties. They voted for the EU. Russian bots on Twitter seem to have been programmed to lament voters voting for the EU because the EU is undemocratic. Bad day for the Russian bots.
And once again, the pollsters blew it. We’re clearly unable to crack the problem of polling accurately in the cellphone era. Until that problem’s solved, elections are just going to be a lot more suspenseful.
Published in General
Thanks Claire! I was looking for a good summary, and quickly realized Ricochet was the best place to find it.
Another vote for cultural suicide.
Do most European countries have such good turn out? Or is this rising as anti-EU sentiments grow?
I highly regret that our country removed so much from local politics and centralized on the Federal Government. It wasn’t supposed to be that way and I think our politics would be far less divisive if they had remained as designed.
I like it better this way. Herd mentality and a revulsion to being the other in things so divisive like politics makes people lean to the poll winner. I find polling to be our attempts to screw with the election and play mental games on the populace.
Rutte’s response to the Turks strike me as that of a very shrewd politician he seems to have tacked to the right at just the right time to defeat Wilders. It reminds me of John Howard in the late 90’s early 2000’s when he moved to the right on issues such as immigration to defeat Pauline Hanson.
There are future elections. Maybe.
Yes, the danger of other people’s babies is quite great.
Considering most of our terror attacks have been done by the children of immigrants, yes.
Babies aren’t babies forever.
This was really exceptional.
This seemed to be a strong display of pro-EU sentiment, or it could be rally-round-the-flag effect after the dustup with Turkey.
I see your point, though I think reliable polling, generally, is important — not just for elections — and I hope we crack the problem.
A good portion of Ricochet are apparently Russian bots.
Yes, it is. (Thank you, @cm!) I guess you didn’t get the memo–it’s no longer de rigeur to sneer at what used to be called “demographic paranoia”.
It cannot be credibly denied that the in-migration of a critical mass of people whose culture and values are not just different, but antithetical to the host culture, and who show a low propensity to truly integrate into the ‘local’ culture, will change the nature of that host culture. And it is also reasonable to ask what the change will look like – and how it will affect the future of the country both culturally and legally.
But we can’t have these conversations because they’re not politically correct.
To steal from the enemy: “Yes we can!” have these conversations, thanks to Trump.
The question is what is the governing coalition?
VVD would need at least three coalition partners to reach majority. Would it go into a leftist coalition where leftist parties had the majority?
Cultural suicide though doesn’t seem like the expression one would use to discuss the dangers of terrorism. In fact if one is worried about Western Culture and the liberal values of human rights it has built up the greatest dangers to that are not from immigrants but rather the changing attitudes of the native population, that itself no longer values or respects those traditions. If you see Muslims coming into Europe and worry it won’t be a Christian continent in another 200 years, you are looking in the wrong place. The Europeans themselves have been abandoning Christianity for the last 70 years, irrespective of their changing ethnic make up.
2 things can be bad.
This seems to me the key point- the Wilders-aligned party went from 15 to 20 seats, while the “center-right” party went from 41 to 33 seats. But since there are 150 total parliament members, no party has close to a majority. I’d say the “far-right surge” seems to still be continuing, but this is what a “far-right surge” looks like for the Netherlands.
Here in Austin, it would be shocking if Republican-aligned candidates could get to 5 members on the 11-member city council. Last November we went from 3 down to 1.
It will be interesting to see what knots Rutte ties himself in to avoid forming a coalition with the PVV, if he even does. He’s quoted at De Telegraaf and the Reformatorisch Dagblad as saying “It’s going to take a while.” If the graphic on the website at the Reformatisch Dagblad is right, the VVD is still the strongest party in the Tweede Kamer. The Greens did indeed perform spectacularly (for them) but the decimation of Labour leaves the parliament more conservative that it was.
Just wait until there are –events–.
–events– seems likely with turkey losing its mind.
There are still latent Christian ideals buried in our culture even as the secularization continues – something that will continue to diminish without a religious reformation. However, increased secularization is also trending with political unrest. Political unrest coincides with instability.
I can’t imagine how bringing in immigrants with oppositional culture helps instead of making things far worse.
So, like guru said – 2 things can be bad.
Yes, Cas Mudde’s piece on this is pretty good. The growth of parties on the extremes and the loss of support for centrist parties leads to unstable coalition governments, and in turn bad governance, which results in more support for the fringe. Not a good cycle.
I think the words “reliable” and “polling” should almost never be used in the same sentence without a negation to keep them company.
Da, tovarisch.
Nye udarniki pazhaloosta!
Well this should successfully hijack the thread!
Antithetical? Low propensity to integrate? If I like this culture (I do) why would I want it to be changed toward something antithetical? This is MY home. And I like it like it is.
But if we must discuss it, let’s discuss it before we bring in large numbers of people from a considerably different culture that are antithetical to what we have now. Not wait until it’s all over. So, Lily Bart, start a conversation if you must, but I hope to find the vast majority of us don’t want to change into one of those “antithetical” cultures.
Do you have any evidence that this is a widespread view in the Netherlands? Polling data, say? Absent that, it seems to me you’re defending a hypothesis inconsistent with the data we do have, which are the election results. Anti-systemic parties didn’t do well enough for us to posit that. If the people who said they’d vote for Wilders were taking systematic delight in messing with the pollsters’ minds, why didn’t they in fact vote for him? All we know is that the polls were off, and not for the first time; seems to me we have reason to be modest — very — about how to interpret that, especially since neither of us lives in the Netherlands or speaks Dutch.
As of last night, the polls did show sharply sinking support for Wilders — which everyone discounted. So perhaps what we might conclude is that voters were unsure how they’d vote until the last minute, or not as committed to him as we’d expect. It’s being reported now that only only 51% of 2017 PVV voters voted PVV in 2012. So it seems plausible that Dutch voters hold more fluid party preferences than American voters do, or that the issues that most mattered to them were not the ones that most mattered to the international media. (I understand that health care reform was a critical issue; the rest of the world media was not, understandably, interested in this, but it may have been more important to voters than other, more telegenic issues.)
I agree that many in the West don’t seem to value their culture. Its a shame because they’ll likely lose it. To use a phrase: You don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone.
You cannot just ‘destroy’ your culture – something will take its place. What is that something? This is a good question to ask.
After all, the arrival of small numbers of 17th century European immigrants had no obvious impact on Western Hemisphere indigenous cultures.
Rutte needs 76 seats to govern. His party has 33, and he’ll need a coalition with at least three other parties. Working with Wilders is probably out. He governed in coalition with Labour since 2012, but with them being knocked down to 9 seats, they’re no longer viable as a primary coalition partner. The two obvious parties are the ones tied for third place, both with 19 – the center-right Christian Democratic Appeal, and the center-left Democrats. That gets him to 71. There is another Christian Democratic party, called the Christian Union (CU); it won 5 seats. That would get him to 76 seats without help from Wilders or the socialist parties (Labour, Socialist, Green). I’d say this coalition is the most likely scenario.
He could replace the CU with the previous coalition partner Labour, or less plausibly, with the 5-seat “Party for the Animals”, an animal rights party.
CU seems too religious. Labour is likely to stay onboard unless they feel the need to bolder their street cred by being in opposition.