As many of you already know (if not all of you), the Dutch government fell in the wee hours of this past Saturday morning due to a rift between coalition parties. In what is reminiscent of divorce proceedings, the parties split due to irreconcilable differences over whether or not the Netherlands should extend their military presence and participation in Afghanistan until 2011. The supposed hard-liner was Deputy Prime Minister Wouter Bos of the Labour Party who refused to accept any further extension of Dutch troops despite NATOs written request to the government early in the term.
The fall of the government did not come as a shock to most who follow Dutch politics, especially after the results from the independent Davids commission were released in early January. The Davids commission was an independent body which analysed whether or not the Netherlands' support of the invasion of Iraq was illegal or not (it was found to be illegal). When this report was released, Jan Peter Balkenende (the Dutch Prime Minister) shrugged off the results as unimportant and very-narrowly missed toppling the coalition then.
One might also be less than surprised at this happenstance considering this is nothing new to the Dutch politics. This cabinet was Balkenende's fourth and it was also the fourth time that Balkenende has failed to bring a coalition government to the end of the full four-year term. In my opinion, I think it would be more shocking if the government lived out their full term at this point! (but I digress…)
As one might guess, the government’s dissolution was a hot topic at the going-away party that I attended last Saturday night after the news was reported earlier that day. A friend of mine, we'll call her Farsi, is going home to Iran for two months for a vacation. She has not been back to Iran in over a year and was quite excited to return. When the topic came up, she told me that when she had heard the news about the Dutch government falling, she asked her vrindt (boyfriend) something to the effect of: "What does this mean? What will happen? Is their going to be a revolution in the streets?" To which her vrindt responded, "No, this just means that there will be another national election in three months." While his response seemed quite a bit less extraordinary than what my friend's original interpretation and expectation of the situation had been, I agree with some of the news reporters who are weary of the outcome of another election at this time.
Although there may not be mass protests in the streets, this next election will come at a time of instability and growing exasperation and lack of trust held by the voters for traditional politicians and their parties. Many of the recent news stories covering the dissolution of the Dutch cabinet have also trotted out the shocking and sudden rise of Pim Fortuyn's right-wing politics back in 2001. They believe that Fortuyn’s rise may have paved the way for other right-wingers such as Geert Wilders, the leader of the right-wing political party PVV. According to popular opinion, Wilders’ is manoeuvring into a position to take up Fortuyn's legacy.
I agree with other commentators out there when they surmise that Wilders will most definitely profit from the current unstable political climate and exasperated voters. In what has been deemed 'the Wilders' effect', some reporters have been guessing at which parties will flop toward Wilders' extreme views and which against, but all agree that Wilders will be a formidable force in these coming elections. Another conclusion is that, the major parties which constituted the last cabinet will not be able to make-up much of the ground they've lost and have been loosing for quite some time with the Dutch voters. The Dutch electorate itself is quite fractured as is evinced from the fact that no one party has held a majority in recent history. There are typically about eight parties that share parliamentary seats, this last government housing eleven different parties in parliament. Although you might think that this would mean that the ideals of a party like Wilders' PVV would then be held at bay due to the numbers, he would only need about 20 seats or so in order to make an impact on policy and Dutch society.
If the Netherlands is entering a period of political instability then this has quite a lot of meaning for my research. Wilders is famous for his tirades against Muslims and Moroccan immigrants. Much of his policies seek to lessen non-western immigration and to see that more assimilative policies are put into place for immigrants already living in the Netherlands. These national party politics and all the hoopla that goes on during national elections will definitely affect how people come together in everyday in somewhere as local as my neighbourhood. How will this affect the activities that I'm currently participating in (for example, the inburgering classes, the fietsles (biking lessons), and the conversation circle)? How will this affect how neighbours view one another and their place within larger society? These are questions that I continue to follow in my daily excursions into the Dutch wild. Seeing as we'll now have both municipal and national elections during the course of my research, it appears that my research has now become a little more political than I originally intended.
If you'd like to read more about the topic please follow this link. I found this site to be most helpful when writing this particular blog, my thanks to Mr. Tyler for his well-written and comprehensive piece.
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