Dem
47
GOP
53
Yesterday, we had a story about South Korean politics. Today we have one about Dutch politics. On Tuesday, the Dutch government, which is a coalition of four very different parties with little in common, fell apart, despite having spent 7 months negotiating their program after the 2023 general election and 11 months trying to carry it out. The election resulted in the party of Geert Wilders (PVV), a populist who resembles Donald Trump in some ways but not in others, getting 37 seats in the dominant 150-seat lower chamber of the parliament and becoming the largest faction by far. At first, none of the other parties wanted to talk to him, but when all other combinations failed, they were forced to. The other three parties are the traditional conservatives (VVD), a farmer party (BBB), and a new centrist party (NSC) that tries to embrace the most popular ideas of both left and right.
Normally, the leader of the biggest party in the coalition is the prime minister, but that was a bridge too far for the other three parties, so they agreed on a professional nonpartisan technocrat, Dick Schoof, as prime minister. But Wilders, whose main issue is stopping immigration by any means, still runs the show from Parliament. Wilders also supports banning the Q'uran as well as closing mosques and Islamic schools. He doesn't like Muslims much. We've heard that before somewhere.
The collapse was precipitated when Wilders got tired of the other parties stalling about banning asylum seekers from entering the country. He produced a list of demands about stopping them and ordered the three other leaders to sign it as is. They all refused and Wilders withdrew from the coalition, forcing new elections, probably in October. Here is a statement by Wilders (with voiceover translation into English):
Making the immigration issue more complicated is that immigrants require housing, health care, language training, education for their children, and more. All this costs money. A lot of it. And at a time when the European Union wants every member to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP, in some cases doubling it, because it doesn't believe the U.S. will defend it from a Russian attack. So social spending will have to be gutted and Wilders does not want to spend what is left of it on foreigners.
The Netherlands is not the only European country that does not want any more immigrants. While some governments are tolerant of them, it would be hard to find a country where the people want more immigrants, many of them from Africa, Syria, and other places where there is unrest. In the recent German elections, for example, the extremely far-right AfD Party got 21% of the vote.
To make things worse, NATO leaders are meeting in The Hague later this month, and the head of NATO is Mark Rutte, who was the Dutch prime minister for a record-breaking 14 years. Slightly embarrassing.
The current Dutch government will muddle along until the election, but it is supposed to merely carry out policy items that have already been approved by Parliament, not introduce new ones. In practice, that is impossible. Suppose things go south in Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskyy goes to every country begging for help. There is overwhelming support for Ukraine in the Netherlands, but is the government supposed to say: "We'd love to help you, but please come back next May, by which time we might have formed a new government"?
As an aside, (V) was once involved in Dutch elections, as an ICT consultant. The Parliament voted to make the voting software open source and the election commission had to write a tender to allow companies to bid on it. The commission is staffed mostly by lawyers, who couldn't tell a COBOL program from a Python program if their lives depended on it, and had zero idea what open source meant and how to word a tender to make sure the bidder did not retain any legal rights to the software after it was paid. It didn't go smoothly, even though the software in question was the software that added up the totals from the precincts. Actual voting is by huge paper ballots with as many as 28 parties, each with as many as 50 candidates. With hundreds of candidates to choose from, no one ever complains "I don't like any of them." As far as (V) knows, the plan hasn't been implemented yet. (V)