Dutch Coalition on Point of Collapse

*applause*

long answer -

http://verkiezingen.tros.support.nl/redactie/peilingweek42.jpg

An opinion taken this afternoon following the collapse of the coalition, in Dutch but I think you'll get the gist of it, left column last May's election result, right column today's findings.

If correct the Christian Democrats CDA will be by some distance the biggest party with around 49 seats (of the 150). They would prefer to continue in office with the right-wing Liberals VVD placed on 31 seats, ie just enough for a majority for a centre-right coalition.

Pim Fortuyn's Party LPF look set to be virtually wiped out down to 4 seats (from 26).

Fresh elections (likely in December or January) come at an unfortunate time for the largest opposition party Labour PvdA who are in the middle of a leadership contest, and reassessing where the party is after getting hammered last May. They are still likely to gain a few seats (as are the Greens GroenLinks and the far-left SP Socialist Party). Left Liberals D66 allied to the Lib Dems, are in serious decline after winning 24 seats in 1994.

There isn't a Conservative Party in Holland, but although 'Liberal' in name the VVD is probably the nearest thing to one. They certainly always win the most votes in the most prosperous areas.

Electorally his party benefited enormously from an unprecedented outpouring from grief and sympathy (of almost Princess Diana proportions). Once in parliament, and in power, and without their leader the LPF completely were rudderless, ideologically and poltically clueless, spending most of their time arguing amongst themselves over who was in charge. At times it was high farce, and quite entertaining...until you remembered they were in power. Then it felt disturbing.

For all its 'Liberal' reputation many parts of the Netherlands are still surprisingly religious, with a Protestant Bible-Belt in the North, and strongly Catholic in the south. The Christian Democrats have a solid electoral base to build on.

They, and their predecessors, have generally dominated the Dutch political scene, playing a part in every coalition government from 1918 to 1994, longer than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ("we run this country"). I'm not as familiar with other European Christian Democrat Parties but the Belgian and German variants certainly seem cut from the same cloth.

Back as Omar: A truly happy day. Those corrupt, two-faced, moralistic, racist cunts destroyed themselves before turning Holland into a humourless police state.

I'm a bit worried though that Harry Potter gets through this undamaged. The past months he did some nice impressions of a robot, but showed no leadership at all. Stevo don't you think PVDA look like shit, every party is on tv with rethorical flame-throwers (Marijnesse especially is running the show) and they thought they were going to have 4 years of reorganizing the party.

Alas I suspect most will conclude he wasn’t given a fair crack of the whip and only blame the LPF Muppets. Their public humiliation couldn’t have happened to a more deserving set of nasty, self-serving idiots. In a strange sort of way I’ll miss the comedy. Ferry Hogendijk in particular seemed to be some bizarre cross between the child catcher in ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ and Uncle Fester in the Adams Family.

Yeah-rotten timing for the PvdA, a leadership campaign in an electoral campaign…unenviable. Don’t think anyone in their ranks thinks power is a serious option. Marijnnessen is a shrewd customer, but Zalm too has played his cards rather well I think ie keeping a certain distance from the chaos and then pulling the plug when confident he had the nation behind him. I fear a CDA/VVD govt is inevitable. I certainly won’t be voting for them but they should at least offer a bit of stability after 87 days of conflicts, crises, chaos, and high farce.

hahaha! This is so true. What a misanthrope. THe other one that won't be missed is Nawijn. Amazing how he couldn't believe they were taking his power away. :) That nasty KGB-chief look-alike.

Zalm did great. Wouldn't mind him becoming prime minister.

Yeah got to chuckle at Nawijn's fall, so proud on returning to his old workplace as minister. Happy to see Harry Potter actually receiving some serious criticism in the press today, the NRC Handelsblad especially scathing.

I'm aware of how strongly religious parts of Holland are, and in fact I alluded to this in one of my recent essays. I was generally deconstructing the lies and doublethink of the Countryside Alliance by pointing out how integrated between its urban and rural parts Britain is compared to most other countries, and I cited the differences between the liberalism of Amsterdam and the religious conservatism of some rural parts of Holland as an example of a greater divide than exists in this country (London is less liberal than Amsterdam, but rural Britain is less religious and less of a traditional society than the equivalent parts of Holland tend to be ... there seems to be much less of an urban-rural gulf in Britain than almost anywhere else). Would you agree with that analysis?

in Norway they have an interesting (and quite typically Scandinavian) balance between the British and mainland European political traditions: the centre-right party are called the Christian Democrats, but the centre-left party are known as Labour.

Amsterdam is definitely more liberal than London, but it’s also far more liberal and cosmopolitan than other Dutch cities. It feels itself, with some justification, to be quite different in character from the rest of the country. I'm confident A'damer Omar would confirm this.

Not all rural areas in the Netherlands are especially religious - there’s a small pocket in the N/E of the country that is staunchly communist! – but the ‘confessional’ parties enjoy most of their support in rural areas and they are generally quite traditional and very different in character to urban areas.

Most of the Dutch population is actually squeezed into a small area in the west of the country known as therandstad , a mass urban sprawl that is economically and politically dominant. The rest of the country is predominantly rural, with a few regional capitals, and so urban/rural divide is largely subsumed into the debates over the Randstad v the Rest.

(Policy links that may be of interest Robin:
The Structure Plan for the Rural Areas
in the Netherlands
Viable and Vibrant Countryside )

it always seems to me that the supposed concentration of British population in urban areas is actually less than people say it is - also of course we have urban areas in most of the country, which is a difference from some other European societies. somehow it seems to take a fringe group (whether 80s hardline socialists or the Countryside Alliance today) stirring things up to create feelings of a massively important urban-rural divide in Britain. in other parts of Europe, it always seems to be there.

I would certainly suspect that the difference between Amsterdam and the rest of Holland is greater than the difference between London and the rest of Britain. Most Londoners actually live in suburbs which seem to me almost indistinguishable from the equivalent areas in Southampton or ... I dunno, Peterborough, somewhere like that.

I meant: urban areas are reasonably evenly distributed around England (less so in Scotland and Wales, obv) while in other European countries you have larger, more genuinely "isolated" areas of countryside.