Come on Netherlands, take out the trash and show us the way.
Unfortunately the trash is still leading in the polls, even after kicking down the government yet again (he has done this before, all because he’s a major xenofobe)
I think it’s too early to say how this will impact the polls. A lot of people are still processing what happened. Blowing up the government over immigration didn’t work out great for the VVD (liberal right), but perhaps Wilders’ party will fare better.
It was the protest vote that won the PVV (Wilders’ party) the last election and the BBB (farmers’ party) the Eerste Kamer (Senate) elections before that. Now that the PVV and the BBB have been in the government and achieved basically nothing, those voters are more likely to vote for left-leaning parties or stay home.
If Wilders can push the narrative that the rest of the coalition forced his hand by blocking his immigration policies, perhaps he can win the election. However, considering that even the FvD was criticizing Wilders today that might be a tall order, even in the alt-right bubble.
If Groen Links/PVDA (green/labour alliance) can convince protest voters that the solution to their problems is to tax the rich and invest that money in social programs and environmental policies, maybe they can win the elections.
(Winning the elections in this context means becoming the largest party. Nobody ever gets an absolute majority.)
yes, but leading here doesn’t mean much, given how small the biggest party is in actual numbers. All it takes is for the reasonable parts of society to exclude these folks from coalitions. They’re not big enough that they can’t be ignored. It’s worked for many years, lets return to that.
And no one’s going to trust him to lead now.
PVV has been dropping in polls for more than a year now. Let’s hope this is the last time they are in a ruling coalition.
I know nothing about Dutch politics. But fear this might be a strategic move by them since they are more popular as “opposition”?
Wilders has been threatening to blow it up since day one. This coalition has been an uphill struggle from the get-go and none of the voters are in any way helped with the flailing policies and continuous notes that their official documents are lacking any semblance of professionalism and critical thought.
The sad thing is that we are a country divided on basically one issue. Migration. This is why populist parties can just ask simple questions like ‘can we even trust our government?’, ‘are the government people even working?’ or ‘are the media still trustworthy?’ and everyone is like ‘yeah we need this guy in charge’. So voters do exactly 5 minutes of ‘research’ and then vote for the most incompetent guy who yells the loudest.
So we will go vote again. And we will most likely end up in a similar situation. And that, too, will fail.
At least now there is a chance again for a de facto cordon sanitaire to emerge.
I’m referring to an earlier Rutte cabinet (conservative-liberal VVD and christian democratic CDA) which relied on a confidence and supply construction with Wilders. Wilders got to go on with his opposition politics while supporting the coalition (not unlike what we’ve had this past year), but when the coalition wanted to save money because of a budget deficit, Wilders dropped his support and the cabinet fell. After this, Rutte was succesful in framing the PVV as unreliable and vowed never to work with them again, leading to the PVV becoming ever more irrelevant.
That was until the new VVD leader, Yeşilgöz, said she didn’t rule out working with the PVV during the last elections.
I think that’s a nice and concise way to put it. I agree that the VVD kind of brought this on themselves but that’s also due to them being the largest party for a lot of years in a row and there was a certain group of people who felt they couldn’t rely on the VVD any longer.
I think Covid might’ve had something to do with that, it sort of fueled a polarisation on vaccines and government handling of individual freedom.
If somehow asylum/migration does get fixed or improved somehow, the ‘out-group’ will just find something new to polarise over. We’ve still got climate change, housing, nitrogen, power net congestion…
But it doesn’t matter whether asylum requests form an actual problem (and in reality it wasn’t problematic at all, except for problems that were caused by earlier VVD cabinets saving on centers for processing asylum requests). What matters is whether it can be framed as one. The PVV (like populists in general) is all smoke and mirrors.
I’ve been having a discussion about asylum with a friend all day. The thing is that we can see a lot about the actual figures and the amount of verblijfsvergunningen actually granted, but there is no way of telling how many of those requests are fulfilled due to migrant coaches who tell migrants just what to say in order to get asylum, or how many edge cases fall the right way because the employees at the asylum centers don’t have the time or resources to properly look into certain situations.
I think if we apply this nuance to the actual debate, rather than calling it a ‘too much’ issue, it becomes a very difficult topic that doesn’t really have a clear solution or answer.
The question then remains: if populists aren’t set on solving a crisis that may or may not exist, are we voting ourselves into a totalitarian regime? I shudder to think so.
Admittedly I don’t know much about the actual workings of the asylum process.
However, I have no doubt whatsoever that the primary goal of Wilders is to attain power by whatever (non-violent, for as far as we know now) means necessary. One of the things Wilders immediately tried to do in this cabinet, through his asylum minister Faber, was sideline the chamber by declaring the framed asylum situation an emergency. This was just copying Wilders’ good friend Orbán, who has been able to rule by decree using emergency laws set into motion during covid.
Luckily, this didn’t work. Further, the Dutch political system works in such a way that absolute majorities are pretty much ruled out, always requiring cooperation with other parties. The biggest danger is parties like the VVD taking over PVV talking points and moving ever more to the right.
It is always the same tactic:
- If in opposition be as loud and obnoxious as you can, have the less far right parties implement your policies as you rise in the polls.
- Rise even more in the polls as a result of your policies being implemented and the public discourse becoming more and more far right and get into a government coalition.
- Blow up the coalition and suffer a bit in the polls.
- Quickly recover in the years to come by repeating step one, just in a more right wing society
- Rinse and repeat until you get absolute power.
Look at Austria, Poland, Hungary…
Fascists profit both from being in opposition, thanks to their less far-right enablers and they profit from a dysfunctional government in the long run.
It’s really interesting how this doesn’t work for the left precisely because left opposition doesn’t get its voice amplified or covered in media while facists do.
Might be because blatant lies market better than ugly truths
Can certainly make an argument for this.
Wasn’t able to turn the government upside down the way as Orbán did, so back into opposition to be able to yell all you want and not have to show anything for it.
Well, the main question is whether they’ll be able to accomplish more as opposition. It wouldn’t surprise me as they can, though at the same time, they’re not as big a threat anymore now that it’s clear that no party will want to govern with them anymore in the foreseeable future, so maybe whoever does get to govern feels less pressure to move in their direction. Until a new party arises, of course.
As was stated by another commenter, the VVD already wasn’t willing to work with the PVV but Yeșilgöz threw that overboard because they lost so badly in the polls she was looking for a last resort to at least get a seat at the table.
It’s not unlike what the PvdA and D66 have done ever since Rutte-I. It’s actually kind of interesting that CDA has never said anything like this. At least not in a memorable way.
Yeah exactly, and this is a surefire way to make her and the rest of the VVD regret that. Presumably they’ll remember the lesson this time, at least for the foreseeable future.
(I do believe CDA has also consistently said they won’t form a coalition with PVV ever since Rutte I, but don’t quote me on that.)
Let’s talk about others. I invite the Dutch people to tell us who they would like to see rise in this election.
It’s not a popular opinion in the Netherlands but I would like Volt to be bigger. If I read about their perfect Netherlands, I really can get behind that. The thing is that they do describe a utopia with a lot of impossible things that are going to cost a lot of money. But hey, we gotta start somewhere, right?
Go Volt!
I like how they are the only party you can vote on in all levels of government, including Europe. Even if they only get 1/2/3 seats next election, I don’t see them going away any time soon.
They had three last election, and their three MPs have been very visible in debates.
I really hope they get five this election.
So for a long time the left has been struggling (like everywhere?) right before the previous elections the two biggest “left” parties merged. In the 2023 elections they were the second largest, after PVV. Let’s see if this time it plays out well.
Problem is unless they become the biggest they will be a second-choice for the big right parties (pvv and vvd). Except for CDA and D66 there isn’t a reasonably sized centre party left and they both might remain too small to form a government without at least one of the big right parties (vvd). But who knows, if vvd pvv shrink a lot it will turn the tables.
