Job Cohen (PvdA) resigns, Geert Wilders: insult machine, Prince Friso in hospital

Just when you least expected it, a re-launch of sorts! (Don’t get too excited, though.)

Quite a few things going on in the Netherlands at the moment, but the main reason for this post is to compare one of the major events of the last week with a similar situation occurring right now in Australia.

Over here, Prime Minister Julia Gillard of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) is facing a challenge to her leadership by Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, who was ALP Prime Minister from 2007-2010, before he was overthrown by Gillard, who went on to lead Labor to a very narrow victory in the 2010 elections, resulting in a minority government including Greens and Independents. Almost two years later, and with Labor sinking to record lows in the opinion polls, Rudd’s decided that he wants his old job back. So who will decide this? The hundred or so ALP MPs in the federal parliament. They’ll cast their votes at a caucus meeting on Monday.

The media has been buzzing with media speculation for the last few weeks, so even if there was no intention by Rudd to challenge, the endless commentary probably made it seem inevitable. In any case, it looks like Gillard will win comfortably, for reasons I’m not going to go in to here because by the time I’d finish you’d either be asleep or very confused, and there are far more interesting things to discuss.

The link between the ALP brawl here and the Netherlands is that the Labour (PvdA) parliamentary leader there resigned a couple of days ago, without much of the breathless media hype that we’ve seen in Australia. Job Cohen, once the very popular Mayor of Amsterdam, had been at the helm of the PvdA since a bit before the 2010 elections, where he effectively missed out on becoming Prime Minister by a single seat. Fast forward two years and the PvdA is predicted to lose half of its 30 seats in the Tweede Kamer should an election be held soon.

It began with a leaked e-mail to Cohen from a disgruntled PvdA MP, and after a few days of speculation, Cohen held a party meeting, where he realised he didn’t have the support of more than around half of the PvdA MPs, so he decided to step down and leave parliament. It all happened pretty quickly, actually, and with a lot more dignity than the situation in Australia. The party membership will now vote to determine the new leader from the sitting MPs – two of whom have already nominated.

For what it’s worth, I’ve always liked Cohen (I very much appreciated his speech on the evening of the 2010 elections when he spoke warmly of the gains made by D66 and GroenLinks despite the PvdA arguably having lost seats to them), but there are many reasons for his failure to break through with the electorate – his inability to work out exactly how to be the opposition leader, his fraught relations with the Socialist Party, and no doubt the vicious attacks by Geert Wilders didn’t help. Cohen admitted that he was unable to provide the PvdA with sufficient vision and inspiration. He is more a politician from the Paas-era: calmly seeking consensus and co-operation. This hasn’t gone down well in the highly-combative post-Fortuyn era.

Speaking of Geert Wilders: recently he claimed in parliament that the PvdA had been welcoming of immigrants from Muslims countries for all these years because they were “cattle for votes” (doesn’t translate well, I know). This claim is based around the fact that most Muslims vote for the PvdA, with GroenLinks also attracting a significant portions of the Muslim vote. Of course, might this be because these two parties are among the few who don’t demonise immigrants, Muslims in particular? The Socialist Party leader, Emile Roemer, was so outraged at Wilders’ comments that he walked angrily out of the Tweede Kamer, closely followed by the rest of the Socialist MPs.

UPDATE: I’ve just realised that Wilders made these comments several months ago. But he’s probably been repeating them endlessly since then, so perhaps in the context of this post, they should been seen as typical of the hatred he so eagerly spouts. The website where you can report a “Pole causing trouble” is a recent development, though.

Either way, Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who has been taking a hands-off approach to Wilders’  berserk outbursts (the PVV recently set up a website where people could report “Polish workers” who were “causing trouble”), admitted that the comment was inappropriate.  Rutte will be hoping that the new PvdA leader will be keener to work with him than Cohen was so that he has to rely less on Wilders, who is becoming more poisonous by the day.

But the news that has been understandably dominating the headlines for the last week regards Prince Johan Friso, the second of  Queen Beatrix’s three sons, who has been in an induced coma in Innsbruck hospital for several days after being caught in an avalanche while skiing at Lech, a famous ski resort in Austria. The 43-year old Prince was dragged along for a couple of hundred metres by the rush of snow, and stuck under half a metre of it for twenty minutes before he was dug out. The paramedics admitted that it took a long time to resuscitate him, and so far it is unclear what kind of lasting damage there will be, if any. His situation continues to be described as stable but serious.

Needless to say, in a country where the monarchy is greatly loved (90% approval rate last time I checked), there are a lot of people hoping for a successful recovery. Despite being a republican in principle, I certainly count myself among them.

LIVEBLOG: 2011 Provincial Elections

Good morning from Australia, where it passed 7:30am a few minutes ago. It is just past 21:30 in the Netherlands; the polls closed half-an-hour ago. All times from now on are Dutch local time, which is GMT +1.

Exit polls are predicting the following:

CDA: 13.6% (- 11.4)
VVD: 20.0% (+ 1.9)
PvdA: 17.5% (- 0.4)
PVV: 11.8% (+ 11.8)
SP: 10.7% (- 4.1)
D66: 8.0% (+ 5.4)
GL: 6.4% (+ 0.3)
CU/SGP: 6.0% (- 2.8)
PvdD: 1.9% (- 0.5)
Others: 1.3% (- 3.0)

I’ll work these percentages out in seats soon, or maybe I’ll just wait for Dutch television to do it for me!

21:38 – One result is already in – the small island of Vlieland north of Friesland. It doesn’t entirely match up with the predicted trend, as the PvdA has gained a few percent there. The prediction for the “Others” category includes the regional parties under the OSF (Independent Senate Group). If they’ve really lost that much of the vote, their seat could be in trouble.

Provincial / Senate Elections this Wednesday

Provincial elections, held every four years, usually attract the least interest and therefore lowest turnout out of the three levels of government in the Netherlands. Provincial parliaments are said to have less power than councils, and certainly less than the national government. No “states rights” or the like here. However, provincial MPs have a very important task to carry out not long after their election: the election of the Eerste Kamer (Senate). The Senate has 75 members, and at the 2007 elections there were 564 members of the provincial parliaments. This was a reduction from 764 in the 2003 elections, increasing the threshold needed to win a seat.

The Scene Since September

This post is a few months late, so there’s quite a bit to catch up on. Hence, I’ll summarise as much as possible, and maybe one day I can post about events as they happen. To recap my last post: negotiations between VVD, CDA and PVV had just collapsed when Ab Klink, former CDA minister and key coalition negotiator, wrote a letter to CDA parliamentary leader Maxime Verhagen, and party chairperson Henk Bleker, declaring that he could no longer take part in any negotiations with the PVV due to his opposition to such an outcome. When the letter became public it became clear that two other CDA MPs, Kathleen Ferrier and Ad Koppejan, backed Klink’s position. The PVV withdrew from negotiations at this point.

Only a few days (7 September) after the PVV withdrew from negotiations with VVD and CDA, Klink resigned from parliament. The circumstances surrounding this decision suggest that he was under a lot of pressure from party colleagues to change his tune or leave. With Klink out of the way, the PVV indicated its willingness to enter talks again. The CDA MPs met behind closed doors and agreed to continue negotiations, keeping in mind that a special congress of CDA members could still veto any coalition agreement.

Stating the obvious: site on hiatus

Hello to my small group of readers! While there is a lot to say about recent events in Dutch politics, not least that there is finally a new government, I won’t be posting about it for at least a few more weeks. I am running as a candidate for the Greens in the Victorian state elections, which will be held on Saturday 27 November (before anyone asks, my chances of winning are incredibly small). Once that’s done, I should be able to pay more attention to hobbies such as this blog, so see you all in December.

- Justin-Paul

7. The Liberal Parties

While there is a case to say that the two parties I’ve put in the category “liberal” could have been placed in another, I think it’s important distinction to make. As such, liberalism is a key feature of Dutch society, where an emphasis on tolerance and freedom has long been the norm — only in the recent decade has this image begun to waver and fray around the edges. The two liberal parties — the VVD and D66, represent two variants of traditional liberalism in terms of personal and economic freedom. The VVD has a more right-wing streak, whereas D66 is more to the left, but both sit in the same group in the European parliament (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe).

VVD / PVV / CDA coalition negotiations collapse

I haven’t posted here for a while for a couple of reasons: firstly, we’ve just had a federal election in Australia, and my focus naturally shifted to that, and secondly, the negotiations between VVD, Geert Wilders’ PVV and the CDA were looking promising in terms of reaching an agreement, so I figured I might as well wait until the announcement of the new government before posting again.

Of course, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. In previous posts, I pointed out that a number of CDA leaders and ‘prominents’ as they’re called in the Netherlands were openly opposed to working with Geert Wilders and his band of followers. This unrest continued to build in the lead-up to a special congress of the CDA membership where the proposal to work with the PVV in government would be put to a vote. Turns out that congress won’t be necessary, because Wilders has withdrawn from negotiations.

The final straw for Wilders seems to have been the letter sent by CDA negotiator and MP Ab Klink. In this letter, he stated he refused to take part in any further negotiations with Wilders and did not promise his support in parliament for a government with the PVV in it. Additionally, it appeared that he was not alone in this — another two CDA MPs have indicated their agreement with this stance. What this means is that the VVD/PVV/CDA coalition, which would have had the barest of majorities of 76 seats in the Tweede Kamer, now has only 73 guaranteed votes. It is worth noting here that the three CDA dissidents haven’t ruled out taking part in such a right-wing coalition, merely that their support could not be taken for granted.

VVD leader Mark Rutte has decided that his next step will be to write a governing accord by himself, and then see which parties will sign-on. How successful this attempt will be depends entirely on whether Rutte writes an accord which simply is a list of VVD policies, or whether he makes a genuine attempt to put something to paper which will be feasible for a number of parties. I would imagine that if Rutte fails in this attempt, the baton of coalition-forming may well be passed on to Job Cohen as leader of the second-largest party. If he fails as well, there could be new elections early next year.

Oh, and before I sign off, a special note to Australian readers worried about the situation back home: chill, okay? It’s only been two weeks since our elections, and it looks like we’ll have a government within a few days. The Dutch have been at it since June and it doesn’t look like it’ll resolve any time soon. Meanwhile, the economy hasn’t collapsed, and there haven’t been riots in the streets. Hung parliaments are a good thing. They mean compromise and negotiation are the order of the day. In my opinion, the only party which has a right to govern alone is one that polls over 50% of the primary vote.