A Dutch Quandary Offers a Glimpse of a Deepening Problem for Europe
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Sure, the racist parties blame (wrongly) all problems on immigrants, but at the same time they are the only ones who publicly denounce that there is a problem to begin with. If I were struggling to get a good education for my children, who should I vote for? The party that wants to raise my transport costs, the one that ruled while the rich got richer, or the one that swears that my salary will go up once all refugees are gone?
I believe all it would take to reduce the power of the far right would be to run on a campaign of "we fucked up and we're sorry".
We need a party that goes back to "we'll kill programs and then start a big program to do X". Better public transport. Housing in large cities. Land on the fucking moon again if you want. SOMETHING. With the power of government they're all very much solvable, but no parties are even interested.
Wilders has but a minority, therefore he is not "too popular to shun".
Instead of moaning about how they are going to engage with a far right politician, instead consider how their own policies turned voters against them.
> They could prevent him from becoming prime minister, but in almost any conceivable circumstance, his party would have to be a part of the government. There is almost no getting around it.
It's the same issue in many other european countries, like Belgium or France. The "regular" political parties (and their mainstream media, which they basically own and which they use for propaganda) try to demonize the far-right but there's a reason so many people are voting for the far-right european parties.
I'm not saying these are good reasons, but it is what people vote for.
And mainstream politicians, instead of addressing the issues that make people vote for the far-right, try to do what politicians do best: dodge the issues, demonize the far-right, and collude to prevent those who won the election from putting in place what they promised their voters they'd do.
If you remove the 5% (approximative) of muslim in the Netherlands (who obviously didn't vote for a party that is anti-islam), there are 26% of voters in the Netherlands who voted for Geert Wilders.
Why? Why is more than one person out of every four in a country voting for a far-right party? How shitty have things become for that to happen? (they won 37 out of 150 seats).
I do believe that, at some point, politicians have to address that question.
P.S: FWIW I'm originally from one the rare (european) country where voting is mandatory but I don't give a crap and still don't go voting. Never had any fine (even though technically I could get one).
A prime feature of the multi-party system is that this is well within their rights, and even the spirit of democracy (if there is such a thing), to do. That the holders of 113 seats can collude against the holders of 37 seats is quite logical. All this coalition building and alliance forming, and even the political parties themselves to an extent, ultimately rest on 150 individual elected persons holding a seat who can in theory do and vote whatever they want.
Well... Yes and no. Because it's precisely that kind of behavior that make it that more and more people keep voting for the far-right (or far-left FWIW): their voices are never taken into account.
With three quarters of the seats left, they can form unholy alliances (involving rightwing parties, leftwing parties, ecological parties, etc.: allianes which are looking more and more unlikely) to make sure the status quo persists... But is this what people want?
I mean: they didn't just have one person out of every four vote for them: there's also no single party who got more vote than that.
If it was a "winner takes all", they'd have won already.
What are mainstream parties going to do? Ignore the issue until more than one in every two voter votes for Geert Wilders?
Is this what it'd take for mainstream politicians to wake up and realize that maybe, just maybe, they did act in a way that pushed one people out of every four to vote for a far-right party?
Or put it this way: if all the parties are going to collude anyway to govern (because so few of them are getting seats), what's even the point of going to vote?
There are obvious problems with that tactic. (Do they not have civics classes in any of these countries anymore?)
The mechanism described above is exactly what happened in the 1932 German Federal elections: "The Nazis and KPD [communists] held over half of the seats in the Reichstag. This made it impossible to form a government composed of moderates."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1932_German_federal_elect...
It didn't end well for the Germans.
In the alternative, is there anything that seriously prevents forming a majority coalition consisting of the VVD (+CDA/BBB?) through the PvdA?
Also, as I understand it, the current Rutte IV cabinet is in caretaker mode, which in theory would prevent them from addressing worker and farmer compensation as well as the housing crisis, but in practice I'd bet the VVD would rather see market solutions to all of these things, so they aren't that motivated to form a new government. Is this correct?
A bit of historical context is that PvdA formed a coalition with VVD in 2012-2017, were then perceived to have not done so well (being overpowered by the VVD despite similar number of seats), and scored a historic loss going from 38 to only 9 seats in the following elections. So PvdA might be a bit hesitant to form a coalition with VVD again.
>Also, as I understand it, the current Rutte IV cabinet is in caretaker mode, which in theory would prevent them from addressing worker and farmer compensation as well as the housing crisis, but in practice I'd bet the VVD would rather see market solutions to all of these things, so they aren't that motivated to form a new government. Is this correct?
The dynamics and edge cases surrounding the cabinet formation and the demissionary cabinet are always a bit unclear to me, can't really answer this one except to say that the rule is that the demissionary cabinet can't decide on controversial issues. I don't know who gets to decide what issues are controversial, or how this rule would be enforced, I get the impression a lot of this is just parliamentary procedure formed through tradition, and maybe laid down in the meeting regulations but not in any laws..
(to my eye it looks like "since you didn't give us any guarantees that you wouldn't pursue the anti-constitutional bits of your platform, we'll support a right-wing government in general but reserve the right to vote down anything stupid your ministers may try in particular"; is that generally what happened?)
As far as I am aware, all that the other right wing parties have asked is that Wilders clarify which of his far-right planks he's willing to drop, but he (as is traditional for far-anything parties) has thus far refused to budge.
In reasonable jurisdictions, politicians don't have to address anyone that isn't willing enough to make sausage to put together a majority coalition.
Meanwhile politics is even less capable of dealing with the large issues we face with climate and an aging population. I'm afraid this is going to become a lot worse still before we come to our senses again.
One or two general elections ago[0] the Danish Peoples Party (which at the time was often declared far right and compared to the likes of Geert Wilders et al) got a 25% vote.
In the media it was described as a "protest vote". It was a landslide and IIRC they became the second largest party in terms of votes.
So, what happened next? First off the party leadership at the time declared that they did not want to join government, which was kind of weird given their extreme share of votes.
Second, a very normal government coalition formed, having the DPP as support but not as members. In local terms this was a "right wing" government (in US terms probably not right wing enough /s).
Third, parties across the full political spectrum began being verbose on immigration (ie "asylum seekers" because, well, IDK... that's the term they prefer I supose, while immigration is seen as beneficial, or... well, it's complicated) at the very least creating an image of concern, and in some notable cases even calling for action. The new government IIRC even crafted a few new media-friendly laws in this area - notably a law on "ghetto demolition" which got a lot of media attention even internationally
Time went by, and the traditional government did more or less what it would have done in any case, with a bend towards being tough on "foreigners-and-Danes-with-certain-foreign-ancestry-but-only-those-related-to-select-geographical-areas-and-mostly-criminal-ones-unemployed-ones-or-asylum-seekers" (sorry, I find it hard to find a single descriptive word here).
As the next general election came the vote of the DPP plummeted to near nothing. Next government was once again a very normal coalition in that region doing what they otherwise would have done, only with a slight bend towards being tough on "x, y, but not z unless a, b ,c ...". Since then the DPP has been split up, and the most of the "right wing" has gone though some hardships, so it's not really the same political landscape now.
I'm not sure this tale is comparable to Dutch politics. In Denmark it was more of "a glimpse" than anything else, and the media and political establishment right now is entirely focused on something else than "those people" (US interests/"Foreign Policy" mostly, domestic not much).
[0] I don't recall if it was the election where the PM accepted an offer of a well paid NATO job while on duty, or the one where the former PM accepted an offer of a well paid Facebook job immediately afterwards... (as for our current PM, she alleges publicly that she "is not interested if an offer should come" confirming the trend by denying it... )
The solution is pretty simple: officially ban the far-right parties and politicians, if the voters fail to get the message to not vote for them. If a national government is captured, and the minority parties cannot fix the problem, then the EU needs to step in and return things to normalcy. Democracy dies if the voters can actually give power to fringe forces outside the mainstream.
"We must destroy democracy to save democracy."
EDIT:
The OP strikes me as the kind of guy that would side with a group of religious extremists trying to unilaterally execute the democratically elected head of government because "He's too dangerous to be left alive." during the middle of a civil war.
Oh, wait, now you're the fascist.
The problems that his voters have will somehow need to be addressed. However, I expect that once Wilders is in power, he also can't solve the problems (for example: building lots of housing is not something a politician can do, especially when you shun immigrants who can solve the labor part of that) and the disillusioned voters will have to find someone else, if they are smart enough to recognize this instead of hailing Wilders as a saint who can do no wrong (and instead blame everything on who is not in power)
As an off topic comment I know people who write stuff that has this sort of confusion and invariably the one's writing satire congratulate themselves on a job well done. I disagree with that assessment.