When Bos took over as leader of the Labour party in 2002, he inherited a party in disarray. Pim Fortuyn had wreaked havoc on the patrician presumptiousness of Ad Melkert, and Labour, which had been coasting under two Wim Kok-led cabinets from 1994-2002, suddenly collapsed into a heap of false assumptions about being the new centre of Dutch politics. (curious aside – Melkert exited the Netherlands and has forged a new career at the World Bank, UNDP, and since mid-2009 as UNDP Special Representative in Iraq. A recent interview suggests that he still hasn´t taken in what happened eight years ago, and his Iraq post has brought mixed reactions).

But back to Bos. Unlike Kok - former union leader – and Melkert – party apparatchik – Bos was a relative outsider, moving as he did from several years at Shell (Rotterdam, London, Hong Kong, Bucharest) to join the party in parliament  in 1998. His corporate experience showed – by 2000 he was already State Secretary for Finance, the number two at the Ministry. And he came out of a rock-solid Protestant – Labour family, his father being a diplomat and activist for the cause of international development. 

Bos came in as leader after the fall of Balkenende´s first cabinet in late 2002. Labour had fallen from 45 to 23 seats in the May 2002 elections, and it was a party lost to a wave of Fortuyn-inspired populism that rejected the arrogance of power apparently expressed by the established parties.  

The eletions in early 2003 produced a wonderful moment, albeit for the wrong reasons. Bos declared that he did not want to be premier himself should Labour win, and instead, just before the elections, he announced Job Cohen as candidate for future prime minister. It was a heavy gamble, and it missed its mark – just. Labour recovered to 42 seats, but couldn´t overcome the Christian Democrats who came away with 44. With the results coming in live on tv, the cameras at the Labour HQ caught Bos meeting an arriving Cohen surrounded by supporters. It was a poignant moment - so near and yet so far. It would also prove prophetic for what was to come. 

Bos´s main problem as Labour leader was his inability to get around the stubborn power of the Christian Democrats (CDA) at the centre of Dutch politics. In 2003, with the levers of power in the hands of Balkenende, it was inevitable that the CDA would not easily allow Labour back in to the ranks of power, and endless negotiations between the two ultimately led nowhere. Likewise personal relations between the two leaders were lousy from then on. Interestingly enough they both come from strong Protestant backgrounds (and both studied at the Free University in Amsterdam), but whereas Bos reflects the pragmatism of a can-do business approach, Balkenende is all high-blown principled moralism. And the two didn´t mix.

Bos´s pragmatism didn´t always work with party members or supporters either. Riding a wave of popular support in 2004-2005, which peaked with remarkable results in the local elections of 2006, it looked as if the tide was turning and Labour could once again claim the key middle ground of Dutch politics. But much of this support - beyond the usual rejection of the incumbent parties – was focused on Bos himself as charismatic leader. This was ok for a while, but it needed back-up with a coherent party programme. And when he entered that field in 2006, it was clear that he was prepared to take on some of the sacred cows in Dutch politics: linking pensions to income, reducing student travel concessions, and less tax relief for mortgage-holders among them. Criticism from within the party caused the pension plans in particular to be watered down. 

Out of that period came two things: the Labour party was effectively Bos himself, and Bos was prepared to think in public and change his mind. For the CDA this provided the opportunity, and all ammunition was focused on Bos as someone who could not be relied upon. The 2006 elections caused yet more bad blood between Bos and Balkenende as the CDA portrayed the Labour leader as, in American terms, someone who ‘flip-flopped’ and didn’t stick to his word. The accusations stuck, and Labour came out of the elections with 33 seats, trailing, once again, the CDA. 

Both Bos’s strengths and weaknesses had therefore been exposed during his time in opposition. From 2007-2010 he grapsed the poisened chalice of a Labour-CDA-Christian Union coalition and tried to get something out of it all as Minister of Finance. Should he have chosen to stay on the oppossition benches? The compromises were difficult: Labour gained money for inner cities and eduation, and a halt to liberalising rented housing,but had to give up on the mortgage tax relief and – a big issue – the demand for an inquiry into Dutch policy on the Iraq war. 

With his experience, it can’t be denied that Bos was the right person for the job when the credit crisis hit in late 2008. Following the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, Bos rescued the Dutch operations of Fortis bank, including ABN AMRO, with 16.8 billion of state money in October. Several billions more followed for struggling ING bank. For his competence in adversity Bos was named politician of the year for 2008 by both politicians and media.

But the damage left by the credit crisis has been more than expected. The hole in state finances left by ABN AMRO has increased as the actual extent of its debts gradually emerged. Looking for sources of income tofill thee hole, Bos supported a plan to raise the pension age from 65 to 67. It was once again pragmatism over dogma, but it didn’t go down so well with Labour supporters seeing it as an unnecessary and unjust move. Bos spoke out earlier this year in his den Uyl Lecture against the way neoliberal market forces had been allowed to go solong unchecked. Social democracy is still on the back foot trying to judge what to fight for and what to give way on when it comes to market forces. Bos tried to find a way through, but discovered that being flexible could make him vulnerable tofriend and foe alike.  

It was foreign affairs that blew everything open in early 2010: The Davids report in January and Uruzgan in February. But the writing was on the wall already. Bos was an able politician, but he was unable to translate high levels of support between elections into actual election victory. 2003 was a great result in the circumstances, but 2006 was a major disappointment.

To his credit Bos analysed the outcome in public via The Wouter Tapes, a remarkably honest tv documentary following Labour leader and advisors through the election campaign of 2006 and its aftermath. Of all sources, this is probably the best for giving an insight into Bos’s character. It fits with his reaction to both the Davids report and the NATO-Uruzgan connection – he does not like backroom deals or decisions taken behind the scenes. It fits with his own sense that his leadership was heading in the right direction – at least for a while.

The entry of Job Cohen as Labour leader to replace Bos has certainly avoided an otherwise tired Bos-Balkenende battle this coming June. Even Wilder knows he may have met his match with the former mayor of Amsterdam. Will Dutch politics miss Bos, the leader who never was? Possibly. His experience highlights how difficult it has been to keep Labour on course in the 2000s, true to its values but able to bend when needed.

Vlaams Belang and the Freedom Party: Ideology or Charisma?

Frank Gerits

De Standaard, a Belgian newspaper, lucidly remarked that the Netherlands woke up in a changed country the day after the local elections. The PVV of Geert Wilders had become the biggest party in Almere and the second largest in Den Haag. More importantly, polls taken that day indicated that Wilders’ party could become the biggest political formation in the parliamentary elections. What is striking in all of this is the fact that commentators are still surprised. Even in Belgium there is astonishment, although we should have grown accustomed by now to the stereotypes, insults and racist remarks of our own extreme right nationalistic party: The Vlaams Belang. But do not lose any sleep over this, it is just Wilders.

I was struck by a double feeling of déjà vu, while reading the opinion pages and blogs that discuss Wilders. This sentiment is rooted in the repetitive nature of the analyses, which is inevitable because the PVV program offers little surprises. Growing up during the nineties in a country and a time in which extremism achieved a lot of success, has made me inert for feelings of surprise when another party comes along with the same story. This small contribution, which stems from a lack of astonishment, will discuss the similarities, differences and the future of the PVV in comparison with the Belgian right-wing Vlaams Belang (VB).

The first déjà vu stems from the resemblance displayed by commentaries on the PVV with articles that have been published about the VB, the French Front National of Le Pen and the Austrian FPÖ of Jorge Haider. Opinion pieces discuss extremism in two distinct ways that seem to recur time and again. Two contributions on the same page in De Standaard of Saturday 6 March can serve as an illustration. Geert Buelens, professor at the University of Utrecht, took the ‘let’s not underestimate’ road. He takes the threat that Wilders embodies serious, voters who cast their ballot in favor of Wilders are people who experience real problemsly, in the sense that Wilders focuses on problems not addressed by conventional parties. In his own words: “PVV-voters do not walk around with their head in the clouds”. Conversely, Hans Wansink, the writer of the book De erfenis van Fortuyn, takes the alternative ‘let’s not panic’ approach, emphasizing some of the ludicrous opinions that are voiced by Wilders (for instance, the secession of the Dutch Antilles) and pointing to the organizational problems faced by the party. People vote for Wilders because there is no alternative to conventional parties. As a result, Wansink minimizes the potential influence of the Freedom party. At the end of the day the PVV will go down the same road as the other extreme parties in Europe and the Lijst Pim Fortuyn before him, disintegrating because of the system or because of internal rows.

Similar analyses indicate analogous situations, hence my second déjà vu. Wilders seems to be just another extreme party emerging from the rubble that collective fear and uncertainty within a society create. Belgian politics has been familiar with this since the founding of Vlaams Belang (originally called Vlaams Blok) in 1982. Since the last election the country has found a way to cope with the Vlaams Belang. Nonetheless, unique to the Wilders case are the people that run the PVV and the Dutch political culture in which it has emerged. The basic question then becomes: what effect will these differences have? Will the Dutch experience be different from the Belgian? Will Wilders triumph where others have failed? The question has broader implications. Do extreme and racist parties disintegrate because they are poorly organized, or is their failure inevitable because the ideas on which they are built are bound to be unmasked as offering a faulty world view?

To be continued….

Interesting times in Rotterdam, the Dutch city that is regarded as something of a political weathervane for the rest of the country. It was in Rotterdam back in 2002 that Pim Fortuyn made his dramatic breakthrough into Dutch politics, and since then it has been all change in this harbour city, a traditional stronghold for Labour. The results of the local elections on Wednesday have produced a close-on dead heat between the Labour party and Leefbaar Rotterdam (literally Livable Rotterdam), a local party with a rightist agenda. Labour won 28.93 % of the vote, Leefbaar 28.63 %, a difference of only 651 votes. Leefbaar’s leader Marco Pastors has demanded a recount, claiming irregularities at some of the voting stations, but it looks like this will not be granted. While some voters were apparently unfairly influenced at 13 voting locations, it has so far been decided that this was not enough to affect the overall outcome.  

There is no love lost between the two parties, and Labour leader Dominic Schrijer already refused any cooperation with Leefbaar earlier this year. The main issue from now on is how to create a workable coalition to run the city. Pastors has not closed out working with Labour, but this is a meaningless statement because he has indicated his lack of faith in Rotterdam’s Labour mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb. Aboutaleb, of course, is a key leader at the municipal level for Labout – a Moroccan by birth, the former councillor in Amsterdam was appointed mayor in January 2009 in a move that the New York Times described as “a landmark in the successful integration of immigrants.”  

Pastors had this to say at the time of Aboutaleb’s appointment: “He is morally upright and thinks immigrants must adapt to our Dutch values. He believes that they must take the chances the Netherlands offers and not sink into the role of victims. He can say what many do not dare say: ‘If you don’t like it here, then pack your bags.”‘ Now this trust has disappeared. Pastors, who entered politics with Fortuyn in Rotterdam in 2002 and has never looked back, is renowned as a controversial politican who is not afraid to share his concerns over the ‘Islamicisation’ of the city, for instance through the building of mosques, forced marriages, and the demeaning treatment of women and homosexuals. 

But the outcome could give some indication of what to expect after the national elections in June. Both Labour and Leefbaar Rotterdam have 14 seats in the 45-seat municipal assembly. Since Labour – just – received more votes, it has the first opportunity to try and form a majority. But any coalition will have to be formed from at least four parties, since the results produced a fractured political landscape with no easy options. Labour-Leefbaar would be the most effective partnership, but Pastors’ opposition to about Aboutaleb rule this out.

It is true that most of the focus has so far gone to the success of Wilders in Almere and the Hague. It is a fair point, as raised on DutchNews, that we should not overestimate the chances for Wilders to achieve success at the polls in June. But Rotterdam raises another problem that may well be faced at the national level – political deadlock due to votes being spread across the spectrum, allowing no stable coalition to emerge. That is a definite possibility. Roll on, Belgium. Or – Have the Dutch ever gone in for tactical voting?

The Hague is proud of its status as the ‘legal capital of the world’, it being the location for many well-known institutions such as the International Criminal Court, the Yugoslavia Tribunal, and the Peace Palace among others. A 500-page book with this title published in 2005 proudly boasted that it was ”a testament to the vital importance of the rule of law and the special role The Hague plays in promoting peace and justice.”

Yet the local political situation gives quite another picture to the city. On the eve of local elections on 3 March, Jovan Pronk, a resident of The Hague, discusses the nature of Wilders’ party and the reasons for his focus on only two municipalities. 

Coping with Geert Wilders

Jovan Pronk

As the Netherlands goes to the polls for local elections, March 3^rd, all eyes will be on results in Almere and The Hague. These are the only urban municipalities where the far-right Freedom Party (PVV) of Geert Wilders has fielded candidates.  With opinion polls suggesting the Freedom Party may end as the largest in parliament after national elections next June, the outcome of these two local elections may offer some insight into the future political state of the Netherlands.

The reasons why the Freedom Party are only standing in these two municipalities are in themselves worth highlighting. The Freedom Party is difficult to define. It is not a ‘party’ in the conventional sense of the term. You can donate to it, but cannot join it, nor influence its policy forming. It has no internal democracy. Its sole purpose is to serve as a platform for the ambitions of Geert Wilders and his brand of anti-Islamic populist nationalism; accurately described in a recent New York Times editorial as ‘hate spewing’ and ‘xenophobic ’.

Living at an undisclosed location, under 24 hour police protection, Geert Wilders has won the battle for the political space opened up by the late Pim Fortuyn in 2002. Attempting to define this political space remains the subject of considerable debate. A recent report into ethnic, religious and political polarisation coined the term “New Radical Right’ to describe Wilders’ movement. By any conventional political genealogy it cannot be placed on the neo-fascist ‘extreme-right’. Wilders is no anti-Semite for example. Indeed, he can make a serious claim to be one of the most ardent Zionists in the Dutch legislature; he once lived on a Kibbutz, admires Israel immensely and visits it regularly. His party backs the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory; his inflammatory rhetoric is more Avigdor Lieberman than David Ben-Gurion.

Wilders’s Zionism, however genuine, is also useful in distancing himself from accusations of right-wing political extremism.  Nonetheless, the Dutch anti-Fascist research bureau Kafka revealed that many of his sympathisers who demonstrated during his recent court appearance in Amsterdam have backgrounds in unreconstructed neo-fascist parties.

Wilders controls his movement with an iron fist, micro-managing its dealings and orchestrating an extremely controlled approach to the media. Consequently, he astutely decided it would be political suicide were any candidates for local government to have neo-fascist associations, and it is this lack of suitable individuals that caused him to stand in only two local municipalities, with his eye firmly on the upcoming national elections. In this Wilders has learned the lessons of the unholy shambles the late Pim Fortuyn’s movement descended into, when crooks, cranks and opportunists ran amok during the party’s time in government in late 2002.

Here in The Hague the Freedom Party has captured much local and international attention. The two mainstream centre-right parties, the Christian Democrats and the Conservative-Liberal VVD (for which Wilders was once a member of parliament) are now running policy programmes leaning to the right, with hard authoritarian language and proposed cuts in public spending for welfare, culture and social services. The choice of The Hague and Almere reflects the Freedom Party’s success in recent European elections in these municipalities. In The Hague, by Dutch standards a socially polarised and fragmented city, two unreconstructed neo-fascist parties scored more than 13% in local elections in 1994. Many local citizens, not least amongst the large Islamic minority, are holding their collective breath. Watch this space.

The Dutch Parliament [Photo from derdekamer.nl]

In this first reflection, lets start by considering some of the domestic political dimensions.

The cabinet Balkenende IV failed by two days to hang around until its third birthday, and for the fourth time in a row a cabinet led by Balkenende suffers a premature end. His (lack of) leadership has been criticised consistently throughout those governments, but Dutch politics has become far more restless over the past eight years, and he cannot be solely held to blame.

Balkenende I (2002) went down after only 86 days due to the ministers from Pim Fortuyn’s party (effectively leaderless following his assassination before the election) proving unable to maintain any unity. Balkenende II (2003-2006) collapsed when D 66 decided it could no longer work together with the right-wing national-populism of Minister for Immigration Rita Verdonk. After D 66 withdrew, Balkenende III held the country together from July 2006 till February 2007, when the results of the November elections finally brough Balkenende IV into existence. Three years later it has now gone down. 

But Balkenende IV, with its awkward alliance between Christian Democrats and Labour, was always a shaky political construction waiting for one or other policy earthquake. Journalist Marc Chavannes describes it as “one of the strangest post-war cabinets” – due to incessant compromises it never got going, so its difficult to say that its now actually gone. For a while in 2008-2009 it looked like Labour would come out of it well, thanks to Minister of Finance Bos looking like he could manage the pitfalls of the financial crisis. But the rescue of ABN AMRO by the Dutch state has cost billions, leaving a large hole in the public purse and pushing the Netherlands beyond the agreed-on limits to public debt for the Euro-zone (but this is hardly unusual at the moment). And Labour has had to twist its programme – most notably on raising the pension age from 65 to 67 and on bank bonuses - in order to keep in line with the cabinet, in doing so alienating its members and distancing potential supporters. From this perspective, it is no surprise that it is Bos and Labour who have ended this Grand Coalition experiment.

 It leaves an uncertain time ahead. Labour will depart from its ministerial positions tomorrow, leaving the Christian Democrats and Christian Union to hold the government together before elections produce a new formation. But what will that mean in practice?

The first outburst will be the local elections on 3 March, where it is widely expected that there will be a large turn to the opposition parties. The most significant point here is the Wilders chose last year only to put candidates forward in two cities, Almere and The Hague. Speculation abounded but most likely reason is that Wilders, determined to maintain control, did not want to lose it should his party win hundreds of seats across the country. As it turns out, it looks like a master stroke. With the vast majority of voters not having Wilders’ PVV as an option on 3 March, it is highly likely that many of them will therefore do so at the next opportunity – national elections, probably on or around 12 May. In other words, the local elections will not function as a safety valve, but as a bottleneck.

If current trends continue, the May elections are going to produce one of the most significant test cases for the future of Dutch politics. The battle is to be the largest party, as the leader of that party will then have the first opportunity to form a cabinet. 76 seats out of the 150 in parliament are needed to back up a stable cabinet.

Scenario I – Christian Democrats are the largest, but this may be no more than 30 seats. Logical partners are the Liberals (VVD), Christian Union, maybe D 66. If together they could get  above 76, they  might be able to form a four-party cabinet.

But this is probably wishful thinking. And considering I am a typical voter of the centre-left, it gives some idea of how desperate the current situation is that I actually see this as potentially the best outcome.

Scenario II – The Christian Democrats become the largest and are prepared to work with Wilders’ PVV, plus perhaps the Liberals. This would be the most right-wing government the Netherlands has had. The positive spin on this – and that would be more spin than one of Shane Warne’s leg-breaks, out of the rough - is that, just like Balkenende I, the authoritarian Wilders and the inexperienced PVV would cause the cabinet to self-destruct fairly soon, bringing new elections and a more sober outcome. That is what happened in 2002-2003. But Wilders is not the same as a rudderless Pim Fortuyn party without Pim Fortuyn. And the bottom line here is that the CDA would be taking this on in order to stay in power – for the good of the country, of course. It would be a high-risk strategy, and it would take the Netherlands in a whole new direction. 

Scenario III – Labour or the Socialists are the largest party, and set out to form a left-of-centre cabinet together with GreenLeft and probably D 66. This won’t happen. Labour are facing their worst results for a long time, and it is highly unlikely that the Socialists will come out on top of everyone else. With their previous leader Jan Marijnissen? Maybe. Under Agnes Kant? No.

Scenario IV – Wilders’ PVV becomes the largest party with somewhere around 30 seats. Wilders sets out to form a cabinet. Then it becomes very, very interesting indeed. Who would be prepared to work with him? Who would be prepared to accept Wilders as Minister-President? The Christian Democrats might work with Wilders if they are top dog, but being second best? And the Liberals?

Two points here, both of which have direct reference to Belgian politics:

1) It is widely considered that the cordon sanitaire run by the centrist parties against the Vlaams Bloc (now Vlaams Belang), particularly in Antwerp, successfully excluded the Flemish nationalists from power and partly led to their decline. Are we entering a similar phase in Dutch politics? Somehow I doubt it. Wilders is not Filip Dewinter, and the PVV is a different kind of political animal. A lot will depend on how Wilders presents himself from now on, and how willing he is to start bending his message for possible deals later.

1) It is almost certainly going to take a long, long time to sort it all out. The Dutch average is three months between elections and having the new cabinet sworn in. This time it is going to take longer. In 2007 the Belgians took 196 days to form a government, which then proved to be hopelessly fragile. This was the second longest post-election government formation in Europe’s democratic history……beaten only by the Dutch, with 208 days, in 1977.

Conclusions:

Worst of all worst case scenarios – PVV-CDA-VVD 

Second worst of worst case scenarios – CDA-PVV-VVD

Relative sanity – CDA-D66-VVD

Muddling through – CDA-VVD-D66-CU

Leftist dreamland – PvdA-D66-SP-GroenLinks

May the betting begin.