I must admit I don’t entirely trust TNS-NIPO’s wild swings, and I don’t understand their publication schedule. The poll was released on the 6th, but the press release went out only on the 10th.
I informally compared the reception of the three polls in the press, and it’s very clear that Peil.nl receives by far most attention, the Barometer some, and TNS-NIPO almost none. Their last poll wasn’t mentioned anywhere (at least, I didn’t see it).
TNS-NIPO would certainly be helped by a reliable publication schedule. Their results are every bit as wild as Peil.nl’s, but Peil is helped by the fact that everybody knows it’s released every Sunday.
Anyway, in my average the left-wing parties are at a historical high of 74 seats. The SP marginally outstrips the VVD 33 to 32; Wilders’s PVV is down to 20, PvdA and D66 are stabilising and the smaller parties (including the CDA) are not doing very well.
To be honest, I don’t think that will last. Something of a swing back to the right is to be expected, although I hope the parties of the left will retain at least some of the seats they recently conquered.
]]>Today we’ll start with the only new party that could make it to parliament: 50Plus.
]]> History and party profile50Plus is a typical protest party for the elderly who fear for their pensions. As such it stands in a long, though generally not very succesful, tradition. Back in 1994 parties for the elderly won no less than 7 seats because the CDA stupidly decided to discuss pensions just before the elections, but they fell out, split up, didn’t accomplish anything, and disappeared without a trace in the 1998 elections. Whether 50Plus is any different remains to be seen, but the omens are slightly better.
50Plus is the brain-child of Jan Nagel, who can best be described as a political entrepeneur. There aren’t many politicians who’ve been involved in a revolution from the left and its counter-revolution from the right, but Nagel is one.
He started his career in the PvdA of the early sixties, and was one of the main founders of the Nieuw Links movement that aimed at pulling the party leftward. He was the main author of an influential pamphlet and a member of the PvdA board. Eventually Nieuw Links succeeded, the PvdA drew sharply leftward, polarised politics, and grew, sucking dry the old christian parties together with its opposite number on the right, the VVD.
Nagel was involved, but not at the top level. After serving in the Senate from 1977 to 1983 he became less active in politics. In 1993 he resigned from the PvdA and founded Leefbaar Hilversum (“Livable Hilversum”), a local party in his town of residence that called itself neither left nor right, but tried to focus on stuff that voters found important. As such it was succesful: it became the largest party in the Hilversum council three times in a row, and Nagel became an alderman.
The Leefbaar movement was copied in several other towns and cities, with the best-known offshoot being Leefbaar Rotterdam, which is still the main right-wing party in that city. In 2001 Nagel took the initiative for creating Leefbaar Nederland, a party that was supposed to bring the Leefbaar initiative to national parliament. Nagel became chairman and he was instrumental in selecting Pim Fortuyn as its political leader. Then Fortuyn started to bash Islam, Leefbaar Nederland fired him, he founded his own party, and the Fortuyn revolt was a fact. Leefbaar Nederland won 2 seats in 2002 against 26 for Fortuyn, and disappeared silently in 2003.
In 2005 Nagel teamed up with well-known crime journalist Peter R. de Vries for an abortive attempt at a (surprisingly left-wing) law-and-order and reform party. Via an earlier attempt at a party for the elderly focusing on pensions, Nagel arrived at 50Plus in 2011.
50Plus is not only Jan Nagel; other well-known members are Henk Krol, editor of the Gay Krant and one of the main forces behind the legalisation of gay marriage; Michiel van Hulten, a former PPR secretary of state under Den Uyl (1973-1977); chess master and writer Hans Böhm; TV personality Koos Postema; and Klaas Wilting, the former PR chief of the Amsterdam police.
50Plus was founded in early 2011, so it did not participate in the 2010 general elections. It did participate in the 2011 provincial elections, winning 9 seats in 8 provinces. These nine States members were easily enough to elect Jan Nagel to the Senate, and he returned to parliament after 28 years.
50Plus had more voting power than was needed for one seat, and decided to strike a deal with the OSF (Onafhankelijke Senaatsfractie; Independent Senate Fraction). This is an amalgam of regional parties from the outlying provinces, as well as the Greens (as distinct from GL), and it used to be able to win a seat by itself. However, the 2011 elections were harsh for the OSF member parties, and it needed help.
50Plus offered that help: several of its States members would vote OSF, on the condition that the OSF list was headed by 50Plus vice-chairman De Lange. Thus De Lange was elected for the OSF, and 50Plus considers itself to have two seats in the Senate.
50Plus will not participate in local elections, since there are enough local parties that don’t need yet another competitor. Besides, the pensions are decided on the national level, so that’s what the party should focus on.
50Plus shows up with one seat in nearly all polls. Recently it even had two seats. All this may change dramatically either way, but right now everybody assumes 50Plus will enter parliament in the next elections.
It’s unclear where its voters come from, but most of the well-known party members come from the moderate, old-fashioned left.
In any case, the economic crisis will make sure pensions remain a hot item for some time to come, so its main issue will remain interesting to many, mainly older, voters. Still, the SP also makes a great deal of defending the pensions, and that party is currently on a winning streak, too.
For 50Plus it would be best if the SP loses some attraction and people start wondering where else their pensions may be safe.
50Plus would only be asked to reinforce a coalition if there is a very splintered parliament, and some sort of (centre-)left coalition needed a few more seats. Although larger than zero, this chance is not very high.
In the short term 50Plus should focus on getting any seats at all and becoming a stable, though minor, factor in Dutch politics.
]]>In general, the 7% consist of women more than men, younger voters more than older, lower-educated ones more than middle- or high, they are politically centrist, and they value SP leader Roemer higher than PVV leader Wilders. (That last bit is a general trend across even block lines right now; don’t read too much in it.)
Ipsos gives the following comparison table with the percentage of SP and PVV voters that also consider another party. Unfortunately it’s not quite clear whether they mean 2010 SP and PVV voters or polled people who currently prefer those parties. I’m guessing the latter.
| Party | PVV voters | SP voters |
|---|---|---|
| SP | 17% | 100% |
| PVV | 100% | 14% |
| VVD | 40% | 11% |
| PvdA | 13% | 43% |
| CDA | 14% | 7% |
| D66 | 7% | 30% |
| GL | 5% | 36% |
| CU | 3% | 4% |
| SGP | 3% | 1% |
| PvdD | 14% | 13% |
| 50Plus | 15% | 12% |
| Total | 231% | 271% |
In general SP voters are left-block, and PVV voters right-block. That’s not much of a surprise, but it’s good to see it confirmed once more, especially since sometimes opinion articles seem to think the two kinds of voters are completely interchangeable.
PVV voters hesitate between 2.3 parties on average; SP voters between 2.7 parties. Since the left block has one more party than the right block, this seems natural.
Still, 40% of the PVV voters see the VVD as a possibility, against only 14% for the CDA. This is quite a difference, and it’s not really repeated on the left. There, 43% of SP voters see the PvdA as a possibility, and GL and D66 also score quite decently.
About 15% of the voters for both parties consider the other party, which works out to roughly 7% of the total electorate. Still, take a look at the 50Plus and PvdD numbers: they’re barely less. This is good news for especially small protest party 50Plus. Sure, sympathy doesn’t mean actual votes, especially not once strategic voting starts to be factored in, but it still means these two parties may attract a decent amount of protest voters.
The oft-repeated theory that most PVV voters are disappointed PvdA voters is just not true: only 13% of PVV voters is considering the social-democrats. The PvdA scores higher than GL or D66, but that doesn’t really say a lot.
So the voter conduit between the extreme left and the extreme right exists and is worth roughly 10 seats. Currently the SP is profiting from this, but that could just as well change with the next polls.
]]>In addition, the paper finds that it’s voters from any sort of middle group (income, education, or political preference) that are most volatile. There is no more centre party, apparently. CDA is too confused, D66 too much for higher-educated city dwellers.
The research confirms the existence of a left and a right block, with fairly little traffic between them. The left consists of SP, GL, and PvdA, and the right of CDA, VVD, and PVV. In this paper D66 is the only true centre party, catching votes from both left and right. In addition, the paper sees very little vote exchange between PvdA and CDA. It does not say anything about movement between SP and PVV, but the most recent polls suggest that such a move is definitely going on.
In my mental model there are three conduits that allow voters to move from right to left. If these three voter movements take place simultaneously, the left wins a lot of seats from the right (or vice versa):
The paper agrees on VVD-to-D66, but adds that many CDA voters, too, may consider the Democrats. Though the numbers support that conclusion up to a point, the amount of VVD-to-D66 switchers is still much larger than the amount of CDA-to-D66 switchers. I always thought that the CDA was too socially conservative to have much in common with D66, and from these numbers that appears to be true up to a point. Not all CDA voters are social conservaties, though: some are just genuinely centrist, and for them D66 remains an alternative.
The paper also says there’s hardly any evidence for voter movement between PvdA and CDA. That may be so, but the research is only about 2006 and later — exactly the period that both these parties performed their incredible shrinking act. If both of them lose voters it’s only natural that they don’t exchange any: unhappy right-wing PvdA voters casting around for an alternative won’t like an equally confused CDA, and will instead opt for D66. So I’d like to revisit this voter conduit once at least one of the two parties performs well in the polls.
As to the PVV to SP conduit: the current crop of polls makes clear that it is in fine working order. The paper doesn’t dissect this conduit in detail, but it’s clearly there (see for instance table 4.1, page 32).
Finally, the paper gives the various parties some strategic advice. There are several interesting points here:
This is big. It’s not necessarily the endpoint of the political struggle, but it’s very clear now that over January the Dutch voters have repudiated the current coalition and are looking to the left, and especially the SP, for an alternative.
At last.
]]>Now Wilders has attacked many parties in the past, and has succeeded admirably especially against the PvdA. Thus some say the SP should be worried about Wilders’s words: it may go the same way as the PvdA.
I think that’s untrue. Wilders’s attacks on the PvdA were so succesful exactly because that party has shuffled off its ideological feathers and gone with the neo-liberal free-market-crazed crowd. There is a huge mismatch between what the PvdA stands for and what it says it stands for.
The SP does not resemble the PvdA at all in that respect. It has never been part of government, so its ideological purity is unsullied. Besides, it has always opposed the free-market radicalism and preached old-fashioned leftism based on defending the welfare state.
Even more importantly: Wilders’s voters agree with the SP on a lot of welfare-related issues, which is why I believe the socialists are largely immune to Wilders’s slings and arrows. His warnings don’t make any sense. He says a SP/PvdA government will be a disaster, but I doubt whether a lot of his voters agree. Sure, the hard-right ones for whom anti-Islam sentiment comes first do, but the mainly left-wing protest voters won’t. They might be happy with a large SP that keeps the PvdA pointed in the right direction.
So far the SP has responded in very measured tones, and doesn’t seem to fall in the trap of playing along with Wilders. The socialists may be much more succesful than the PvdA in this respect. They may even start to attack Wilders, and they’re in the unique position that they’re actually a valid alternative to many Wilders voters.
Meanwhile, parliament is discussing a new law that aims to make the (rather modest) donations political parties receive completely transparent. Everybody agrees this is a good idea, except for Wilders. The reason seems to be he’s holding reasonably succesful fundraisers in the US. NRC reported he gathered $75,000 recently. That’s small fry for a US politician, but in the Dutch context it’s quite a lot, and it’s pretty decent for a foreign politician in the US.
So Wilders stands to lose from this law. Tough luck. Everybody from SP to VVD seems to be in favour, so it’ll pass.
Unless Wilders makes its rejection a requirement for his support for the upcoming savings. He might do that, but it won’t look too well if this ever becomes public knowledge.
I’m not saying Wilders is doomed. He’s a very clever politician who plays on his electorate’s hopes and fears like a master. Still, he hasn’t been in this much trouble since he started his independent career.
]]>First the poll itself. It confirms the current trend of seats flowing from PVV to SP, and the SP has now even become the largest party in the country. (SP: 32, VVD: 30, PVV: 20)
It seems clear that one of the three main right-to-left conduits has opened, and as a result the right loses seats to the left. (The other two main conduits are from VVD to D66 and from CDA to PvdA.)
Still, this is Peil.nl we’re talking about, and to be frank I do not completely trust their polling. To me it’s too pro-left, and too much out for sensational headlines. The SP becoming larger than the VVD seamlessly fits both.
Nonetheless, when it comes to trends I trust it more than when it comes to absolute numbers; especially if those trends are confirmed by the other pollsters. The recent TNS-NIPO poll does exactly that, although the left as a whole and the SP are smaller than with Peil.nl.
I’m eagerly awaiting the Politieke Barometer of next Thursday. If it confirms the movement from PVV to SP we’re really in business, and Wilders is really in trouble.
Peil.nl also split out the vote by income groups (low, middle, high), and it’s there that we see an explanation for the current voter shift. It turns out that the low income groups are massively turning from PVV to SP. Where at the end of 2011 18% of low-income voters voted PVV against 17% SP, now it’s 32% SP vs. 12% PVV. The SP also drew low-income voters from GL, D66, and the PvdA. The same pattern, though less extreme and without GL, also occurs with the middle incomes.
In other words, the SP now truly had a chance to become the default left-wing party, shoving too-centrist PvdA and vaguely left-liberal GL aside. The time has truly come for the SP to enter a coalition and deliver the prime minister, as is the largest coalition party’s privilege.
In fact, my coalition calculator has shown for a while now that an SP-led centre-left coalition is somewhat more likely than a VVD-led Purple, centre-right, or right coalition.
Peil.nl asked voters several SP-related questions, and one of them was whether it would be good that the SP entered government. Obviously SP voters were in favour, but so were PvdA, GL, and, surprisingly and by a narrow majority, CDA voters. That’s a recipe for a centre-left coalition with three left-wing parties and the CDA, and headed by Roemer.
Another question: do you think SP leader Roemer will make a better prime minister than PvdA leader Cohen? Painfully, even 35% of PvdA voters said Yes, and among the voters for all other parties a majority agreed.
The real problem with coalition with the SP is the VVD. Without the VVD, a centre-left coalition would likely have to include all four left-wing parties in addition to the CDA, but with the VVD a whole new slew of coalitions becomes possible.
Will SP and VVD cooperate? Roemer recently stretched out a hand to the liberals; pointing out that as an alderman in the southern town of Boxmeer he has already formed an SP/VVD coalition. True, on a national scale that’s different than on a local one, but still. So far the VVD has rejected Roemer’s overtures.
Peil.nl also asked whether a SP/VVD coalition was impossible. 39% of SP voters answered Yes, meaning that a majority wouldn’t mind the coalition. 50% of VVD voters rejected the coalition. Some work clearly needs to be done here.
Of the other parties, a majority of PVV and PvdA voters also reject the coalition, while majorities of CDA, D66, and GL voters thought it possible.
Finally, what of this month’s big loser: Geert Wilders and his PVV? He has some tough choices to make. It’s clear that his recent fall in the polls come from his support for government’s hard-right policies. Thus, from an electoral point of view it would make sense if he increased the distance between himself and government.
Still, the obvious result of more distance would be the fall of government and new elections; elections where Wilders would likely face seat loss.
What to do? My guess is that Wilders will remain loyal to government for now in order to avoid new elections. He can hope that somewhere in the future the pendulum swings back to him, at which point he can again consider blowing up government with less damage to himself.
Still, supporting government has become more tricky because one after the other the left-wing parties made it known they won’t support the new saving plan for 7 billion euros. Thus government is totally dependent on Wilders, and he can no longer avoid making choices.
Basically he has to decide whether his right-wing ideas are more important than the populist (i.e. economically left-wing) ideas of his voters.
Stay tuned. This is going to be interesting.
]]>Like the CDA, the PvdA is a former mass party that’s slowly bleeding to death because its voters don’t trust it any more or are looking elsewhere for some old-fashioned ideological standpoints. It didn’t lose as much as the CDA in the 2010 elections, but the current polls are dramatic: 19 seats, a loss of 11.
]]>Even worse, these 11 seats all end up with traditional-socialist SP, a party expressly aiming at taking over the Pvda’s role as the main force on the left. The SP is a whip party, a party that by its very existence forces its larger and more moderate competitor to pay more attention to its original ideas. It’s very succesful nowadays, and has evolved into the PvdA’s biggest nightmare.
The fundamental PvdA problem is that it moved too far to the centre in the Purple years (1994-2002), embracing a free-market fundamentalism that is at odds with what its traditional voters, workers, civil servants, and left-wing intellectuals, want. Back then this switch was a requirement to form the CDA-less Purple coalition (the VVD insisted on it), but Purple has been history for ten years, and the PvdA still hasn’t gone back to its left-wing roots. Instead, it allowed the SP to take over most of its working-class constituency.
This fundamental problem was not solved during the leadership of Wouter Bos (2003-2010), who remained a Purple boy at heart and was not the person to lead the party leftward. When Bos was replaced by former Amsterdam mayor Cohen before the 2010 elections, many expected the party to veer somewhat more leftward, but so far that hasn’t really happened, either.
Even worse, Cohen disappoints as party leader. He was originally chosen because he’d make a first-class prime minister, but the PvdA became the second party in the country and was defeated by the right block in the formation. That left Cohen opposition leader in parliament — a role that doesn’t really suit him. He is unable to stand up against Wilders, and more and more the true opposition leadership has devolved onto SP leader Roemer (and in certain respects D66 leader Pechtold).
In addition, the PvdA was forced to make some hard choices due to the peculiar nature of the current coalition. Although Wilders’s PVV supports the VVD+CDA government, he does not support every single government measure. That forces government to go shopping for votes among the left-wing opposition from time to time. I wrote a post about this construct a while back.
The PvdA needs to remain coalition-worthy. It has to be seen to take care for the country as a whole by supporting government in tough times, and it has to remain on speaking terms with VVD and CDA, both of which it could encounter in future coalitions. Thus the support.
Of course that leads to further centrism, if not supporting out-and-out right-wing ideas, which gives the SP yet another opportunity to steal a few votes from the PvdA. That’s basically what has been happening over the past months.
Now Cohen seems to think enough is enough. Government has to save yet another 7 billion euros, Wilders is already indicating that he won’t support further economising on the welfare state, and Cohen stated that he won’t help government, either. They’re on their own; after all the gedoogsteun-construct of VVD+PVV+CDA has a parliamentary majority (plus the support of the two SGP MPs), so let them take care of their own problems.
Quite apart from winning back ideological brownie points, this course of conduct may put severe strain on goverment; possibly even so severe that the gedoogsteun breaks down and new elections will be held before the year is over.
The question is whether Cohen will still be party leader when new elections come around. Today the NRC published a poll among PvdA and SP professionals (council members and aldermen), and it’s clear that the PvdA ones are getting tired of Cohen. Only 20% of them feel that Cohen is the best party leader, while about 33% went for Amsterdam alderman and rising star Lodewijk Asscher, with the rest voting for several other candidates.
Compare this to the SP, where 98% supports party leader Roemer. (Admittedly, the SP has always been a firm believer in this kind of scores in internal elections and votes. Still, there’s no doubt that Roemer is doing very well both among SP members and voters, and among the Dutch at large.)
That’s a problem. Cohen reacted by stating there will be a free election for party leader, and that he himself will be a candidate. That’s a lot better than what the CDA is doing right now (i.e. not much), but it still means the PvdA does not have an undisputed leader.
I doubt if we’ll see any fireworks on the PvdA party congress. For that we have to turn to the CDA party congress, which is also held this weekend. I’ll see if I can write something about that tomorrow.
]]>Furthermore it turns out that they also polled on 19th of December, from which I assume they, like the Politieke Barometer, are going to release a new poll every two weeks, but skipped one release due to Christmas and New Year.
The polls page has been updated with this information.
]]>Yesterday TNS-NIPO released its first poll, and it shows the SP as the second party after the VVD, before the PVV and way before the PvdA. In fact, the poor PvdA is only the third party on the left: D66 is bigger. See the polls page for details.
The problem with this poll is that I cannot find the actual report. Two newspapers ran a short piece on it, but it mentioned only the score of the six larger parties, and not of the five smaller ones. Since my poll script cannot deal with incomplete polls I made up the results of the five smaller ones. Very annoying, but unfortunately necessary.
Update: The latest Peil.nl poll confirms the trend: PVV loses three seats, SP and VVD both at 30 seats. See the polls page for details.
In any case, the movement away from the PVV and toward the SP is real. That doesn’t mean it will continue, but it does mean that right now people are starting to get enough of Wilders and his shouting.
Recently he even started shouting at the Queen, who, during a state visit to Oman, had the temerity to wear a headscarf during a visit to a mosque. Quite unusually, the Queen replied that all this is “such nonsense.” Usually the prime minister is supposed to defend her, but Rutte didn’t do anything until much later.
Also, a PVV member of the Limburg provincial States turns out to have written a very vulgar and racist mail to a PvdA member of Turkish descent. The PVV quite correctly kicked him out of the party, but more damage was done.
Anyway, do we see a slide back into obscurity for Wilders and his party because people are getting tired of him? It’s far too early to tell, and it certainly won’t be this easy, but the polls, at least, give some indication that it’s possible.
]]>As usual, the CDA became introspective after the hideous 2010 election losses (41 to 21 seats), and hardly eighteen months later there is a report that says the party is steering too much to the hard right and should correct itself leftward, to the political centre it belongs in. Less anti-Muslim stuff, more attention for social and ecological issues. The report even touches on the possibility of making the mortgage tax deductability a subject of discussion. Back in 2010 then-leader Balkenende declared the retention of this deductability a breakpoint, much to the surprise of other party prominents.
This message was reinforced because the CDA fraction in parliament opposed the government plan to allow a when speed of 130 kph on most highways instead of the current 120. This maximum speed increase is a typical right-wing toy, and the CDA shows it can’t automatically be counted on to support such right-wing hobbies.
On 21 January a special party congress will debate the report and make decisions — or rather, suggest possibilities for trends for future decision-making, or something. The CDA remains vague.
What’s happening here is clear: a moderate group of party leaders feels that the disastrous losses in 2012 and in the polls since then were caused by too much identification with Wilders’s PVV and its standpoints. The CDA should correct leftward, even though then future government collaboration with hated social-democratic rival PvdA becomes all-but a certainty.
Simultaneously, the party is looking for a political leader. A vacancy has existed ever since Balkenende resigned after the 2010 elections, and currently a triumvirate of economics minister and vice-prime-minister Verhagen, parliamentary leader Van Haersma Buma and party chairwoman Peetoom has been responsible for general political matters. That won’t work in the long run, and the CDA is quite correct in looking for a new leader.
That new leader is not going to be Verhagen. A week ago he made it known he will not be in the race for the leadership. Since he was the favourite until now, this has caused a lot of speculation, and many prominent CDA politicians were asked whether they were interested.
Meanwhile a surprising amount of them have said they won’t become the new leader, including popular finance minister De Jager. Also, it became known that Verhagen’s ascent to the leadership was vetoed by party chairwoman Peetoom, and that Verhagen probably brought out the news himself in order to avoid otherwise painful revelations.
Just about the only party prominent who has not rejected the leadership is parliamentary leader Van Haersma Buma. In fact, he wasn’t even mentioned by most reports. To me that sounds as if his chances are good. One is not supposed to openly court the party leadership, after all.
Update: That was fast. Former CDA spin doctor Jack de Vries proposed Van Haersma Buma as party leader on TV. That doesn't mean the case is closed, and lots of discussion will follow, but it increases Buma's chances.
Others say the ordinary CDA members should elect their new party leader, as PvdA and VVD have (occasionally) done before. Such an election might be divisive instead of uniting, because the left and right wings might have their own candidates, and in case of a close race this division might spell serious trouble for the party.
In fact, it’s already in some trouble. A few right-wing catholic CDA prominents from the southern province of Limburg have threatened to secede and form their own catholic, conservative party, which would be related to the CDA as CSU and CDU are in Germany.
Limburg is the problem right now. It is the home province of Verhagen and Eurlings, but also of Geert Wilders, and it was there that the CDA lost disastrous amounts of votes to the PVV, to the extent that the PVV became the largest party. In order to win back these voters, Limburg CDA members say, the party should continue on its right-wing course and not veer leftward.
This may be good for Limburg, but it’s bad for the north, where predominantly protestant CDA voters are somewhat less conservative, and where the party has to maintain its traditional balance between left and right.
Still, for now I see the threat of secession as a political move primarly, aimed at getting more right-wing catholic Limburg influence on the party. If the party congress partly recants the proposed shift to the left, we won’t hear anything about secession any more. On the other hand, it might annoy the moderates.
Stay tuned and take lots of popcorn. This is going to be one hell of a fight.
]]>Four seats change hands since last time, and the Right coalition that’s currently in power conquers back an absolute majority of 76 seats. D66 is again confirmed to be one seat larger than the CDA. 50Plus, the elderly party I still owe you an update about, disappears, though the pollster is careful to note it just barely didn’t make the threshold, so it might be back in two weeks.
]]>We’ve run into a serious translation problem. I have found no directly equivalent English term for gedoogsteun. Still, some help from my Twitter followers unearthed the fact that both Canada and New Zealand have had a similar construct, but no specific name for it. Denmark, too, has made extensive use of gedoogsteun, but I don’t speak Danish and I doubt they translated their name for it into English.
]]> Confidence and supply comes close, but it’s not quite on the mark. The New Zealand example states this as first and most important point:Good faith and no surprises
All parties to this agreement will operate on a good faith and no surprises basis for the term of this Parliament.
The crucial fact of Wilders’s gedoogsteun is that he does not always operate in good faith and surprises form the basis of his parliamentary actions. Thus confidence and supply is not the term we want.
I’m not going to translate gedoogsteun for the moment. So the two or so visitors from outside the Netherlands should get used to it. (Distinguished English-speaking visitors are discouraged from trying to pronounce it, by the way.)
Anyway. The facts. The Rutte government consists of VVD and CDA. That is, these two parties sent their best and brightest into government, and the parliamentary fractions have promised to abide by the coalition agreement. Together, VVD and CDA hold 52 of the 150 seats.
This is the first time since 1977 we’ve had a government that does not have an outright majority in parliament. Still, VVD and CDA negotiated gedoogsteun with Wilder’s PVV, which has 24 seats in parliament and brings government to a majority of 76 of 150 seats.
That’s rather a minimal majority. Any single defector would endanger government. So far that hasn’t happened yet (or other parties supported government), but there are dangers galore:
Plenty of dangers. Let’s see how well Rutte steers past them. So far he hasn’t done badly.
During the coalition negotiations it was clear Wilders would support most, but not all policies of VVD and CDA. The best example is the new Afghanistan mission.
The Balkenende IV government fell over an extension of Dutch military presence in that country, and politically it was a hot potato. Government wanted to take on a new “police training” mission, but Wilders refused to support it.
That left Rutte no choice but to shop around for other supporters. The PvdA was out of the question: it couldn’t flip-flop on the very issue that made it withdraw its support from Balkenende IV. Rutte had to create an alliance of convenience with several smaller parties.
In the end GL, D66, CU, and SGP helped the plan to a majority — and the process was rather visible and transparent for all. This has hurt GL: the party has historically had a strong pacifist tendency that is not easily squared with what’s essentially a colonial war. GL’s Kunduz vote is the cause of its slide in the polls. In fact, it’s the only party apart from CDA and PvdA that stands to lose seats right now, and the cause is clear and instructive.
Something similar happened to the pension age, earlier. Wilders refused to support its increase from 65 to 67, which forced Rutte to shop elsewhere for support, eventually ending up with the PvdA. That didn’t help the social-democrats’ standing with their traditional left-wing electorate.
Of course PvdA and GL knew they were courting trouble when they helped government to a majority. Still, their wish to retain their voters is balanced by the wish to seem coalition-worthy, especially when it comes to VVD and CDA. A left-wing coalition just isn’t in the books: it won’t get a majority, and even if it does the four left-wing parties won’t be able to form a government. That means they need either CDA or VVD. And that means supporting them every now and then.
Wilders understands this calculation very well, and it gives him another reason not to support government in these matters: apart from stressing his importance and giving his voters what they want, he damages a left-wing party in the process.
So far D66 seems immune to Wilders’s game, but that’s partly because the right topic to hurt the Democrats hasn’t come up yet. As to the SP, it supports most of Wilders’s populist ideas, so it’s less vulnerable to this particular trap.
Still, the Rutte government is experiencing stress. Tensions are mainly between PVV and CDA, and both PVV and VVD have played the game quite cleverly. The CDA has had ... issues, and is not in the best of health.
It took me a while to figure out how very clever Rutte has been to make a CDA man, former Maastricht mayor Leers, yet another Limburger, minister of Immigration and Integration. Minister of Wilders, in other words. If Wilders has any remarks to make on the insufficient measures government is taking to stop the tsunami of Islamic creepy migrants he addresses them to Leers.
Leers is in a tough spot. If he ignores Wilders he’s risking the coalition, but if he obeys he estranges the CDA’s left wing. Meanwhile the VVD stays out of the entire argument and looks mature and deliberate compared to its coalition partners.
Also, the vice-presidency of the Council of State will shortly become vacant. (Complicated; will explain later. But it’s a lifelong plum job in Dutch politics.) The only candidate for the seat so far is interior minister Donner (CDA), but his candidacy has drawn criticism, and the fact that it’s the interior minister who arranges the selection of a new vice-president made some fear for undue influence. Rutte moved the selection to justice minister Opstelten (VVD) to remove all shadows of doubt from the process. Still, one more affair that makes the CDA look bad.
More recently the VVD came under fire, too. Foreign minister Rosenthal was accused of being undiplomatic and only interested in sales of Dutch products as well as Israel. A recent poll showed VVD voters are getting a bit worried about the influence of Wilders and the SGP on policies. Still, for now Rutte performs splendidly according to his voters.
But Wilders, the dissidents, the SGP, and the serious trouble the CDA is in, they all form dangers to governmental stability.
Recently some political commentators declared the Rutte government dead. It would be good if government fell, but I’m not totally certain that it will — and even if it does it’ll take a few more months.
Will definitely be continued.
]]>Next: who’ll be responsible? PVV 49%, CDA 38%, VVD 8%. Wilders might do it if he expects electoral gain; the CDA is deeply divided and may get an insurgency from the left wing; the VVD is relatively most happy.
One more interesting factoid: of PvdA voters, 47% thinks the CDA will pull the plug vs. 42% for Wilders. This group is the only one to rate CDA higher than PVV here, and that might mirror its desire for a centre-left CDA they can form a coalition with rather than a centre-right one.
If government falls, what’s next?
(Incidentally, the coalition table on the polls page now also allows you to ponder the coalitions that are possible in current parliament.)
According to Dutch constitutional law new elections are the only solution. Switching government coalition in mid-term was tried last in 1965, and it caused a hell of a lot of trouble for everyone involved. Let’s not go there.
Fortunately the poll also asked this question, and about 60% feels that either a new gedoogsteun construction or PurplePlus would not be acceptable. So that’s pretty much that: if Wilders shuts down government (or if those pesky CDA left-wingers revolt) we’ll have new elections.
Sounds about right to me.
]]>Still, take a look at the polls page. It has changed considerably, especially the coalition table. I now generate coalitions automatically since the curated list of the previous version got too big and unwieldy. I hope I found the right rules to keep the number of coalitions in check, and I’ll probably tweak them a little in future weeks.
]]> Rumours of the Rutte government’s impending fall are on the rise again: in two newspapers the leading political analyst explained why government would not survive another year.The basic message is that Wilders is too annoying with his solo-actions, while CDA is still in disarray, and for the first time problems reach Rutte’s own VVD instead of being basically a PVV vs. CDA fight. Add to that the mounting international tension over the euro, and changes of government here and there (now even Belgium is forced to create a government!), and we get a confusing situation in which anything is possible, including the fall of government.
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