The Netherlands has now had four governments in eight years, says Giles Scott-Smith in his first reflection on the domestic political dimensions of the cabinet collapse.

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.
Giles Scott-Smith is an academic based in Leiden and Middelburg. Check out the blog The Holland Bureau for more.