The Hague is stumbling from one coalition impasse to another, writes Giles Scott-Smith on The Holland Bureau.

We forget, but Jan Peter Balkenende is still the Minister President of the Netherlands. He has now been ‘demissionair’ leader for a longer period of time than his first period as Minister President lasted (87 days). While The Hague doesn’t burn but stumbles from one coalition impasse to another, JP is telling dirty jokes at car racing conventions. With the Belgian coalition talks also fumbling to a halt, Low Countries politics are at present just that, and little more.
It was a remarkable turn of events last week that ended with Geert Wilders declaring that his trust in the CDA had evaporated. The scale of the irony here is beyond comparison. Maxime Verhagen had aimed all along to strike a deal that would put constitutional shackles on the PVV and prevent Wilders from claiming populist right to run wild over Dutch law.
But many in his party baulked at the very need to demand such shackles – if that is the situation, then you are shaking a dirty hand, and the whole idea of cooperation stinks. After crisis management Verhagen thought he had his party back in line, but instead the dissenters had given Wilders yet another perfect club with which to bash the CDA for being unreliable and back off from further talks. Yet the PVV wasn’t even going to be a part of the coalition!
The NRC lead article on Saturday quite rightly questions Wilders’ decision. Why continue to provoke the CDA during exactly the period when the party is trying to assemble unity to work with him? Why not simply wait for Verhagen to sort it out and go ahead with the VVD-CDA coalition? But its looking increasingly worthless to search for a PVV ‘plan’ in this scenario. Opportunism is the mantra here. If short-term gain can be seized, then its worth it, and onwards to the next short-term coup, ad infinitum, in doing so constantly mocking the established order.
Over in Hollands Diep, US-Dutch wünderkind and all-round good bloke James Kennedy casts an insightful eye over the Dutch political landscape. Since the 1990s Dutch voters have become more footloose. Party membership is very low. Voters are moved by charisma and media impact as much as (if not more) than by ideological conviction. PVV voters come from every walk of life. Kennedy sees a period opening up where “opportunism is the only way to survive”, and where Wilders’ success is forcing all other parties to adopt a more populist attitude, aiming for immediate results to solve citizen concerns.
I like the way he seems to divide opportunism (the PVV) from pragmatism (adapting to the PVV), but maybe I’m seeing a difference he didn’t intend. The problem, however, is that there can only be one anti-elitist movement, and Wilders has cornered the market. Perhaps the really interesting struggle in the coming years will be between the PVV and the Socialists, once the impending public spending cuts really bite. Will the SP under Emile Roemer be able to get some traction for a social justice programme that prevents the (Dutch) muslim from becoming the PVV scapegoat?
Could it have been otherwise? A biography of Wilders’ political career by Amsterdam prof. Meindert Fennema offers a suggestion for us to dream on. In 2003 (Balkenende II) the position of state secretary for social affairs came free – Mark Rutte, at the time holding that position, moved to the Ministry of Education, leaving the slot to be filled by the VVD. Wilders was VVD spokesperson for social security in parliament, and so a front runner for the vacancy.
But Gerrit Zalm, irritated by Wilders’ lack of party discipline and criticism of parliamentary leader Hans Dijkstal, passed him over in favour of the less prominent Henk van Hoof. Even though many in the VVD agreed that GW was the best candidate, no-one fought the decision in his favour. A year later Wilders quit the VVD.
A parable for our times? State secretary is only one step away from being Minister, and then Wilders would have been set for a VVD career, a career within established politics. Instead Zalm played it by the book, and GW, with social affairs now secondary, turned to ‘Islamisation’ in the Netherlands as the vehicle around which to build his own one-man movement. The shift from VVD to PVV is remarkable. Here he is two weeks after 9/11 stating (in opposition to Pim Fortuyn) that Islam is not the problem, only the extremist minority:
The Zalm decision is a nice neat ‘what if?’, but no more than that. Concern for the changing nature of Dutch society through immigration had been slowly on the boil through the 1990s, beginning with VVD’er Fritz Bolkestein breaking ranks with Tolerant Netherlands as early as 1991 with an article, ‘The Integration of Minorities’, in the Volkskrant (and being more or less condemned as a racist for doing so). Bolkestein was definitely Wilders’ political godfather, but it wasn’t just the right that banged this drum as others got in on the act (albeit with a different beat).
Paul Scheffer’s ‘Het Multiculturele Drama’ (2000), which spoke of an “ethnic underclass” and the need for a new national ‘we-feeling’ beyond multiculturalism, rocked the boat more precisely because it came from someone embedded within the Dutch left-liberal salon. The stage was set for someone to run with it as a political programme. Since then we’ve had Fortuyn, Balkenende’s ‘Norms and Values’, Hirsi Ali, Verdonk’s TON, and so far Wilders is the only one who has been able to make it pay off.
For more from The Holland Bureau, go to the website www.thehollandbureau.com