Intransigence from the right-wing Liberals will only play into Geert Wilders’ hands so don’t vote VVD, says Giles Scott-Smith of the Holland Bureau.

I don’t quite know why, but I feel surprisingly optimistic about the upcoming elections. With 5 days to go, things are shaping up for the kind of almost-dead-heat that we saw in 2006 and then again in 2010 – the PvdA almost but not quite making it to being largest party, its failure allowing first the CDA and then the VVD to play hardball and determine the coalition outcome. According to the Voice of Holland Maurice de Hond, the PvdA is within one seat of the VVD, a huge turn-around from a couple of weeks ago.

Yet my optimism does not simply come from a barn-storming PvdA. I am not – many posts on this site to the contrary – a dyed-in-the-wool PvdA voter, hoping that the Samsom Revival will lead them to a remarkable electoral bubble and leave the VVD in their slipstream. It has more to do with the mechanics of what will happen after the election.

The main factor is the woeful experience of the last minority cabinet with support from the back-benches from Wilders, which tormented the CDA to the point of total self-destruction, and destroyed their credibility for the vast majority of the electorate.  

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The follow-on factor from this is the collapse of the CDA to a possible 12-13 seats, a dismal total that reduces their input in coalition-building. So if the VVD does still hold its own and check in with a largest-party 33 or 34 seats, their options are severely limited.

It makes sense that the PvdA’s Prince Charming Lodewijk Asscher has correctly raised the alarm about a possible re-run of the VVD-CDA-PVV scenario, because Rutte gives the strong impression of a Neoliberal ideologue who is not interested in the slightest whiff of compromise with a less dogmatic centre-left. 2010 all over again.

The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? Farce it would truly be. But I don’t see it. Even if the VVD comes out the largest party, they will face the squeeze of a dominant centre-left that wants to cut a deal. Rutte can run a pretend mile from  Paars III now, but  he’ll be up against it to construct anything at all without first getting off his hegemonic high-chair.

Debating style

So maybe it does make a difference. Maybe I do give a damn if the PvdA surge just falls short, yet again – even if its some transitory electoral puff based on nothing more than Samsom’s debating skills. The so-near-and-yet-so-far Bos-Cohen theatre of 2006 was indeed a high point of recent Dutch electoral politics – but a defeat is a defeat, however charming.

Stuff the VVD and all their smugness. VVD intransigence will after all only play into the hands of Wilders, who’s only hope is an endless period of failed coalition-building followed by new elections, at which point he can say ‘told you so’.

Don’t let it happen. Double-passport ex-pats, unite – and DON’T vote VVD. The only way Wilders can profit from this election is if the VVD brings him in, or keeps everyone else out. As Obama says – it IS a choice.