When Mark Rutte resigned last July after 13 years as prime minister, he created a political vacuum. That vacuum swelled during an insipid four-month election campaign, sucking up any hope that a new generation of leaders could engineer real change. All three of the party leaders who seemed best placed to succeed Rutte made strategic mistakes that cost them dearly. Pieter Omtzigt promised a slate of reforms to restore trust and accountability in government, but was unwilling or unable to answer the immediate questions such as who would lead his cabinet. Frans Timmermans spent much of the campaign arguing with his own side over issues such as Gaza and how quickly nitrogen compound emissions should be reduced. And Dilan Yesilgöz made the historic blunder of opening the door to a partnership with Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom (PVV), which gave Wilders the chance to sneak up on the guard rail in the last days before polling day. And so 2024 begins with not a vacuum, but the political equivalent of a blocked drain, with four prospective coalition partners all denying responsibility for the stench.
The election outcome was an indictment of the campaign that produced it. When Omtzigt launched his New Social Contract party in August, many voters were receptive to his ideas for reforming the institutions of government to prevent the kind of abuses of power that have destroyed houses in Groningen, the livelihoods of working parents wrongly accused of fraud by the tax office, and public trust in general. Surveys showed that the need to catch up on a shortfall of 400,000 homes, the effects of soaring inflation on the cost of living and the accessibility of healthcare were the issues the electorate most wanted to see addressed. But instead of confronting these “headache dossiers”, the party leaders indulged in a claustrophobic, largely fact-free debate on migration numbers. It gave a free ride to Wilders to campaign on the issue he has dominated for 20 years, without being properly held to account by his political rivals or the media. It illustrated how much politics has become a game, detached from people’s real lives and concerns, in which the players fight for control of the YouTube-positive spaces of immigration and culture wars. The official statistics show that initial asylum claims were no higher in 2023 than in 2022, and substantially down on the peak years of 2015 and 1994. What has changed is that far more people are stuck for longer in the system, causing a backlog of cases at the reception centres in Ter Apel and Budel. This is not a crisis caused by migration, but political stagnation. Just as the election result was not so much a call for reform as a cry of anguish from an electorate driven to distraction by their leaders’ abysmal failure to tackle the hard questions.
In the wake of Wilders’s unexpected success, there has been much talk has been about whether, and why, Dutch voters lurched to the extreme right. Yet even two weeks before the election, opinion polls showed that the three hardest-right parties – PVV, Forum voor Democratie and JA21 – were on course to accumulate about 14% of the vote. The fact that this proportion doubled in two weeks suggests that around half of people who ultimately plumped for the PVV did so for tactical reasons. Surveys since the election show how badly Yesilgöz miscalculated in believing that the best way to constrain Wilders was to rehabilitate him as a potential junior partner. A significant number of her own potential voters drew the opposite conclusion – that Wilders was the best safeguard against Timmermans profiting from a split vote on the right. It is disturbing enough that so many people were willing to ignore Wilders’s unvarnished contempt for democracy. It would be foolish to assume that either the Dutch constitution or the Netherlands’ culture of consensus offers some kind of immunity from authoritarian breakdown: there are enough examples from history of countries committing electoral suicide. But it would also be wrong to conclude that the drift to the right is either terminal or irreversible. Much can change in 2024 if a class of politicians emerges that is honest enough to articulate the real challenges the country faces and brave enough to propose real answers.
WordsForPress 