Geert Wilders’s statement that “we have a serious problem” (we hebben een serieus probleem) went viral on social media last week, mainly because it was one of those sentences that make the Dutch language look like a phonetic transcription of Officer Crabtree in ‘Allo ‘Allo. But it is worth examining in all its banality for anyone trying to understand why the talks to form a new Dutch government are still in the embryonic stage, two months after an election result that was supposed to shake up the established order.
Wilders’s probleem was that one of the three parties with which he hopes to form a right-wing government had just dropped a gigantic spanner in the works by voting through a draft law designed to ease the pressure on the asylum system. The liberal VVD party has been riven in two by the bill, known as the spreidingswet (spreading law), which gives the junior minister for asylum the power to overrule local councils that are unwilling to accommodate asylum seekers. The minister, Eric van der Burg, also from the VVD, stressed it would be a last resort if negotiations with local councils failed to find enough places by agreement. The snag is that the law was only drafted in the first place because those deals were failing to materialise, leading to the kind of scenes at the main refugee reception centre in Ter Apel, Groningen, that were condemned by Médicins Sans Frontières as inhumane – even before a three-month old baby died while sleeping on the floor of an overcrowded sports hall. And so last week the VVD group in the Senate, after listening to Van der Burg’s plea that the law was the only way to prevent another crisis erupting next year, agreed to vote in favour.
The debate pitted pragmatists in the VVD against hardline ideologues, including its leader, Dilan Yeşilgöz. It transgresses the party’s established liberal instincts, which say local government should be free to set its own priorities, and its more recent determination to impose steep cuts on migration. As minister for justice – and Van der Burg’s immediate superior – Yeşilgöz prompted the collapse of the last cabinet when she proposed a strict limit on the number of refugees’ family members who could join them in the Netherlands. When the ChristenUnie, the smallest coalition partner and a fervent supporter of family values, said the idea was unpalatable, Mark Rutte disbanded the coalition. In the ensuing election campaign Yeşilgöz insisted that cutting numbers at the border should take priority over fixing the bottleneck in the asylum system. And after Geert Wilders’s anti-immigration PVV eclipsed the VVD in the election, she made a ham-fisted attempt to wrest back control of the agenda by calling on the Senate to delay its vote on the spreading law.
Yeşilgöz insisted that cutting numbers at the border should take priority over fixing the bottleneck in the asylum system
Instead, the Senate went ahead with the debate and, after much deliberation, the VVD group unanimously backed the bill in Tuesday’s vote. Yeşilgöz was at pains to point out afterwards that the upper house was an autonomous body and she would not be dictating the party line to her colleagues. But the fact is that the “spreading law” could not have passed without the support of the VVD, despite of the extensive efforts of Yeşilgöz, which included triggering an election in which her party lost almost one-third of its seats and surrendered the initiative in forming the next government to Wilders.
The vote in the upper house should not have come as a surprise. Senators derive their mandate from the provinces, and the calls of those toiling at the coal face to relieve the accommodation shortage, including several VVD mayors, was overwhelming: the law was the only realistic way to deal with the problem, they argued, given the reluctance of many local authorities to pull their weight. Here was the rub: the parties who heckled the previous cabinet for ignoring the views of the provinces were the first to turn their backs when local administrators raised a serieus probleem in The Hague. The VVD mayor of Groningen, Koen Schuiling, made an impassioned plea on NOS Radio 1 last week to the senate to pass the law. And a poll indicated that by last week, a majority of VVD voters supported the move. The pragmatists had won the argument against the ideologues.
On the face of it, the serieus probleem would seem to lie with Yeşilgöz, who now has to explain to Wilders how she can keep her promises to cut migration numbers after being outflanked by her own Senate faction. She must somehow reconcile the narrow focus of her own election campaign with the broader concerns of her party in parliament and the country. But the problems run much deeper. A Maurice de Hond poll at the weekend projected that the PVV would win 49 seats – almost a third of the total – if an election were held now. Yet those gains come entirely at the expense of the VVD, which is down to 12 seats. And there is no other prospective partner in sight that will make the concessions Wilders needs on migration and offer the necessary experience in government.
The “spreading law” is a bitter pill for Wilders, because it weakens his influence in the one policy area where he can broker no compromise. If he tries to ignore it or whip up resistance among reluctant councils – some of whom have already vowed not to implement it – he will put his relationship with both Yesilgöz and Pieter Omtzigt in jeopardy. Omtzigt’s probleem is that the spreidingswet is an example of the Dutch system of government working well, with checks and balances, parliamentary scrutiny, and central government and the regions respecting each other’s interests. Yet it has produced an outcome that undermines the coalition talks. It is unthinkable that Omtzigt, who has cast himself as the guardian of good governance, will give Wilders any leeway to defy a law that has passed the scrutiny of both houses of parliament. And the probleem for Wilders is he is now has an unenviable choice: break with his partners now and take his chances in early election, or wait until the coalition runs aground on migration, as the previous cabinet did, and risk a return to the political wilderness.
WordsForPress 