quinta-feira, 21 de março de 2019

Forum big winner in provincial elections, set to take 12 senate seats Politics / Mark Rutte to lose Senate majority after Dutch local elections



O FVD (Thierry Baudet) alcançou uma victória nas eleições Provinciais na Holanda, substituindo assim como Partido Nacional Populista o PVV, o Partido de Geert Wilders, como principal opositor das políticas de Imigração e perfilando-se como protector dos valores nacionais. O FVD é um partido totalmente negacionista no que respeita as Alterações Climáticas, negando toda a evidência cientifíca e recusando todas as políticas e mudanças imperativas e necessárias no que respeita as políticas do clima e o crescente consenso Europeu e Internacional.
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Forum big winner in provincial elections, set to take 12 senate seats Politics
 March 21, 2019 / Martijn Beekman via HH

 With most of the votes counted in Wednesday’s provincial elections, Thierry Baudet’s right-wing nationalist Forum voor Democratie appears to have won most votes and will take 12 seats in the senate in May. Forum, which is pro Nexit and does not believe in climate change, campaigned on national issues and did not draw up policies for any of the 12 provinces it will now be represented in. ‘Arrogance and stupidity has been punished,’ Baudet said in his victory speech. ‘We are being ruined by the people who should be protecting us,’ he said. ‘We are being undermined by universities and journalists, by the people who design our buildings.’ The four coalition parties will now control 31 of the 75 seats in the senate and will need the support of a fifth party to pass controversial legislation. Forum, Labour and Groenlinks, which almost doubled its support, could all fulfill that role. Big losers of the night were Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration PVV which is on target to lose four of its nine senate seats, and the Socialists which will sink from nine to four. Turnout was up sharply on the last provincial vote, with some 56% of people casting their vote. It was highest (60%) in Zeeland and Utrecht. Preliminary results VVD from 13 to12 seats Forum voor Democratie from 0 to12 seats CDA from 12 to 9 seats GroenLinks from 4 to 9 seats PvdA from 8 to 7 seats D66 from 10 to 6 seats PVV from 9 to 5 seats ChristenUnie from 3 to 4 seats SP from 9 to 4 seats Partij voor de Dieren from 2 to 3 seats 50PLUS unchanged at 2 SGP unchanged at 2 DENK none OSF (independent, local parties) none Check out the results in your area on the NOS interactive map.

Read more at DutchNews.nl:

Mark Rutte to lose Senate majority after Dutch local elections
Far-right Forum for Democracy on course to be the second biggest party in upper house.

By           ELINE SCHAART 3/20/19, 11:23 PM CET Updated 3/20/19, 11:34 PM CET

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte is on course to lose control of the upper house of parliament after provincial elections on Wednesday saw strong gains for Euroskeptics and Greens.

Far-right populist newcomer Forum for Democracy is set to become the second biggest party in the Senate with 10 seats, with Rutte's liberal VVD party on 12 seats, according to an exit poll published by public broadcaster NOS. The votes are counted by hand and final results will be published overnight.

The Greens were another big winner, according to the exit poll (which has a margin of error of +/- 1 percent), doubling their seats from 4 to 8. Other opposition parties, including Geert Wilders' Freedom Party and the Socialists, suffered at the polls, losing 3 and 5 seats respectively.

Rutte's coalition partners the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) and centrist Democrats 66 (D66) are also set to lose seats (the CDA down from 12 to 8, with D66 down 3 to 7).

Voters were choosing new regional parliaments, which will determine the makeup of the new Senate. The ballots were held two days after a Turkish-born man was arrested following a shooting in Utrecht in which three people were killed.

Rutte’s center-right coalition — his liberal VVD, CDA, D66 and the small Christian Union — had a one-seat majority in the Senate before Wednesday's vote, but is expected to lose 7 seats overall.

Dutch right-wing populism, dominated for a decade by Wilders and his Freedom Party, has been transformed in the past two years by the rapid growth of the Forum for Democracy. Its leader, 36-year-old Thierry Baudet, shocked establishment parties this week by blaming the government's migration policy for the Utrecht attack just hours after the shooting. All other parties had suspended campaigning.

“This is a combination of an honor killing and a half-terrorist motive,” Baudet told supporters at a rally, Reuters reported. The shooter's motive is still not known.


In 2017, the Forum for Democracy won just two seats in the national parliament, but is projected to win 12 percent of the Dutch votes in the European Parliament election in May.

Campaigning for the provincial elections was largely overtaken by national politics, with party leaders attending debates, bringing national and European issues to the fore. In a debate hosted by the public broadcaster on Tuesday, the provinces were mentioned just three times, according to NRC.

The projected turnout was 54 percent, slightly higher than the last such vote four years ago, but lower than in general elections.

In order to achieve a working majority in the Senate, Rutte's coalition will have to rely on the support of one or more opposition parties. It's unlikely that Baudet's party will work with the government. The party rejects, for example, the need for climate change policies, a major issue for the government. Last week, Baudet suddenly wavered on his long-standing support for the Netherlands leaving the EU.

The election results come at a time when Rutte is gaining prominence as a voice for liberal economic policies and as EU leaders are gearing up for debate about the bloc's future, in which the Netherlands has been trying to fill the void that will be left by Britain's departure from the EU.

Far-right nationalist Forum will be biggest in Dutch senate with 13 seats
Politics March 21, 2019

Thierry Baudet during his victory speech. Photo: Leander Varekamp/HH
 Thierry Baudet’s right-wing nationalist Forum voor Democratie has emerged as the big winner in the provincial elections and will take 13 seats in the 75 seat senate in May. The four coalition parties have lost their majority and will control 31 of the senate seats, forcing them to turn to opposition parties for support to get controversial legislation through. Prime minister Mark Rutte, in Brussels to discuss Brexit, told reporters that he would work to come to a ‘sensible majority’ in the upper house. Rutte said he would not try to come up with a pact, nor would he rule out any party, whether more left or right-wing than the coalition. Has Baudet really changed the political landscape? Baudet, who before the elections said that the government would have to drop its climate plans to get his support, told voters in a Twitter message that the party does ‘feel a responsiblity to ensure real political change, not just in the provinces but also in the senate’. Nevertheless, he told reporters later, ‘we want to see a change of course from the government.’ GroenLinks, which now has nine seats in the senate after adding five to its total, would also be in a position to ensure a government majority, as would the Labour party which has seven. Amsterdam, Utrecht don’t fall for Forum Meanwhile Forum campaigned in the provinces on national issues and now faces the problem of making sure it fills the seats it has won on the 12 provincial councils. As the biggest party in both Zuid-Holland and Flevoland, Forum will be charged with putting together a working coalition in the regions, and Baudet said on Thursday he has already approached former VVD senator Hans Wiegel to work on his behalf in Rotterdam. Big losers of the night were Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration PVV which is on target to lose four of its nine senate seats, and the Socialists which will sink from nine to four. Wilders, whose support has been declining for years and has fallen 40% in the provinces, described his party’s losses as ‘limited’. ‘Six parties is not nothing,’ he said, adding that that the ‘unique PVV voice’ will continue to heard in the senate. Turnout was up sharply on the last provincial vote, with some 56% of people casting their vote. It was highest (60%) in Zeeland and Utrecht. Preliminary results VVD from 13 to 12 seats Forum voor Democratie from 0 to 13 seats CDA from 12 to 9 seats GroenLinks from 4 to 9 seats PvdA from 8 to 7 seats D66 from 10 to 6 seats PVV from 9 to 5 seats ChristenUnie from 3 to 4 seats SP from 9 to 4 seats Partij voor de Dieren from 2 to 3 seats 50PLUS unchanged at 2 SGP from 2 to 1 DENK none OSF (independent, local parties) none Check out the results in your area on the NOS interactive map.

Read more at DutchNews.nl:

 Not an explosion, but a very loud noise: has Baudet really changed the landscape?
Politics March 21, 2019 - By Gordon Darroch

The headlines, inevitably, were dominated by Thierry Baudet after his remarkable success in the Dutch provincial elections on Wednesday, writes Gordon Darroch, in an analysis of what the victory really means. Three years after being founded, and two years after upsetting the odds by grabbing two seats in parliament, Baudet’s Forum for Democracy (FvD) took around 14% of the national vote. In the fragmented Dutch political landscape, the support of one in seven electors was enough to put him on top of the pile, edging out the Liberal party (VVD) headed by Mark Rutte. The FvD’s gains mean the party is set to take 12 seats in the 75-member senate when the upper house is elected by provincial deputies in May. However, expectations of a political earthquake should be tempered for a few reasons. Firstly, despite its name, the Dutch senate is very much the minor player in the legislative set-up. As a revising chamber with an indirect mandate, it assesses laws mainly on technical merit rather than political or ideological grounds. Opposition Secondly, while the four-party coalition is set to lose its narrow majority, going from 38 senators to 31, the consequences are not as bad as they seem. Opinion polls before the vote suggested that Rutte’s cabinet would need to secure the support of two opposition parties in the senate. In the event either the nine seats that will be filled by GroenLinks – Wednesday’s other big winner – or the seven held by the Labour party (PvdA) would be enough to get them over the line. Rutte made overtures to the former last week when he dropped his opposition to a carbon tax for business, a move that was enthusiastically welcomed by GroenLinks leader Jesse Klaver, and the cabinet has softened its stance on migration, the issue that prompted Klaver to walk out of coalition talks two years ago. Neither will Rutte have his work cut out rekindling his relationship with Labour leader Lodewijk Asscher, the deputy prime minister in the last cabinet, if their convivial sparring in the pre-election TV debate on Tuesday is anything to go by. Vote-by-vote Given these two options, the coalition is more likely to solicit support on a vote-by-vote basis than strike a confidence and supply deal with a single partner, a strategy that backfired on Rutte in 2012 when his first cabinet was brought down by Geert Wilders. Finally, Baudet’s success reflects not so much a surge of the nationalist right as a shuffling of the pack among the populist parties. Nearly a third of his vote came from supporters of Wilders’s PVV, which is looking increasingly like a spent force. Wilders has been the standard bearer on the right for the past 15 years but now appears to have been eclipsed by a younger, more sophisticated pretender. A sizeable block also seems to have broken away from the left-wing populist Socialist Party, which has taken a more nationalist line on Europe and immigration since Lilianne Marijnissen replaced Emile Roemer as leader, only to find, like the PvdA before them, that offering a Diet Coke version of the populist right only encourages voters to seek out the real thing. Modest success Smaller numbers have defected from the coalition parties, but Baudet has had only modest success in attracting his real target audience – the influential and moneyed supporters of the VVD, most of whom have, somewhat uneasily, kept faith in Rutte. Despite fears that Tuesday’s tram shooting in Utrecht might spark a surge in populist sentiment, it appears to have had little substantial influence. The last Peilingwijzer opinion poll, from canvassing carried out before the shooting, gave Baudet and Wilders a block of 18 seats, one more than the actual outcome. As well as migration, Baudet scored in the campaign on the issue of climate change and energy transition, but so too did Green-Left, particularly in metropolitan areas such as Amsterdam, Utrecht and Groningen, where it took around a quarter of the vote. GroenLinks The polarisation on the issue reflects a gulf between voters who see tackling global warming as the number one political priority and those who resent the high personal cost. The cabinet will now have to revise its plans to meet the agreements in the Paris climate accord, but Wednesday’s results will give Jesse Klaver a much bigger say in the matter than Baudet. There is also the question of whether FvD can build on its success. Baudet will now have to find 12 senators while learning to handle more than 100 inexperienced deputies in the provincial assemblies of varying calibre. His manifesto is more comprehensive than Wilders’s pot-pourri of stock phrases, but his fondness for conspiracy theories and supremacist rhetoric is an unfortunate weakness for a self-styled intellectual. He celebrated his victory with a labyrinthine speech peppered with vague classical references that, as it went on, sounded more like the product of a storytelling workshop at a survivalist summer camp than a mature political platform. We have known for a while that Baudet is a politician in thrall to his own rhetorical skills, but he will need more than dog whistles to change the political mainstream.


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