'We
do reasonable' – so why are Dutch voters abandoning the centre
ground?
After
years of backing catch-all centre parties, many in the Netherlands
are turning towards to anti-politics-as-usual alternatives for the 15
March election
Jon Henley in
Purmerend
@jonhenley
Monday 13 March 2017
05.00 GMT
In Purmerend on
market day, there is little to suggest the Netherlands may be on the
brink of a populist uprising. Little, even, to show the country is
days from an election widely portrayed – though not, on the whole,
by the Dutch – as the next step in the overthrow of the liberal
world order.
On Kaasmarkt, a
queue waits patiently in the shadow of the Niklaas church to be
served at the stall of Beuse, cheesemongers since 1928. On Koemarkt,
the 15th-century cattle market that is now the town’s main square,
shoppers sip strong coffee in weak sunshine outside Café Aad de
Wolf, talking about anything but politics.
“It’s a bit
strange,” said Annemarie Akkerman, 38, a pharmaceuticals manager
and liberal VVD party voter. “We get the BBC and some US channels
on the cable, you know, and they’re all like, that’s it, the
Dutch are next in line, for sure. And we’re: this is Holland, you
know? We don’t do that. We do reasonable.”
But for all the
bemusement of many Dutch voters at the global spotlight on the far
right, anti-Islam Geert Wilders and the chances of his Freedom party
(PVV) winning the parliamentary election on 15 March and prolonging
the populist insurgency begun by the Brexit vote and Donald Trump,
this remains a very strange election.
A PVV victory is
still conceivable, although after leading the polls for nearly two
years the party has now slipped to second behind the VVD of prime
minister Mark Rutte – whose overtly uncompromising stance in a
diplomatic spat with Turkey this weekend will have done him no harm
at all with voters tempted by Wilders’ anti-Islam rhetoric.
As many as 40% of
voters are still undecided; as many as 15% will not make up their
mind until voting day. But even if the PVV does finish top, Wilders
is unlikely to enter government: no other major party will work with
him.
The deeper story in
the Netherlands is one of voters abandoning en masse the mainstream
parties of centre right and centre left that have governed the
country for the past half-century, and turning instead to an
astonishing array of smaller, newer, anti-politics-as-usual parties
from across the political spectrum.
With seats
distributed by direct proportional representation and 70,000 votes
enough to give a party one of parliament’s 150 seats, the Dutch
political landscape has never looked so fractured. A record 14
parties could end up with at least one MP, eight with 10 or more and
six – including the PVV – with up to 25.
Wilders will still
be way short of the 76 seats needed for a majority. But even if, as
seems most likely, he is effectively locked out of government, a
bigger anti-establishment genie is out of the bottle. That could make
building a coalition and sustaining a stable government a long and
tricky job.
Purmerend is half an
hour north of Amsterdam in the polders, the low-lying land reclaimed
from water that dominates northern Holland. Round a fine old centre
of bricks and gables have sprouted new neighbourhoods of smart,
low-rise apartment blocks and neat townhouses with well-tended
gardens. The town has grown quickly in recent decades, from 10,000
inhabitants in the 1960s to 80,000 today.
It is a thoroughly
representative Dutch town. Unemployment stands at 6% and immigrants
make up 25% of the population. Purmerend is averagely prosperous,
averagely safe – and politically average. The last time it voted,
in the provincial election of 2015, Wilders’ PVV finished on top
with 18% of the vote.
Why would nearly
one-fifth of the electorate of a town such as this – in a strong
economy, low-unemployment country such as this – vote for a man
like Wilders, whose one-page election manifesto includes pledges to
close mosques and Islamic schools, ban sales of the Qur’an, bar
Muslim immigrants and take the Netherlands out of the EU?
“We’re ashamed
of the man,” said Irene Muusze, 71, walking across Kaasmarkt with
her partner, Johan Helffer, 69. Both will be voting for the
progressive, eco-friendly Green-Left party next week. “He’s
shameless,” Muusze added. “He knows how to wind people up. That’s
all.”
What Helffer
objected to, he said, was that Wilders, and a fair few of the other
outliers and popups on the ballot paper, such as Denk, aimed at
Moroccan and Turkish immigrants, and the arch-Eurosceptic Forum for
Democracy (FvD), is “a polariser. A divider. And that’s not the
Dutch way. We are compromisers. Always have been”.
But for many in the
Netherlands now, polarity is the attraction. The endless and
amorphous compromise of Dutch politics is driving voters, in
Purmerend and across the country, not just to Wilders, but to parties
such as the radical Socialists, the socially progressive liberals of
D66 and the fast-growing Green-Left.
To anywhere, in
short, but the traditional, catch-all centre parties. There was a
time, back in the 1980s, when the Netherlands’ Christian and social
democrats – CDA and PvdA – could comfortably count on more than
50 MPs each. This year, they will do well to muster 30 between them.
By the free-market
1990s, with politics shifting to the right, the CDA had largely given
way to the far more economically liberal VVD, but it too had no
trouble governing with the PvdA. In a country governed for more than
a century by coalitions, the parties of the centre have become, to
many, indistinguishable.
“Everything could
be rationalised away,” said Purmerend’s avuncular mayor, Don Bijl
from the VVD, in the town hall. “And it was. People felt lost. The
traditional parties couldn’t give answers people understood. No one
knew what anyone stood for. Governing became about efficiency,
technocracy, management.”
But it was not all
about that. Society was also changing, Bijl said, in ways some people
did not like. “In Purmerend, there are a lot of people who moved
out of Amsterdam because, well, they felt their neighbourhoods had
changed. Moroccan families had moved there; their streets no longer
felt the same,” he said.
“Now they’re
here and they don’t want it to happen again. All our surveys show
people are happy here – good social provision, no real poverty,
minimal crime. But some people in Purmerend will vote for the PVV not
because they are unhappy, but because they are happy, and afraid of
losing it.”
That could be one
reason why, at the height of Europe’s refugee crisis in late 2015,
there were protests, and some riots, in several Dutch towns at
government plans to build large-scale asylum-seekers’ centres.
Arie-Wim Boer, a local councillor who led the opposition in
Purmerend, insisted it was not down to anti-Muslim sentiment.
“It was just bad
communications,” said Boer, whose party is called Leefbaar
(Livable) Purmerend. “There was no prior consultation, no community
involvement. We had serious questions about location, access, impact.
And about this town’s 10-year waiting list for social housing for
young people.”
Finally, after a
meeting so heated the police were called, the council voted against
the centre. “There were cheers from a few,” Boer said. “‘Our
country for us,’ that sort of thing. But you get some of that
everywhere. And I told them – lots of people told them: that’s
not what this is about. Really.”
It is, of course,
hard to know how far that is true. Surveys suggest that while the
generally open and tolerant Dutch care more than most European
nations about preserving their customs and lifestyle, they sympathise
with genuine refugees: a 2015 survey found 70% would accept an asylum
centre in their town.
The migration crisis
has, in any event, now largely receded, and with it, steadily,
popular support for Wilders, sliding since December. Refugees are
still a talking point, though probably not to the extent he would
want.
In Purmerend, few
seemed happy to say Wilders had their vote. “The others have just
broken too many promises, and done nothing,” said one middle-aged
man, who asked not to be named. “I could vote PVV. But I wouldn’t
expect Wilders to be prime minister. That would not be good.”
However he performs,
the broader anti-establishment discontent the blond populist has
helped fuel clearly remains. By international standards, the Dutch
are well-off and well looked-after: healthy economy, high employment,
relative equality, enviable welfare state.
But it depends what
your reference point is, said Gijs Schumacher, a political scientist
at the University of Amsterdam. “Dutch voters don’t compare
themselves to people in other countries,” Schumacher said.
“They compare
themselves to themselves, but back in the 1990s” – before the
financial crisis and September 11. “Objectively, things may be
good, but it’s all really about perceptions.”
And against that
background, the outliers among the Netherlands’ huge array parties
– 28 are running in all – offer a promise, however false, of
protection, said André Krouwel of Amsterdam’s Free University: for
Dutch culture, wages, rents, pensions – even for animals.
“Voters simply no
longer trust the traditional parties to look after them,” Krouwel
said. “And in times like this, people who feel vulnerable, who are
angry and worried, want to feel taken care of. They are drawn to an
alternative party.”
The question that
begs is how far, and on what, the five parties polls suggest will
have to work together to form the Netherlands’ next government will
be able to agree. Wilders or no Wilders, Dutch politics could be
about to become a good deal less reasonable than it once was.
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