In the light of recent results, this one has the right wing populists with their blonde haired bastard of a leader sweeping to power, yes? Just so we know our starting assumptions, like.
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Netherlands general election 2017
If they go for Wilders, the whole EU might be fucked. He'll be wanting a ref there too, I'm done with assuming anyone behaves rationally anymore. -
Netherlands general election 2017
Indeed, even if he doesn't win, could his presence be enough to cause the established parties to do a Cameron?
I suppose that in the Dutch context, he won't be able to pressure VVD into offering a referendum in their manifesto, as VVD are pro-EU, aren't they? (Edit: In fact they have a foundational commitment to the four freedoms as well as common policies on defence and security.)
Would Labour have any interest in putting a referendum on the table?Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
Wasn't that London 2008?Kevchenko wrote: In the light of recent results, this one has the right wing populists with their blonde haired bastard of a leader sweeping to power, yes? Just so we know our starting assumptions, like.
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Netherlands general election 2017
Yup, it's only 4 months away. Whilst it is virtually impossible to gain a parliamentary majority in the country which symbolises coalition politics, the way things are going popular support for Wilders will push this to the absolute limit.
Normally, the other parties would hammer out a cordon sanitaire agreement to keep the PVV out (although the Rutte I administration was happy for him to provide support to their minority cabinet) but I suspect Wilders support will be so large this will be impossible. His racial hatred trial is allowing him to play the martyr at just the time he needs to keep on building that support.
You can chalk another one up for the fash next March.Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
I was checking the 2012 election results. Why is Friesland so Labour-friendly?Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
Wowsers, and Drenthe and Groningen too.
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Netherlands general election 2017
Wilders is of course delighted about Trump's win. He's been tweeting about it all day and has written this for Breitbart.Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
Dutch opinion poll of November 6:
VVD 27
PVV 27
CDA 17
GL 15
D66 15
SP 13
PvdA 10
50+ 9
CU 6
PvdD 4
SGP 3
Rest 4
Total: 150 seats; coalition needs 76.
The PVV will always find it difficult to find a majority for a European referendum; as far as I know, only the far-left SP is also anti-Europe. The remaining parties are all in favor of staying in the European union, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
Will the PVV be able to convince the PvdA ('labour') to change their opinion about it? Perhaps; the PvdA have not been the most strong-willed lately. Will that be relevant? Probably not, since the PvdA are about to be decimated.
It is going to be extremely hard to build a coalition if this poll would indeed be the final tally, especially given that noone wants to join forces with the PVV. The combination of VVD, CDA, and D66 is a viable coalition in terms of program (central-right, free market), but they only add up to 59 seats. Even if you add in GroenLinks (which is not the most natural fit in some aspects, but does work quite well in others) we only reach 74. So either that requires a fifth party, or they need to grow two extra seats somewhere.Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
Making a crude division of parties into camps, I would characterize them as follows:
Left: GL, SP, PvdA, CU
Center: CDA, D66
Right: VVD, PVV, SGP
Fringe: 50+, PvdD
This is far from definitive; good arguments could be made for different partitions. Both the CU and the SGP could be added to the fringe, since they are fundamentalist Christian parties; these fundamentalist policies would never survive coalition talks, so I've classified them by social policies which can have an influence. CU could be center as well, but that doesn't change the point I am going to make.
In the 2012 elections, the blocks divided the seats as follows:
Left: 4+15+38+5 = 62
Center: 13+12 = 25
Right: 41+15+3 = 59
Fringe: 2+2 = 4
In the current polls, we see quite the shift:
Left: 15+13+10+6 = 44
Center: 17+15 = 32
Right: 27+27+3 = 57
Fringe: 9+4+4 = 17
Both partners in the current coalition, PvdA and VVD, suffer heavy losses (although the one is quite a bit heavier than the other). But where the VVD's loss on the right is covered nearly completely by the PVV's gain on the same wing, the left bleeds votes all over the place. Losing thirty percent of the votes in the left slice of the pie is not a good thing.
I'm having a hard time to imagine where those 28 PvdA votes have gone. Eleven of them went to GroenLinks, seven of them went to 50+ maybe. What happened to the other ten? Which parties could possibly be near enough?Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
Friesland always votes centre-left. It is the Michigan and Wisconsin of the Netherlands.Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
Erm . . .Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
Exactly.Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
Please tell me fucking Michigan didn't fall to trump as well. Once I saw PA and Wisconsin, was too depressed to drill down the results further.Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
CNN still haven't called Michigan, but with 96% of the votes counted, Trump leads narrowly.Lang Spoon wrote: Please tell me fucking Michigan didn't fall to trump as well. Once I saw PA and Wisconsin, was too depressed to drill down the results further.Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
I'm not selling the Netherlands short, but I don't see this fucker hitting 443 pages.Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
Wait until that albino fucker Wilders starts climbing on the polls.Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
Well the US thread did have a two year run up, rather than four months.
But this one is going to be a bellwether election in mainland Europe. Netherlands is an old Europe country, one of the inner six, and has been getting along with liberal-conservative governments for goodness knows how long.
But the populist, anti-EU right already has a strong foothold - in terms of vote share the PVV were hitting the numbers in 2012 that UKIP hit here in 2015, and they have proportional representation to boot. The 2017 election is going to show where things are heading.Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
There is a strong undercurrent of racism in the Netherlands. It's no different to any other former brutal imperial power in the respect. Many highly educated, self-proclaimed liberal Dutch people don't hire foreigners, no matter how good their Dutch is. Mark Rutte (the PM) once explained that while discrimination is real, it is up to the immigrants to do something about it. There is nothing he can do about it. He's only the Prime Minister.
Geert Wilders' achilles heel has always been that he is an idiot. He's constantly tweeting unbelievably stupid shit, is openly racist, etc., which has so far limited his appeal to closet racists. But he has been around for years now and, as we have seen, open racism has become the new norm. And that's when all the racists come out of the closet. When it becomes accepted. When it becomes a popular movement.Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
I see what you did there.antoine polus wrote: Friesland always votes centre-left. It is the Michigan and Wisconsin of the Netherlands.
I ask this because in my ignorant mind when I think of Friesland I think of daily farming and a very rural province by Dutch standards. And left-wing is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think 'rural', even though there have been exceptions.Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
Some of the first prominent Dutch socalist politicians came from the Northern provinces. For instance, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, while born in Amsterdam, launched his career in Harlingen, Friesland.
There's much more context here, but it's all in Dutch. In a nutshell: the Northern provinces have always been relatively poor, and were inhabited mainly by poor laborers who were mercilessly exploited by the few rich land owners. This was fertile soil for socialism, which took off in the late 19th, early 20th century, and that has been ingrained in Northern Dutch culture deeply enough that their preference for the left-wing parties hasn't gone yet.Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
Sounds like a possible Michigan/Burnley so. Is Wilders polling well up there?Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
I don't know if those numbers are available, and if so, where.Lang Spoon wrote: Sounds like a possible Michigan/Burnley so. Is Wilders polling well up there?Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
Coincidentally, Michigan and Wisconsin have a shitload of Dutch farmers.Wouter D wrote: Some of the first prominent Dutch socalist politicians came from the Northern provinces. For instance, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, while born in Amsterdam, launched his career in Harlingen, Friesland.
There's much more context here, but it's all in Dutch. In a nutshell: the Northern provinces have always been relatively poor, and were inhabited mainly by poor laborers who were mercilessly exploited by the few rich land owners. This was fertile soil for socialism, which took off in the late 19th, early 20th century, and that has been ingrained in Northern Dutch culture deeply enough that their preference for the left-wing parties hasn't gone yet.Comment
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Netherlands general election 2017
Primarily from the North, no less (at least the ones in Michigan, which has the greatest concentration of people of Dutch heritage in the country).
Though my understanding is that those people, when faced with the same horrific economic conditions in the mid 19th c, turned to the Reformed Church and emigration, rather than socialism.Comment
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