WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI #179: Holland, the right wins but... (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

On November 22, the Netherlands voted for the renewal of the Lower House
(Tweede Kamer): the far-right PVV (Freedom Party) won the elections,
gaining 37 seats. In second place is the GroenLinks-PvdA with 25 seats
(the social democratic party led by Tindemmans) followed by the VVD
(Rutte's former party) with 24 seats and the NSC with 20. These are the
major parties: at least 76 votes are needed to form the Government. ----
The elections were held ahead of the natural deadline scheduled for 2025
following the resignation of the Government chaired by Mark Rutte of the
People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en
Democratie, (PVD), of liberal orientation, at the head of a coalition of
centre-right parties. The governing coalition had resigned due to its
policy on immigration. Precisely on this issue the governing party was
defeated by the right which ultimately reproaches it for the policy of
reception towards Ukrainian refugees and migration policy in general,
despite the fact that the PVD had tried to take cover by replacing Rutte
with Milan Gentilizi, a daughter of immigrants who moved to the right
and became a supporter of xnophobic policies. The electorate of the
right of the liberal party he did not consider the make-up operation
credible and preferred the "safe second-hand" Wilders, pro-Nazi and
anti-Islamic.
To hypothesize how the future Government may be formed, it must be
remembered that the Netherlands is governed by a constitutional
parliamentary monarchy in which legislative power is exercised by the
States General, made up of two chambers: the Lower House (Tweede Kamer)
made up of 150 members elected with a proportional system and direct
universal suffrage for a maximum of 4 years and the Upper House or First
Chamber, (Eerste Kamer) which is made up of 75 members elected for 4
years by the 12 legislative assemblies of the Provinces. The Upper House
cannot propose or amend legislation, but can only confirm (or reject)
laws passed by the Lower House. The Netherlands also includes 6 overseas
countries and territories in the Caribbean. These territories are not
part of the EU. In order to participate in the distribution of seats, a
party list must receive a number of votes equal to or greater than a
threshold of 0.67%. The seats obtained by a list are assigned primarily
to candidates who, in the preferences, have obtained at least 25% of
0.17% of the total votes, regardless of their position on the electoral
list.
In light of the results of the vote, it follows that the future
Government can only be a coalition one, as is the tradition of the
country, considering that there are as many as fifteen parties sitting
in the First Chamber. According to the declarations prior to the vote,
the PVV should have no chance of building a governing coalition, unless
its unscrupulous leader repeats the experience of a few years ago by
offering external support to a minority government of the liberal right.
A government between VVD (liberals), GLPVDA (greens and socialists), NSC
(New Social Contract) of Pieter Omtzigt, a former Christian Democrat, a
party established in August and which is the other big news of this
electoral round for having elected 20 parliamentarians.
As is Dutch tradition, the negotiations will be complex and will last a
long time (9 months of negotiations were needed to form the last
government!), but it is likely that the solution will be very similar to
the Spanish or Polish one where the right-wing party wins the electoral
clash, but does not have the majority necessary to form the government:
if this happens, rather than hypothesizing the formation of a possible
government, it is interesting to analyze what is happening in society
and the profound reasons for the vote.

The Dutch Crisis

The country's malaise has distant and complex origins and to be
understood it must at least start from the observation that for 13 years
the Netherlands has been governed by the center right which, in turn,
had succeeded 10 years of center government. This means that in the last
twenty years the Dutch governments have worked hard to dismantle all the
good that Dutch society had obstructed in terms of social and political
rights in the thirty years preceding the end of the century, proof of
which is that today Dutch society is increasingly illiberal, affected by
social, religious and ethnic tensions. The failure of social policy,
especially regarding emigration, has contributed to the deterioration of
the social climate, given that the social and political instruments used
to integrate, especially Islamic emigration, into the country have
proven to be unsuccessful.
The Dutch legislator believed he could address the problem of
integration with the traditional instruments of concertation and forgot
that the adoption of the concertation method had worked in the past
because the social and political history of the country had, over a long
period of time, "filed" to the point of smoothing out the differences
between the 16 religious confessions of the country, producing a
balanced amalgam between the cults which resulted in the adoption of the
necessary consultation, i.e. a balanced coexistence agreement between
different components of society who respect each other.
Having introduced the Islamic confession into this system, simply as an
additional element, without introducing the corrective of the secular
nature of the institutions as an instrument of education for
coexistence, has broken the balance and caused the emergence of elements
of resentment and division. What we say can only be easily understood
through concrete references such as, for example, in relation to the
school system.

The school question in Holland

The country has a complex school system in which the private
confessional school financed by the State prevails: it follows that each
confession has its own schools. With the rarity of religious
affiliations and the demographic crisis, economic management reasons led
to the merging of Protestant schools of different faiths, while Catholic
and Jewish schools remained. The growing presence of Muslims has led to
the birth of Islamic schools, obviously also financed by the State,
which have joined the others. But let's look at the financing criteria.
The Dutch legislator distributes resources according to some parameters:
number of pupils (Muslim pupils are growing in number and of a single
faith); greater funding for schools that have students with linguistic
difficulties (those of immigrant children); higher salaries for teachers
in schools whose students have linguistic difficulties and require more
teacher work (idem); greater aid to schools whose parents are not
literate (those of immigrants). The result is that Islamic
denominational schools legitimately receive more public funding and are
therefore more sought after by pupils and teachers. It's a short step
from here to hatred and resentment!
What was said for the school system is repeated in the field of social
benefits, housing policy, working conditions, etc.; Add to all this very
high inflation. Now imagine introducing a significant mass of Ukrainian
immigrants into this delicate system and you will have the picture of a
devastating situation that largely explains the vote. And then, it is no
coincidence, the Rutte government was forced into early elections
because a parliamentary investigation revealed the abuses committed by
tax collectors who, from 2013 to 2019, had unfairly asked around 10
thousand families for the repayment of subsidies intended for the care
of children for tens of thousands of euros. This scandal is the basis of
the success of Pieter Omtzigt's NSC, which raised this issue, electing
20 deputies on the first try.

The peasant question

Another novelty in Dutch politics is the newly formed Farmers' Party,
the BBB which obtained 7 seats, but won the provincial elections last
spring and is gathering the discontent of the countryside and of Dutch
rural society which resents the environmentalist policies of the left
which translate into limitations for intensive farming, to avoid the
spillage of leachate, the emission of toxic gases and the spread of
pathogens.
It should be added that the feared competition of agricultural products
from Ukraine worries farmers quite a bit also because, by affecting the
common agricultural policy, it deprives them of financing and support
and increases overproduction to be disposed of on the international
market to support the prices of agricultural products.

It should be considered that the campaign vote was distributed between
the BBB and the PVV, precisely because these two parties share strongly
Eurosceptic positions, contrary not only to community environmental
policies, but also to the greater powers to be given to the EU, also in
the perspective of its enlargement. Even if neither of the two parties
were to go into government, it is still clear that the future Dutch
government will have to take into account these needs present in the
country, if it wants to somehow counteract the growing strength of
populism and erode the economic and social foundations on which the
growing consensus towards these forces.
All the more so since the spring European elections are not very far
away and it is not certain that their possible result will not
contribute to significantly influencing the very outcome of the
negotiations for the composition of a future government of the country,
in a Europe in which the political balance between the forces that
manage the various states is increasingly precarious and issues such as
the restructuring of the common agricultural policy must be addressed in
case we really want to allow Ukraine to join the EU soon.

G.C.

https://www.ucadi.org/2023/11/26/olanda-vince-la-destra-ma/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca