Daily Archives: October 29, 2012

The Netherlands

VVD and Labour to form new ‘purple’ coalition for Dutch government

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With lightning speed (as far as coalition-building goes in the Netherlands), the two top finishers in the Sept. 12 Dutch election have formed a government that will seek €16 billion in budget cuts to bring the Dutch budget further into balance. 

Standing in front of a futuristic poster of a bridge, prime minister Mark Rutte (pictured above, right), the leader of the center-right Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) and Diederik Samsom (pictured above, left), leader of the social democratic Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA, Labour Party) announced that they will form the next governing coalition together.

The two parties finished first and second, respectively, in September’s election, far outpacing the other Dutch parties.

Throughout much of the campaign, the more leftist Socialistische Partij (SP, the Socialist Party) led polls, only for Labour to emerge in the last two weeks of the campaign, as Socialist leader Emile Roemer seemed to stumble in various television debates and Samsom emerged as a credible alternative — more pro-Europe and less stridently leftist yet still more skeptical of budget cuts.

Ultimately, the VVD won 41 seats and Labour won 38 seats — an increase for both parties.  The Socialists won just 15 seats, a far cry from polls just two weeks prior to the election that showed them winning upwards of 3o or 35 seats.  In switching from the Socialists to Labour, a huge chunk of Dutch voters have essentially moved the country from an outright anti-austerity coalition to a more stable, more centrist coalition — in fact, a return to the tradition of ‘purple cabinets’ of the past that included the VVD and Labour, most recently from 1994 to 2002 under various governments led by Labour prime minister Wim Kok.

The reported terms of the coalition agreement make clear that, essentially, the Rutte II government will continue to pursue vigorous austerity measures designed to bring the Dutch budget within 3% of GDP, despite Samsom’s opposition to budget cuts earlier in the spring and his vigorous opposition to Rutte throughout the campaign.  So in joining a government with Rutte, Samsom and Labour will leave the Socialists as the major anti-austerity opposition on the Dutch left.

So how exactly will the Rutte II government differ from its predecessor? And what did Labour win in exchange for its support for a fairly pro-austerity agenda?

Continue reading VVD and Labour to form new ‘purple’ coalition for Dutch government →

Italy, Sicily

Incredibly low turnout in Sicilian election

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Counting hasn’t yet started in Sicily’s regional elections.

But the one thing we know so far is that the electorate was far from enthusiastic for Sunday’s vote — just over 47% of eligible voters turned out for the Sicilian elections, a decline from the nearly 67% turnout at the last election in 2008.

We’ll have some firm results on Monday.  In the meanwhile, check out the background on Sicily’s elections here.

Lithuania

Lithuanian Social Democrats in place to run next government

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So we have the results of Lithuania’s full two rounds of elections: the Lietuvos socialdemokratų partija (LSDP, Social Democratic Party of Lithuania) have won the greatest number of seats in the Seimas, Lithuania’s parliament, following a runoff election yesterday.

Although 70 seats are determined by proportional representation on the basis of the first-round vote on October 14, the LSDP won a disproportionately high number of the 71 seats in the Seimas that are determined in single-member districts.

In the first round of the election, the more populist Darbo Partija (DP, Labour Party), led by Russian-born Viktor Uspaskich, won 19.96% of the vote, while the Social Democrats won just 18.45% and the governing Tėvynės sąjunga – Lietuvos krikščionys demokratai (TS-LKD, Homeland Union — Lithuanian Christian Democrats) of outgoing prime minister Andrius Kubilius won 14.93%.

For lots of reasons, this scared the rest of Europe.  Uspaskich, under investigation a few years ago for corruption, actually hid out in Russia, so a Uspaskich-headed government would be a nightmare for Europe, given that Lithuania’s already not just a European Union member, but a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

But by the end of the second round, the Social Democrats took 23 of the 71 single-district seats — Homeland Union won just 20, and Labour won just 12 — much like in past Lithuanian elections, Labour had a stronger result from the proportional results than from the direct-election results.

The result, which will give the Social Democrats the largest bloc of seats in the Seimas, makes it all but certain that the leader of the Social Democrats, Algirdas Butkevičius (pictured above, bottom), a former finance minister, will become Lithuania’s next prime minister.  Furthermore, although he’s signed an electoral pact with Uspaskich’s Labour Party and Tvarka ir teisingumas (TT, Order and Justice), a shape-shifting  populist party led by former president Rolandas Paksas, who was impeached for corruption in 2004, the result will give Butkevičius a boost vis-a-vis even his coalition partners.

So Europe, which was wary of a Uspaskich-dominated government (even if Labour ultimately won more seats than the Social Democrats, will be a little more relaxed following Sunday’s runoff vote — although it was always thought that Butkevičius would nonetheless become prime minister, his position will be much stronger than Uspaskich’s, or any of the more nefarious characters of Lithuanian politics, with the Social Democrats having won the clearest plurality of parliamentary seats.

Kubilius, who had a difficult hand to play after the past four years in government, duly trimmed the Lithuanian budget after the financial crisis of 2008-09 saw Lithuania’s GDP plummet by 15%.  Indeed, the Lithuanian election result, in both rounds, was much better for Kubilius’s Homeland Union than polls had suggested, indicating that Kubilius received more credit than expected from a Lithuanian electorate that’s nonetheless weary of austerity, economic stagnation and unemployment.

Although Butkevičius won’t likely be able to effect a 180-degree change in Lithuanian policy, he has championed the introduction of a progressive income tax and minimum salaries.  Furthermore, although he’s been less enthusiastic (along with much of eastern Europe) about his country’s accession into the eurozone, European leaders seem much likelier to be happy with a pro-European center-left prime minister like Butkevičius than either Uspaskich or Paksas.

So ultimately, on a day when Ukraine seemed to fall further backwards on democracy and the rule of law, Lithuania seems to have marked another peaceful transfer of government within the broad tradition of European political norms.