Daily Archives: April 1, 2014

The Netherlands

Who is Alexander Pechtold?

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Though Geert Wilders and his anti-Moroccan comments dominated  headlines following last month’s municipal elections throughout The Netherlands, the clear winner was the Democraten 66 (D66, Democrats 66) and its leader Alexander Pechtold (pictured above).Netherlands Flag Icon

Nearly a year and a half after the last Dutch general election, D66 is emerging in polls as the strongest party in The Netherlands today, in light of the government’s increasing unpopularity under the strain of budget cuts and a continued sluggish economy.

Notably, D66 became the largest party in both Amsterdam and Utrecht. That’s a big deal because Amsterdam since 1946 has been the stronghold of the Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA, Labour Party), the junior partner in the current Dutch government. It’s a sign of just how unpopular the government has become, and how specifically unpopular the Labour Party has become.

Nationally, the Christen-Democratisch Appèl (CDA, Christian Democratic Appeal) won the highest share of the vote with 17.7%, largely on the strength of rural voters.

The center-right, liberal Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy), the leading partner of the national government placed second with 12.7%, a significant decrease.

But D66 placed third with 9.6% of the vote and, in light of the advances in Amsterdam and Utrecht, emerged from the March 19 elections as the party with the most momentum in Dutch politics today.

It’s somewhat of an odd party.

Founded in (you guessed it!) 1966 by journalist Hans van Mierlo, its original goal was to make The Netherlands a more democratic country, with a two-party presidential republic and greater direct participation through referenda. 

Today, it doesn’t necessarily want to enact a presidential republic, but it’s still split between an older radical wing and a newer liberal wing, and it has essentially become a just-left-of-center party that’s both socially liberal and economically liberal, with chiefly urban appeal limited to The Netherlands’s large cities and progressive university towns. 

An art historian by training, Pechtold was the mayor of Wageningen before making the leap into national politics. He briefly served in the second government of Jan Pieter Balkenende between 2005 and 2006 as minister for government reform and kingdom relations. Continue reading Who is Alexander Pechtold? →

Canada, Quebec

Will bilingualism doom the Liberals in Québec?

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Bill 14 Protest,

One month ago, on the popularity of premier Pauline Marois’s push to enact a ‘secular charter of values’ (la charte de la laïcité) that would ban the wearing of religious symbols, including the Muslim hijab, it seemed like the sovereigntist Parti québécois (PQ) was headed for a huge victory on the basis of ‘cultural’ values that, for once, had little to do with Québec independence or with the status of the French language in the province. Quebec Flag IconpngCanada Flag Icon

Two weeks ago, that conventional wisdom was upended, as the PQ’s star candidate Pierre Karl Péladeau and Marois spent days speculating about a potential independence referendum and how Québec might separate from Canada and still retain the Canadian dollar and open borders with the rest of Canada. The sudden return of the independence debate to the campaign agenda seemed to scare many votes into the arms of Philippe Couillard, the new leader of the Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ), which has been out of power for barely 18 months after nearly a decade in power.

Now, after the final debate among the four main party leaders last week, Couillard’s comments in defense of bilingualism have shifted the debate once again to yet another controversial issue — the proper role of the provincial government in promoting French and/or English within Québec.   

Last Thursday night’s debate was vastly different from the previous debate. Whereas Marois took much of the heat in the first debate, Couillard received more criticism in the much feistier final debate — likely because polls increasingly show that the Liberals have not only recaptured the lead from the PQ, but that it could win a majority government.

Amid all the sniping, however, Couillard’s comments about bilingualism stand out:

“Bilingualism isn’t a threat,” he said. “Knowledge of English is indispensable.”

To American ears — or, possibly, to Ontarian or British Columbian or Albertan ears — that shouldn’t be controversial. But in many regards, the French language debate is even more fraught than the referendum debate, because it’s not as hypothetical as an independent Québec.

The province’s 8 million citizens comprise a tiny island of French speakers within a sea of 341 million (mostly) English speakers in the United States and Canada. Without the Québec government’s interest in protecting the French language, English might easily overrun French as the language of Québec commerce and industry, putting the province’s native French speakers at a disadvantage in North America’s French-speaking heartland.

Continue reading Will bilingualism doom the Liberals in Québec? →

India, United States

US ambassador to India resigns a week before Indian elections

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India starts its massive, nearly five-week, nine-phase general election in just seven days.India Flag IconUSflag

So you figure that US-Indian relations must be on fairly poor terms when the United States ambassador to India, Nancy Powell, stepped down on Monday after less than two years on the job.

According to reports in both the United States and India, Powell had become increasingly ineffectual due to the Khobragade affair.

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RELATED — In Depth: India’s elections

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Her resignation came amid growing reports that her recall was imminent, though US officials strongly denied that yesterday:

And at a Monday briefing, deputy State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf strongly denied that Powell’s resignation was anything but a 37-year career diplomat retiring after serving posts all over the world….. “All the rumors and speculation are, quite frankly, totally false,” Harf said.

Powell’s decision wasn’t really Powell’s fault — she will retire in May after a 37-year career in the foreign service, having served as the US ambassador to Uganda, Ghana, Pakistan and Nepal, as an assistant acting secretary of state three times, director general of the US Foreign Service, and previously as consul general in Kolkata (previously Calcutta) in the early 1990s and political counselor at the US embassy in India in the mid-1990s.

So Powell was already one of the most experienced hands that the US state department could have deployed to India.

The Khobragade incident is essentially a minor diplomacy scandal. US officials arrested deputy consul general Devyani Khobragade in December of last year on suspicion of visa fraud — and then strip-searched and detained Khobragade. The incident initially caused a minor kerfuffle over diplomatic privileges and immunities, but quickly escalated to the point where it’s had an extremely adverse effect on the bilateral relationship. India began stripping US diplomats of certain privileges, and Indian officials made themselves increasingly less accessible to Powell.

Meanwhile, Powell had to deal with the even thornier issue of how the United States ought to handle Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat and, increasingly the frontrunner to become India’s next prime minister. Modi, who’s leading the parliamentary election campaign of the center-right, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, भारतीय जनता पार्टी) was denied travel visas to both the United Kingdom and to the United States, the latter in 2005, stemming from the controversy over Modi’s role in fomenting — or at least, not stopping — the worst Hindu-Muslim riots of the past two decades in 2002, which left over 1,000 Muslims dead and occurred shortly after Modi took office in Gujarat.

Following the release of a recent report from the US Congress, that policy seems almost certain to change if Modi becomes India’s next prime minister.

Powell met Modi in February, the first ambassador to do so since Modi emerged as a potential prime minister. But the Khobragade affair delayed the meeting (pictured above), and some reports from India claim that Washington faults Powell for being too close to the administration of Mamohan Singh and foreign policy advisers within Singh’s party, the Indian National Congress (Congress, भारतीय राष्ट्रीय कांग्रेस).

Modi hasn’t spoken at length about his foreign policy, but most Indian observers believe he will be relatively more muscular vis-à-vis Pakistan, relatively more aloof with Europe and the United States, and relatively friendlier with China, on the basis of past trade-related cooperation between China and Gujarat.

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With a fresh start, expect US president Barack Obama to appoint a relatively high-profile political ambassador to replace Powell. One option he should consider is Bobby Jindal (pictured above), a two-term governor of Louisiana, former member of the US House of Representatives, a conservative Republican and an Indian American who was raised in a Hindu household, though he later converted to Roman Catholicism.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Obama recruited a sitting Republican governor for such an important post — Utah governor Jon Huntsman served as the Obama administration’s ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011.

Though the India portfolio isn’t always filled by a high-profile political official, there’s a long pedigree of important figures in the role: Continue reading US ambassador to India resigns a week before Indian elections →