Category Archives: The Netherlands

The Netherlands

Dutch voters defeated Wilders, not the Dutch electoral system

Leave a comment
Prime minister Mark Rutte debated populist Geert Wilders in a one-on-one debate Monday night. (Bart Maat / ANP)

One of the growing myths of yesterday’s poor showing for Geert Wilders and the is that, somehow, the Dutch electoral system is somehow responsible for Wilders’s poor showing. 

Consider this paragraph from The Economist that cautions not to extrapolate too much from Wilders’s humbling collapse to just 13% support (good enough, in the current fragmented political context, for second place):

Mr Trump’s win could not have happened without the peculiarities of America’s electoral college. By the same token, the fact that Mr Wilders did not win does not translate on to Ms Le Pen. The Dutch political system is open and diffuse, with over a dozen parties in parliament and low barriers for new ones to make it in. The French system is more rigid.

I’ve seen this theme increasingly on Twitter today (especially on #MAGA Twitter) — somehow as if it’s okay to disregard the Dutch election result because seats in the Tweede Kamer are awarded on the basis of proportional representation or because of the Dutch parliamentary system, as if another system would have delivered a resounding victory for Wilders and the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for Freedom).

Poppycock.

Imagine that Dutch elections were instead organized like American elections. You would see a primary on the right (much like we’ve seen recently in Italy, even though it’s more of a parliamentary system). In this hypothetical primary, Wilders would have campaigned against not only prime minister Mark Rutte, but against Christian Democratic leader Sybrand Buma and Christian Union leader Gert-Jan Segers and even Thierry Baudet, the head of a little-known group, the Forum voor Democratie (FvD, Forum for Democracy), a small right-wing populist and eurosceptic group that managed to win 1.8% of the national vote yesterday. If you extrapolate the results — that’s a little tricky because the Dutch voted for parties, not for personalities — it’s clear that right-leaning voters far preferred Rutte to Wilders.

That would have been true in 2012, by the way, and it would have been true in 2010 (the high-water mark for Wilders and the PVV). An American-style ‘primary’ in 2006? Former Christian Democratic prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende would have easily defeated both Rutte and Wilders. In a presidential-style ‘general election,’ Rutte would have faced off, perhaps, against Alexander Pechtold, the leader of the left-liberal Democraten 66 (D66, Democrats 66), with Wilders standing on the sidelines stewing over Islam or running a doomed third-party challenge. (Though of course sore-loser laws in the United States would have effectively prevented Wilders from running both for the Republican nomination and a third-party candidacy).

Imagine, too, a world where Dutch elections used the French system. Rutte and Wilders, as the leaders of the two parties with the largest number of votes in the 2017 election (again, it’s tricky to conflate votes for parties and votes for individuals) would presumably face one another in a runoff.

But it’s hard to see where Wilders would have picked up votes, much beyond the populist 50PLUS party or the FvD. That’s clear enough from the 65% (or so) of the Dutch electorate that supported moderate parties of both the left and the right that are generally pro-Europe and tolerant (if not always enthusiastic) of immigrants. Rutte, I’d be willing to wager, would win a French-style runoff by the same margin that centrist Emmanuel Macron currently enjoys against populist Marine Le Pen in polls forecasting the May presidential runoff in France.

Finally, consider the United Kingdom, where each member of parliament is elected in a single-member constituency by first-past-the-post voting.

There’s a reason that third parties fare so poorly in FPTP systems — they are unfairly disadvantaged.

See the map above from the 388 municipalities of The Netherlands. That sea of dark blue? It’s the wave of municipalities where Rutte’s governing Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) would have won on a FPTP basis. In a world where the Tweede Kamer was a 388-member parliament, the VVD would easily dominate it, followed (not particularly closely) in second place by the Christen-Democratisch Appèl (CDA, Christian Democratic Appeal), represented above in dark green.

By my count, the PVV won first place across just 23 municipalities. That compares with 13 municipalities where the Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij (SGP, Reformed Political Party) won the highest number of votes (see in orange above) — a party that wants to run the country on ‘biblical principles’ and Calvinist orthodoxy!

The system — in this case at least — had no bearing.

Wilders has no one to blame but himself and his party’s vague and divisive message. It simply didn’t break through to many Dutch voters, and that lack of enthusiasm would have manifested itself in any number of electoral systems.

The Netherlands

Eight lessons from the 2017 Dutch election results

2 Comments
Twenty-eight parties were vying for 150 seats in the Dutch House of Representatives. (Emmanuel Dunand / AFP)

Orange may be the new black.

But as it turns out, orange is also the new bulwark for liberal democracy.

Mark Rutte’s governing center-right, liberal Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) performed better than polls predicted in The Netherlands, and Rutte will now return as Dutch prime minister — perhaps through the end of the decade — as head of a multi-party governing coalition.

Conversely, Wednesday’s election amounted to a disappointing result for Geert Wilders and the sharply anti-Europe, anti-Islam and anti-immigration Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for Freedom), which blew a longtime polling lead that it had held from the middle of 2015 up to just a couple of weeks ago.

As Dutch voters took a harder look at the campaign, however, they turned away from Wilders’s populism and to the balmier vision of Rutte’s VVD. But they also turned to three other parties that ranged from conservative to liberal to progressive. Indeed, over 65% of the Dutch electorate supported parties that are, essentially, in favor of moderate policymaking, European integration and basic decency to immigrants.

Given that the Dutch election is the first of a half-dozen key European national elections in 2017, all of which are taking place in the dual shadows of last year’s Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election in the United States, everyone was watching this vote in particular as a harbinger for European elections this year.

So what does today’s result mean? Here are the top eight takeaways from election night.
Continue reading Eight lessons from the 2017 Dutch election results →

The Netherlands

Rutte’s liberals eclipses Dutch populists as voters go to the polls

Leave a comment
Mark Rutte, if polls are correct, will lead his VVD to victory on March 15 — and another term as prime minister. (ANP)

Everything’s coming up Rutte.

Mark Rutte, that is — the prime minister of The Netherlands who will almost certainly find his way to a third term as prime minister after tomorrow’s election.

Even earlier this year, when Geert Wilders’s hard-right Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for Freedom) held a substantial lead, it was always virtually assured that Rutte would return as prime minister. Consistently, even as the PVV topped polls, Rutte’s center-right, liberal Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) continued to follow behind in second place, leading the race among the PVV’s mainstream opponents. All along, Wilders’s goal was never forming a government, but the hollow victory of placing first among a half-dozen parties bunched together between 10% and 20% in the polls.

Over the last two weeks, even that has changed to Wilders’s detriment.

The VVD eclipsed the PVV in polls at the end of February, and one shock poll from Ipsos on the eve of the election showed the PVV sliding to fifth place. At a time when Rutte is embroiled in a high-profile diplomatic spat with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (over whether Turkish ministers should be holding campaign rallies in The Netherlands for next month’s Turkish constitutional referendum), Wilders still seems to be losing steam.

* * * * *

RELATED: Trump effect — Europe turning toward integration,
away from populists

* * * * *

Both inside Europe and beyond, the Wilders threat was always smaller than the amount of coverage he’s received. Even when the PVV was leading, no other major party was willing to work with Wilders and the PVV’s toxic brand. Even with the highest number of seats in the Tweede Kamer (House of Representatives), the PVV would fall far short of the majority it would need to form a government. Mostly, that’s due to the PVV’s hardline views on immigration, Islam and the European Union. But it’s also because Wilders proved an unreliable ally to Rutte when he withdrew the PVV’s support for Rutte’s minority government in 2012 over spending, forcing snap elections — a gambit that backfired when the PVV lost nine seats.

What’s very much true — and always has been true — is that support across all parties in tomorrow’s election in The Netherlands could be so dispersed that no party wins more than even 17% of the vote. It could usher in the most fragmented parliament in postwar history, and it will force Rutte to navigate coalition negotiations that include four or even five parties. Don’t hold your breath for the kind of quick deal that followed the 2012 election, the ‘purple’ coalition between Rutte’s liberals and the social democratic Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA, Labour Party).

Labour’s support has collapsed in the ensuing five years. Junior coalition parties are rarely rewarded by voters, but many Labour supporters believe the party far too willing to compromise with Rutte on spending after Labour waged a popular campaign against budget austerity. (It is still projected to win between nine and 14 seats in the election under a new leader, Lodewijk Asscher.)

If the VVD and the PVV finish first and second, respectively, as most polls still forecast, the race for third place is murkier. The conservative Christen-Democratisch Appèl (CDA, Christian Democratic Appeal), the center-left/liberal Democraten 66 (Democrats 66) and the leftist GroenLinks (Green Left) are all surging, and the CDA and D66 are widely tipped to enter government after coalition negotiations. GroenLinks is likely to make the strongest gains of any party (more even than Wilders) after the successful campaign of its fresh-faced 30-year-old leader, Jesse Klaver.

If there’s any consensus among the Dutch electorate, voters are choosing from a group of five or six parties, each dedicated to European integration, liberal democracy and moderate policy prescriptions — not fear-mongering xenophobia. No matter what happens tomorrow, Wilders will have a smaller role in shaping Dutch policy than, say, the more circumspect D66 leader Alexander Pechtold, who could become Rutte’s deputy prime minister in a new coalition. Pechtold may not have the international profile that Wilders has acquired with his ‘Make The Netherlands Ours Again’ histrionics, but he could be in a position to push the next government to a more pro-immigrant and pro-European orientation.

None of this, most especially the PVV’s apparent collapse, should be shocking.

Continue reading Rutte’s liberals eclipses Dutch populists as voters go to the polls →

European Union, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, United States

Trump effect: Europe turning toward integration, away from populists

5 Comments
Across Europe, support for Trump-style populists is falling, even though many European populists were growing long before Trump entered the political scene. (123RF / Evgeny Gromov)

If there’s one thing that unites Europeans, it’s the concept that they are better — more enlightened, more cultured and more sophisticated — than Americans.

That was especially true during the presidency of George W. Bush, when France, Germany and other leading anchors of the European Union vociferously opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq. In 2002, it sometimes seemed like German chancellor Gerhard Schröder was running against Bush, not against his conservative German challenger, Bavarian premier Edmund Stoiber.

Europeans might be leaning in a similar direction in the Trump era, even though it’s hardly been a month since Donald Trump took office. In the days after Trump’s surprise election last November (and after the Brexit vote last summer), populists like Geert Wilders in The Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France had reason to believe that Trump’s victory would give political tailwinds to their own electoral efforts in 2017.

If anything, however, Europeans are pulling back from populism in the first months of 2017. As four of the founding EU countries gear up for elections in the coming months — the first will be The Netherlands in just nine days — the threat of a Trump-style populist surging to power seems increasingly farfetched.

Maybe Europeans simply outright disdain what they perceive as the vulgar, Jacksonian urges of American voters. Maybe it’s shock at the way Trump’s inexperienced administration has bumbled through its first 40 days or the troubles of British prime minister Theresa May in navigating her country through the thicket of Brexit and withdrawing from the European Union.

More likely though, it could be that Trump’s oft-stated criticism of NATO and praise for Russian president Vladimir Putin have finally shaken Europeans out of the fog that’s gathered for 70 years under the penumbra of pax Americana. Even as officials like US vice president Mike Pence and US defense secretary James Mattis reassure European allies that the United States is committed to the trans-Atlantic security alliance, Trump continues to muse about NATO being obsolete (as recently as the week before his inauguration). Furthermore, the America-first nationalism that emerged from Trump’s successful campaign has continued into his administration and promises a new, more skeptical approach to prior American obligations not only in Europe, but worldwide. Just ten days into office, Trump trashed the European Union as a ‘threat’ to the United States, only to back down and call it ‘wonderful’ in February. Breitbart, the outlet that senior Trump strategist Stephen Bannon headed until last summer, ran a headline in January proclaiming that Trump would make the European Union ‘history.’

All of which has left Europeans also rethinking their security position and considering a day when American security guarantees are withdrawn — or simply too unreliable to be trusted.

Arguably, NATO always undermined the European Union, in structural terms, because NATO has been the far more important body for guaranteeing trans-Atlantic security. Though Federica Mogherini is a talented and saavy diplomat, the EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy is far less important to trans-Atlantic security than the NATO secretary-general (currently, former Norwegian prime minster Jens Stoltenberg). While the stakes of EU policymaking — trade, consumer and environmental regulation, competition law and other economic regulation and a good deal of European fiscal and monetary policy — aren’t low, they would be higher still if the European Union, instead of NATO, were truly responsible for European defense and security. That’s perhaps one reason why the European Union has been stuck since the early 2000s in its own ‘Articles of Confederation’ moment — too far united to pull the entire scheme apart, not yet united enough to pull closer together.

Perhaps, alternatively, it has nothing to do with blowback to Trump or Brexit, and voters in the core western European countries, which are accustomed to a less Schumpeterian form of capitalism, are simply more immune to radical swings than their counterparts subject to the janglier peaks and valleys of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. It’s not too much to think that, possibly, in the aftermath of both Brexit and Trump’s election, core Europe, unleashed from the toxic dynamic of British euroscepticism and emboldened to forge new relationships from outside the American security aegis, may be finding a new confidence after years of economic ennui.

Nevertheless, populists across Europe who tried to cloak themselves in the warm embrace of Trumpismo throughout 2016 are increasingly struggling in 2017. A dark and uncertain 2016 is giving way rapidly to a European spring in 2017 where centrists, progressives and conservatives alike are finding ways to push back against populist and xenophobic threats.  Continue reading Trump effect: Europe turning toward integration, away from populists →

The Netherlands

Meet Jesse Klaver, the 30-year-old Dutch leader of the surging Green-Left Party

Leave a comment
Jesse Klaver, the youthful leader of GroenLinks, hopes to make his party a player for the first time in the Dutch House of Representatives. (Facebook)

The first thing you notice about Jesse Klaver is just how much he looks like Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau.

The second thing you notice is that he’s so young — at 30 years old, he’s a full decade and a half younger than Trudeau and between 12 and 24 years younger than the other major Dutch party leaders.

But the more important point about Klaver, who has also been likened to John F. Kennedy, is that he’s making his leftist GroenLinks (Green-Left) a genuine player in Dutch politics for the first time since it came into existence in 1989. If polls are correct, GroenLinks will surge from just four seats to as many as 20 seats after the Dutch electorate votes in two weeks.

Klaver is the freshest face among the half-dozen or so party leaders who will be forced to work together after the March 15 election to forge a new government. Unlike in past elections, GroenLinks could be a key player in what will likely be a four- or five-party coalition that forms the next Dutch government. It’s very unlikely that Klaver would agree to bring his party into any coalition headed by current prime minister Mark Rutte. Nevertheless, Klaver’s party, which is as firmly pro-European as Rutte and likely the next Rutte-led government, could offer in opposition an alternative anti-austerity voice than the populist Geert Wilders.

Klaver’s party is locked in a tight contest among potentially five different parties for third place, behind Rutte’s center-right liberal Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) and Wilders’s the anti-Islam, anti-immigrant and eurosceptic Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for Freedom).

Wilders has dominated news coverage of the campaign both in The Netherlands and abroad, with his party surging to a formidable polling lead two years ago. Wilders, who pledges to ‘Make The Netherlands Great Again,’ promises a Trump-style rupture to halt the flow of refugees into The Netherlands and the flow of sovereignty from Amsterdam to Brussels. Wilders, like Trump and other far-right nationalists across Europe, is giving voice to a growing cadre of displaced and dispirited working-class voters who might have voted for left-wing parties a decade or two ago.

Though many polls forecast that the PVV will win the largest number of seats in the 150-member Tweede Kamer (House of Representatives), recent surveys show that the VVD’s support is plateauing or even, within the last week, falling. Even if Wilders and the populists do win the largest bloc of seats in the House, none of the other major Dutch parties are willing to entertain joining a Wilders-led coalition.

All of which means that the threat of an illiberal and xenophobic Dutch government, in 2017 at least, are far-fetched.

Indeed, if the election were held today, it would be Klaver’s GroenLinks (and not Wilders’s PVV) that could make the largest net gains in the election, contrary to conventional wisdom. Continue reading Meet Jesse Klaver, the 30-year-old Dutch leader of the surging Green-Left Party →

The Netherlands

As spring 2017 vote approaches, populist Wilders leading Dutch polls

3 Comments
The majority of polls show that Geert Wilders is leading in advance of the next Dutch election. (Geoff Pugh / The Telegraph)
The majority of polls show that Geert Wilders is leading in advance of the next Dutch election. (Geoff Pugh / The Telegraph)

Europe, it’s safe to say, was focused on a lot of threats in the last month — a polarized British electorate that voted to leave the European Union, ongoing worries about the Italian banking sector, yet another terrorist attack in France, a failed military coup in Turkey.Netherlands Flag Icon

No one has spent much time considering the possibility that political instability could come to the Netherlands, a northern European country that was one of the six founding members of what is today the European Union.

As Americans and non-Americans alike turn to Cleveland to watch the unorthodox spectacle of Donald Trump’s formal coronation as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, one of the Europeans in attendance hopes to become the next prime minister of The Netherlands. And he has reason for optimism. According to polls, Geert Wilders’s Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for Freedom) could win the next Dutch election, which must take place before March 15.

If those polls hold, Wilders, who has been a fixture in Dutch politics for more than a decade, would win the election by a robust margin, dwarfing the more traditional center-right, liberal Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) of prime minister Mark Rutte.

Wilders has enthusiastically embraced Trump at a time when nationalist populism is on the rise throughout the United States as well as Europe, tweeting out ‘Make The Netherlands Great Again’ to supporters earlier this spring. He’s arrived with a splash at the Republican National Convention, invited by the Tennessee delegation. As an outspoken critic of immigration, Islam and the European Union, Wilders hopes that he can finally break through to an election victory in March and perhaps, at long last, fulfill his dream of becoming prime minister.

Far-right Dutch leader Geert Wilders poses for a photo with Tennessee senator Bob Corker, chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (Twitter)
Far-right Dutch leader Geert Wilders poses for a photo with Tennessee senator Bob Corker, chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (Twitter)

Wilders inherited much of the support that Pim Fortuyn once commanded before the latter’s assassination in 2002. Wilders is known mostly for his outright rejection of Islam and his quest to terminate all immigration from Muslim-majority countries into the Netherlands. Though Wilders often denies links to other European far-right parties by pointing to his more liberal record on economic policy, he is clearly the Dutch analog to figures like Britain’s Nigel Farage and France’s Marine Le Pen. Wilders is  currently on trial in the Netherlands for inciting hatred as a result of disparaging comments he made about the Dutch Moroccan minority, though he wears the legal dispute as a badge of honor — a politician willing to speak the truth about Muslims. For more than a decade, following the assassinations of Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo Van Gogh (the latter killed by a Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent in 2004), Wilders lives under strict protection from potential threats.

Continue reading As spring 2017 vote approaches, populist Wilders leading Dutch polls →

The Netherlands

As US drug policy loosens, Dutch laws tighten

Leave a comment

IMG_2510

Increasingly over the past three decades, The Netherlands has become a haven for controversial policies on social issues — prostitution, physician-assisted euthanasia and, of course, drug legalization.Netherlands Flag Icon

Just this week, the Dutch made global headlines by firing an employee of its central bank who failed to report that she was moonlighting as a sex worker.

But even as states like Washington and Colorado experiment with legal marijuana regimes, and as the US justice department falls back from the aggressive prosecution of a ‘war on drugs’ that for decades swelled the US prison population with non-violent drug offenders, it’s the Dutch who are now second-thinking the permissive regulatory approach that transformed Amsterdam into a pleasure capital, where locals and tourists alike could indulge in vices prohibited elsewhere in the world. The bold steps toward full legalization in Washington and Colorado, however, are bringing marijuana into the mainstream. Seattle, Denver and Boulder are now the laboratories for the world’s most progressive drug reforms, not Amsterdam.

* * * * *

RELATED: Jamaican government targets legalizing ganja by September [June 2014]

* * * * *

Dutch liberalization, which dates back to the 1970s when officials embraced a policy of gedoogbeleid (tolerance) for soft drug use, was always an experiment in half-steps. Selling small quantities at Dutch ‘coffee shops’ or growing cannabis for personal use were decriminalized, but the wholesale trade in marijuana remained illegal. That kept the weed trade firmly in the ‘gray market’ — neither fully prohibited nor fully welcomed.

Though Amsterdam’s tourism industry resisted attempts to restrict marijuana use to Dutch citizens alone, it hasn’t stopped Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte’s government from introducing new restrictions that make it more difficult for non-nationals to smoke weed in The Netherlands. Since 2011, new laws give municipalities a wide berth to establish just how permissive they’d like to be. That means that while Amsterdam has largely resisted the crackdown, other cities, especially border towns like Maastricht, have embraced the tighter restrictions with enthusiasm. New police powers took effect last month allowing officials to prosecute those who facilitate the widespread cultivation of marijuana, such as ‘grow shops’ that sell the the equipment necessary to grow marijuana plants.

The result? A greater role for organized crime in the marijuana trade:

The result: Coffee shops are increasingly buying buds from criminal organizations willing to absorb the risk of prosecution by growing large amounts of cannabis in shipping containers buried underground, with little regard for quality or mold abatement. “It’s amazing how bad the quality has become,” says Bergman. “And the price is up. It’s what we’ve all predicted.”

It’s an ironic result for a party like Rutte’s Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy), one of the most successful economic liberal parties in all of Europe. Rutte’s predecessor, the Christian democratic Jan Peter Balkenende, was even more hostile to marijuana, and he pushed for legislation that would require all coffee shop visitors to acquire a ‘weed pass.’ Though that didn’t happen, subsequent Dutch governments have chipped away at drug liberalization, and the number of coffee shops in Amsterdam alone fell in the last decade by about one-third.

Nevertheless, the Dutch lessons were palpable. The most enduring lesson for US policymakers was the distinction between soft drugs and hard drugs. By taking a more permissive attitude to soft drugs like marijuana, Dutch officials could devote more resources to reducing the trade in harder drugs like heroin. While the United States took a tougher approach to hard-core drug users in the 1990s, The Netherlands treated heroin use, for example, as a public health issue instead of a crime problem. Twenty years later, with heroin use once again on the rise globally, it’s the United States that is taking the Dutch approach to addiction at every level of government — from US attorney general Eric Holder, who has pushed to end long, mandatory sentences for drug offenses, to Vermont governor Peter Shumlin, who’s made heroin treatment a pillar of his state government.

Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, European Union, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Slovenia, Sweden, The Netherlands, United Kingdom

The 13 key EU players in the proposed Juncker Commission

1 Comment

juncker

On Wednesday, the incoming president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker (pictured above), released full details on the proposed commissioners within his Commission, which will serve as the chief executive and administrative body of the European Union between 2014 and 2019.European_Union

The most important feature of the proposed Juncker Commission is that he’s introduced the greatest amount of hierarchy in an institution that used to be flat. It’s not a secret that some portfolios have always been more desirable than others, especially as the Commission has expanded to include all 28 member-states. But Juncker has introduced a first vice president and five vice presidents, who will also serve alongside Italy’s foreign minister Federica Mogherini, who was appointed two weeks ago to serve as Commission vice president and high representative for foreign affairs and security policy.

The delegation of so much power to five ‘super-commissioners’ with roving, supervisory briefs indicates that Juncker intends to be a much less hands-on Commission president that his predecessor, José Manuel Barroso. But it also reflects a Commission that, including Luxembourg’s Juncker, contains five former prime ministers (Finland, Slovenia, Latvia and Estonia).  It also contains four incumbents (Germany, Sweden, Bulgaria and Austria) who have served throughout the full second term of the Barroso Commission. That makes the Juncker Commission possibly the most distinguished in EU history.

Each commissioner must be approved by the European parliament and, while individual nominees have had troubles in the past, the parliament typically approves the vast majority of a Commission president’s appointments, all of whom were nominated by their respective national governments.

With nine women, it’s not as unbalanced as feared even a week or two ago, and with 14 members of the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), eight members of the center-left Party of European Socialists (PES) and five members of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), it generally reflects the results of the May 25 European parliamentary elections, though some social democrats and socialists are grumbling that the left doesn’t have enough representation.

So what can we expect from this illustrious college of commissioners?

Here’s a look at the 13 most important players in the proposed Commission (aside from Juncker and Mogherini, of course). Continue reading The 13 key EU players in the proposed Juncker Commission →

Belgium, Czech Republic, European Union, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, The Netherlands

A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 2)

2 Comments

 Across Europe on Monday, officials, voters and everyone else were trying to sort through the consequences of yesterday’s voting, across all 28 member-states, to elect the 751 members of the European Parliament.European_Union

Late Sunday, I began analyzing the results on a state-by-state basis — you can read my take here on what the European election results mean in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain.

This post picks up where that left off, however, with a look at some of the results in Europe’s mid-sized member-states.

* * * * *

RELATED: A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 1)

* * * * *

With the count now almost complete, here’s where the Europe-wide parties stand:

EP14

The European People’s Party (EPP), which has been the largest group in the European Parliament since 1999, will continue to be the largest group, but with fewer seats (215) than after any election since 1994.

The second-largest group, the Party of European Socialists (PES) has 188 seats, a slight gain, but not the breakout performance for which it was hoping.

The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats of Europe (ALDE) will remain the third-largest group, notwithstanding the collapse of two of its constituent parties, the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom and the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party) in Germany.

The European Greens have won 53 seats, just two less than before the elections. The Party of the European Left, which had hoped to make strong gains on the strength of its anti-austerity message, gained nine seats to 44.

The Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), a slightly eurosceptic group of conservative parties, including the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom, holds steady at 46 seats — that’s a slight loss of around eight seats. The Movement for a Europe of Liberties and Democracy (MELD) gained six.

The real increase was among the ‘non-inscrits,’ the unaffiliated MEPs, which will rise from around 30 to 104. The bulk of those MEPs include the newly elected eurosceptics that have made such a big splash in the past 24 hours, including Marine Le Pen’s Front national (FN, National Front) in France.

But, in addition to being a pan-European contest with wide-ranging themes that resonate throughout the European Union, the elections are also 28 national contests, and they’ve already claimed resignations of two center-left leaders — Eamon Gilmore, of Ireland’s Labour Party, and Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party).

Here’s a look at how the European elections are affecting nine more mid-sized counties across the European Union: Poland, Romania, The Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Hungary and Sweden.

Continue reading A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 2) →

Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, European Union, Finland, Flanders, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, United Kingdom

A rogues’ gallery of the EU’s top 13 eurosceptic parties

3 Comments

skepticismAs voters in 28 European countries prepare to head to the polls, beginning on May 22 and running through May 25, no one knows whether Europe’s center-left or center-right will win more seats, and no one knows who will ultimately become the next president of the European Commission.European_Union

But the one thing upon which almost everyone agrees is that Europe’s various eurosceptic parties are set for a huge victory — not enough seats to determine the outcomes of EU legislation and policymaker, perhaps, but enough to form a strong, if disunited, bloc of relatively anti-federalist voices. Voters, chiefly in the United Kingdom, France and Italy, are set to cast strong protest votes that could elect more than 100 eurosceptic MEPs.

In some countries, such as Spain, euroscepticism is still a limited force — the center-left opposition Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) is tied for the lead with the governing center-right Partido Popular (the PP, or the People’s Party) of prime minister Mariano Rajoy. But Spain is quickly becoming an outlier as eurosceptic parties are springing up in places where unionist sentiment once ran strong.

* * * * *

RELATED: In Depth: European parliamentary elections
RELATED: The European parliamentary elections are really four contests

* * * * *

Of course, not all eurosceptics are created equally. Some anti-Europe parties have been around for decades, while others weren’t even in existence at the time of the last elections in 2009. Some are virulently xenophobic, far-right or even neo-Nazi in their outlooks, while others are cognizably on the more mainstream conservative / leftist ideological spectrum. Some seek nothing short of their country’s withdrawal from the European Union altogether, while others seek greater controls on immigration. Some are even pro-Europe in the abstract, but oppose eurozone membership. That’s one of the reasons why eurosceptics have had so much trouble uniting across national lines — the mildest eurosceptic parties abhor the xenophobes, for example.

If everyone acknowledges that eurosceptic parties will do well when the votes are all counted on Sunday, no one knows whether that represents a peak of anti-Europe support, given the still tepid economy and high unemployment across the eurozone, or whether it’s part of a trend that will continue to grow in 2019 and 2024.

With 100 seats or so in the European Parliament, eurosceptics can’t cause very many problems. They can make noise, and they stage protests, but they won’t hold up the EU parliamentary agenda. With 200 or even 250 seats, though, they could cause real damage. There’s no rule that says that eurosceptics can’t one day win the largest block of EP seats, especially so long as most European voters ignore Europe-wide elections or treat them as an opportunity to protest unpopular national government.

For now, though, they’re all bound to cause plenty of trouble for their more mainstream rivals at the national level, and in at least five countries, they could wind up with the largest share of the vote. So it’s still worth paying attention to them.

Without further ado, here are the top 13 eurosceptic parties to keep an eye on as the results are announced on Sunday:

Continue reading A rogues’ gallery of the EU’s top 13 eurosceptic parties →

The Netherlands

Who is Alexander Pechtold?

1 Comment

1236469_10152179794657550_13898520_n

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? →

European Union, France, The Netherlands

Le Pen v. Wilders: a tale of two far-right European movements

Leave a comment

wilderslepen

The big story from Sunday’s municipal elections in France is the success of Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front national (FN, National Front), overshadowing the marquee Paris mayoral election.France Flag IconNetherlands Flag IconEuropean_Union

The far-right won the mayoral race in Hénin-Beaumont, a former mining town in the north, in a rare first-round victory, the FN came in second in Marseille, France’s second-largest city, and it led in at least six other locations as France prepares for second-round runoffs on March 30.

The result should certainly boost Le Pen in her efforts to win  support in European parliamentary elections in May — and to unite the populist hard right across the continent.

According to preliminary results, the Front national won just 4.65% of the national vote. That’s a big deal because the party was running in just 597 of around 37,000 jurisdictions — it’s a massive increase from the 2008 municipal results, when the FN won around 1% and ran in just 119 constituencies. 

The other narrative from Sunday’s vote is the collapse of France’s center-left — president François Hollande’s Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party) won 37.74% nationally, while the center-right Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP, Union for a popular movement) of former president Nicolas Sarkozy won 46.54% nationally. The bright spot for the Socialists remains Paris, where first deputy mayor Anne Hidalgo is the slight favorite to win a runoff against former Sarkozy campaign spokesperson and ecology minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet — but don’t rule out an upset next Sunday there, either.

The success in the 2014 municipal elections is just the latest chapter for Le Pen’s rebranding of the Front national in France as a slightly more moderate alternative than the party her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, led for decades. It’s harder today to target the Front national as a xenophobic, anti-Semitic fringe, because Le Pen has focused on an agenda much heavier on euroskepticism and economic nationalism. While the Front national isn’t exactly immigrant-friendly, its position has largely converged with the UMP’s position since the Sarkozy presidency, which embraced hard-right positions on immigration and law-and-order issues. By shifting rightward, Sarkozy may have sidelined Le Pen during his presidency and co-opted her supporters, but today, Sarkozy is almost as responsible as Le Pen for bringing the Front national within the political mainstream.

With the line blurring between the UMP and the Front national, Le Pen could become the chief voice of the French right in 2017, especially if the UMP succumbs to more infighting between its right-wing leader Jean-François Copé and the more moderate former prime minister François Fillon. The next presidential election is still a long way off, but if Sarkozy doesn’t run for the presidency in 2017, Le Pen stands just as much chance as Copé, Fillon or any other UMP figure of representing the French right in the second round.

More immediately troubling for France’s political elite are the European parliamentary elections in May. Despite its breakthrough performance on Sunday, the Front national isn’t about to overrun the city halls of France. Its victory is more symbolic than substantive. But if it’s one thing to turn over your local government to Marine Le Pen, it’s a far different thing to support the Front national as a protest vote with respect to European Union policy.

Polls show that the Front national and the UMP are competing for first place in the European elections within France — the most recent Opinion Way poll from early March shows the UMP winning  22%, the FN winning 21% and the Socialists just 17%. It wouldn’t be surprising to see a wave of undecided voters support the Front national at the last moment, nor would it be a surprise to learn that polling surveys currently underestimate FN support.

Extremists on both the far left and the far right are gaining strength throughout the entire European Union. That’s perhaps understandable, given the harsh economic conditions that have plagued Europe since the last EU-wide elections in 2009. But the euroskeptic right, in particular, seems poised for a breakthrough. Nigel Farage hopes to lead the anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party to a breakthrough performance in May, and the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, the Freedom Party of Austria) is tied for first place in polls in Austria.

But just as Le Pen hits her stride, another standard-bearer of the hard right, Geert Wilders, found himself in free fall last week after pledging to allow fewer Moroccans into the Netherlands, remarks that have launched a cascade of criticism and a handful of defections from his party: Continue reading Le Pen v. Wilders: a tale of two far-right European movements →

The Netherlands

Willem-Alexander sworn in as first Dutch king since 1890

Leave a comment

willem-alexander

Willem-Alexander became the king of the Netherlands today, succeeding his mother, Beatrix, who abdicated the throne, having served as the monarch of the Netherlands since 1980. Netherlands Flag Icon

The Dutch head of state, notably, is a highly ceremonial role.  What’s key to remember is that following the 2010 election, the Dutch monarch is no longer the key player in appointing an informateur following parliamentary elections to kick off coalition talks, given the prevalence of a half-dozen or more parties in the Netherlands.  The 2013 coalition formation process was determined solely through the Dutch parliament, bypassing royal input altogether, and the process actually took even less time.

So Willem-Alexander will be assuming the throne with the least amount of institutional power over Dutch government than any of his successors.

It’s not even a coronation as such because the Netherlands no longer has a state church, so there’s no one to administer a coronation, apparently.

Much more here from The Guardian.  More here from NRC if you speak Dutch (or are otherwise curious).

He’s pictured above with his wife, Queen Maxima — their daughter, Catharina-Amalia, at age nine, becomes princess of Orange and heir to the throne, so expect a return to the long line of female Dutch monarchs.

Beatrix succeeded her own mother, Juliana, who reigned from 1948 until her own abdication in 1980.  Beatrix’s grandmother, Wilhelmina, served as queen from 1890 until abdicating in favor of Juliana in 1948.  This marks the third consecutive abdication of a Dutch monarch — it’s a marked contrast to the British model, where Elizabeth II continues a reign that began in 1952.

European Union, The Netherlands

Who is Jeroen Dijsselbloem?

4 Comments

jeroen

Most indications are that the next Euro Group head will be a relative newcomer to the group of eurozone finance ministers — Dutch minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who declared his formal candidacy for the job today.European_UnionNetherlands Flag Icon

As I noted at the beginning of the year in my piece on 13 up-and-coming politicians to watch in 2013, the current head of the Euro Group since 2005, Jean-Claude Juncker, also prime minister of tiny Luxembourg since 1995 and the Luxembourgian finance minister from 1989 to 2009, is stepping down from the role.

Dijsselbloem belongs to the anti-austerity social democratic Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA, Labour Party) — that has joined a coalition that’s headed by the decidedly more budget-obsessed Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) and prime minister Mark Rutte.

The second Rutte cabinet took office as a ‘purple’ Lib-Lab coalition in November 2012 after a closely fought election in September 2012, during which Labour leader Diederik Samsom fought for a more gradual process of budget cuts to bring the Dutch budget within 3% of GDP.

The Euro Group came into being in the late 1990s in advance of the introduction of the single currency as an informal group.  In 2005, Juncker became the group’s first president amid a push to formalize the group’s role in 2009 though a protocol to the Treaty of Lisbon:

The Ministers of the Member States whose currency is the euro shall meet informally. Such meetings shall take place, when necessary, to discuss questions related to the specific responsibilities they share with regard to the single currency. The Commission shall take part in the meetings. The European Central Bank shall be invited to take part in such meetings, which shall be prepared by the representatives of the Ministers with responsibility for finance of the Member States whose currency is the euro and of the Commission.

The Euro Group typically meets a day before the Economic and Financial Affairs Council of the Council (Ecofin) of the European Union — Ecofin is comprised of the wider group of all 26 EU member state finance/economics ministers.  Accordingly, the Euro Group typically dominates economic policymaking at the Council level.  At the Council, policies related to fiscal matters must be adopted unanimously, though other policies can be adopted by the EU’s qualified majority voting mechanism (i.e., essentially a supermajority formula that requires both a majority of the 27 member states and a majority of the EU population).

The Euro Group president is appointed for a term of 2.5 years, by majority vote of the Euro Group, and the next president could be appointed as early as Monday, though French finance minister Pierre Moscovici has called for a more formal and transparent process of selecting the next president.  Moscovici has also called on Dijsselbloem to outline his views on the future direction of the Euro Group, and Dijsselbloem is set to discuss goals at Monday’s meeting, though Juncker has been dropping all sorts of hints that Dijsselbloem’s selection is all but assured.

Dijsselbloem has been a member of the Tweede Kamer (the lower house of the Dutch parliament) since 2000, after spending four years as an assistant at the ministry of agriculture, nature management and fisheries.

In parliament, Dijsselbloem has been a moderating voice on highly charged issues like the role of Muslims in Dutch society.  In 2007, he spearheaded a commission on educational reform.  Earlier in 2012, when former Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen resigned as Labour leader, Dijsselbloem was chosen to serve as the party’s interim leader until Samsom was elected as the permanent Labour leader, and he was the fifth candidate on Labour’s list in the 2012 elections.

As early as the 2003 election, Dijsselbloem was seen as a Samsom confidante — they campaigned together in that year as the ‘rode ingenieurs‘ — the ‘Red Engineers’ — due to their red overalls and scientific backgrounds, Samsom in nuclear energy and Dijsselbloem in agricultural economics.

Despite just two months on the job as a pro-growth minister in a government that will seek to reduce the Dutch budget to within 3% of GDP in 2013, Dijsselbloem literally personifies the current fiscal debate in Europe.  It helps that the Netherlands was one of the original six countries that formed the predecessor to the European Union and that it retains one of Europe’s last remaining ‘AAA’ credit ratings.

On one side, as personified by Moscovici and French president François Hollande of the center-left Parti socialiste, only aggressive government policies to boost aggregate demand can reduce unemployment and jumpstart Europe’s economic engine.  Although even Hollande admits the need to bring France’s budget in line with the European Union standard, generally, of within 3% of GDP, Hollande’s government has preferred to implement tax increases rather than cut spending too deeply.

On the other side, as personified by German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble and German chancellor Angela Merkel of the center-right Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Union), the key to prosperity — even in the face of recession — is to cut spending and narrow the budget deficit, thereby bringing more investment and business confidence by shoring up public finances. Continue reading Who is Jeroen Dijsselbloem? →

The Netherlands

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

Leave a comment

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 →