A Dutch Quandary Offers a Glimpse of a Deepening Problem for Europe

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/world/europe/geert-wilders-dutch-election-politics.html

by RestlessMind • 2 years ago

10 29 2 years ago

nytimes.com

TacticalCoder3• 2 years ago

Archive for research purpose:

https://archive.is/jiAfN

tivert• 2 years ago

That quandary has made the Netherlands a test case for Europe as it grapples with the question of what to do with far-right forces that have advanced so far into the mainstream that they can hardly be considered on the fringe anymore.

The solution is pretty simple: officially ban the far-right parties and politicians, if the voters fail to get the message to not vote for them. If a national government is captured, and the minority parties cannot fix the problem, then the EU needs to step in and return things to normalcy. Democracy dies if the voters can actually give power to fringe forces outside the mainstream.

harvey9• 2 years ago

Or tell the voters they're stupid. That seemed to work for the UK's Remain campaign.

gustavus• 2 years ago

A case of Poe's law in action.

"We must destroy democracy to save democracy."

EDIT:

The OP strikes me as the kind of guy that would side with a group of religious extremists trying to unilaterally execute the democratically elected head of government because "He's too dangerous to be left alive." during the middle of a civil war.

cpr• 2 years ago

Sure, ban the people you disagree with. That's a good, practical solution with no unintended consequences.

Oh, wait, now you're the fascist.

class3shock2• 2 years ago

The government does things people don't want, those people vote for politicians that say they won't do those things, and the response should be to ban them... and somehow that isn't the death of democracy?

_3u10• 2 years ago

Exactly, you can’t have people voting for popular things. Doing what the majority want is not democracy.

chrismcb• 2 years ago

"Democracy dies if the voters can actually give power..." I don't think democracy means what you think it means. Democracy dies if you take power away from the voters, which is what you seen to be suggesting.

paleotrope• 2 years ago

Protect democracy from the demos.

systemstops• 2 years ago

Democracy died with mass immigration. The people didn't want it and it permanently changed the electorate, replacing the voice of the people with a new voice.

ragebol• 2 years ago

That won't make the sentiment go away. Over the last years, we've had various right-wing parties getting a lot of votes as the next savior of right-wing voter: FvD, then BBB and now again PVV. FvD became conspiracy loonies, BBB votes also shifted to PVV.

The problems that his voters have will somehow need to be addressed. However, I expect that once Wilders is in power, he also can't solve the problems (for example: building lots of housing is not something a politician can do, especially when you shun immigrants who can solve the labor part of that) and the disillusioned voters will have to find someone else, if they are smart enough to recognize this instead of hailing Wilders as a saint who can do no wrong (and instead blame everything on who is not in power)

hackeraccount• 2 years ago

Literally cannot tell if you're serious or if this is satire.

As an off topic comment I know people who write stuff that has this sort of confusion and invariably the one's writing satire congratulate themselves on a job well done. I disagree with that assessment.

Simulacra• 2 years ago

This is a biased article, it completely ignores that the people voted for this, and maybe those people have genuine concerns that the other parties are just not addressing.

Instead of moaning about how they are going to engage with a far right politician, instead consider how their own policies turned voters against them.

TacticalCoder3• 2 years ago

Yup it's bad. From TFA:

They could prevent him from becoming prime minister, but in almost any conceivable circumstance, his party would have to be a part of the government. There is almost no getting around it.

It's the same issue in many other european countries, like Belgium or France. The "regular" political parties (and their mainstream media, which they basically own and which they use for propaganda) try to demonize the far-right but there's a reason so many people are voting for the far-right european parties.

I'm not saying these are good reasons, but it is what people vote for.

And mainstream politicians, instead of addressing the issues that make people vote for the far-right, try to do what politicians do best: dodge the issues, demonize the far-right, and collude to prevent those who won the election from putting in place what they promised their voters they'd do.

If you remove the 5% (approximative) of muslim in the Netherlands (who obviously didn't vote for a party that is anti-islam), there are 26% of voters in the Netherlands who voted for Geert Wilders.

Why? Why is more than one person out of every four in a country voting for a far-right party? How shitty have things become for that to happen? (they won 37 out of 150 seats).

I do believe that, at some point, politicians have to address that question.

P.S: FWIW I'm originally from one the rare (european) country where voting is mandatory but I don't give a crap and still don't go voting. Never had any fine (even though technically I could get one).

bondarchuk2• 2 years ago

collude to prevent those who won the election from putting in place what they promised their voters they'd do.

A prime feature of the multi-party system is that this is well within their rights, and even the spirit of democracy (if there is such a thing), to do. That the holders of 113 seats can collude against the holders of 37 seats is quite logical. All this coalition building and alliance forming, and even the political parties themselves to an extent, ultimately rest on 150 individual elected persons holding a seat who can in theory do and vote whatever they want.

aebtebeten3• 2 years ago

I think the VVD (and now NSC) remember what happened in their neighbour when the DZP thought they could cut a deal with the NSDAP.

As far as I am aware, all that the other right wing parties have asked is that Wilders clarify which of his far-right planks he's willing to drop, but he (as is traditional for far-anything parties) has thus far refused to budge.

In reasonable jurisdictions, politicians don't have to address anyone that isn't willing enough to make sausage to put together a majority coalition.

jillesvangurp• 2 years ago

By "the people" you mean 25% of the people. 75% didn't vote for him but for somebody else. That's an absolute majority that did not vote for him.

0823498723498722• 2 years ago

how to work with a far-right leader too popular to shun

Wilders has but a minority, therefore he is not "too popular to shun".

class3shock2• 2 years ago

Just to clarify, his party won more votes than any other party in the elections but did not win 51%+ (which I don't believe has happened in recent history in the Netherlands if ever?). So saying he has a minority that can be shunned seems to be somewhat disconnected with the actual result.

probably_wrong• 2 years ago

My personal theory as someone who lives in Europe but not in the Netherlands: while it's easy to assume that only racists would vote for obviously racist parties, I believe there's a large number of otherwise-reasonable voters who follow them because they are the only ones who say out loud that the politicians of the last 20+ years have dropped the ball.

Sure, the racist parties blame (wrongly) all problems on immigrants, but at the same time they are the only ones who publicly denounce that there is a problem to begin with. If I were struggling to get a good education for my children, who should I vote for? The party that wants to raise my transport costs, the one that ruled while the rich got richer, or the one that swears that my salary will go up once all refugees are gone?

I believe all it would take to reduce the power of the far right would be to run on a campaign of "we fucked up and we're sorry".

candiodari• 2 years ago

I believe it doesn't even need to go that far. EVERY party is running on a platform of "we're going to stop those evil assholes". Left says that about the right, the right says that about the left, greens, ... everyone.

We need a party that goes back to "we'll kill programs and then start a big program to do X". Better public transport. Housing in large cities. Land on the fucking moon again if you want. SOMETHING. With the power of government they're all very much solvable, but no parties are even interested.

difosfor• 2 years ago

I wouldn't say the Volkskrant is left wing. I always thought of it as a populist, i.e: right wing these days, paper. But I guess to US almost everything is left wing; whatever that really means. Unfortunately we seem to be following in the US' footsteps again as we have many times before, normalizing types of thinking we found reprehensible not so long ago.

Meanwhile politics is even less capable of dealing with the large issues we face with climate and an aging population. I'm afraid this is going to become a lot worse still before we come to our senses again.

pepa65• 2 years ago

The Volkskrant has been known for many decades to be left-leaning (socialist), definitely never right-wing.

yetanother12345• 2 years ago

As for "glimpse" ...

One or two general elections ago[0] the Danish Peoples Party (which at the time was often declared far right and compared to the likes of Geert Wilders et al) got a 25% vote.

In the media it was described as a "protest vote". It was a landslide and IIRC they became the second largest party in terms of votes.

So, what happened next? First off the party leadership at the time declared that they did not want to join government, which was kind of weird given their extreme share of votes.

Second, a very normal government coalition formed, having the DPP as support but not as members. In local terms this was a "right wing" government (in US terms probably not right wing enough /s).

Third, parties across the full political spectrum began being verbose on immigration (ie "asylum seekers" because, well, IDK... that's the term they prefer I supose, while immigration is seen as beneficial, or... well, it's complicated) at the very least creating an image of concern, and in some notable cases even calling for action. The new government IIRC even crafted a few new media-friendly laws in this area - notably a law on "ghetto demolition" which got a lot of media attention even internationally

Time went by, and the traditional government did more or less what it would have done in any case, with a bend towards being tough on "foreigners-and-Danes-with-certain-foreign-ancestry-but-only-those-related-to-select-geographical-areas-and-mostly-criminal-ones-unemployed-ones-or-asylum-seekers" (sorry, I find it hard to find a single descriptive word here).

As the next general election came the vote of the DPP plummeted to near nothing. Next government was once again a very normal coalition in that region doing what they otherwise would have done, only with a slight bend towards being tough on "x, y, but not z unless a, b ,c ...". Since then the DPP has been split up, and the most of the "right wing" has gone though some hardships, so it's not really the same political landscape now.

I'm not sure this tale is comparable to Dutch politics. In Denmark it was more of "a glimpse" than anything else, and the media and political establishment right now is entirely focused on something else than "those people" (US interests/"Foreign Policy" mostly, domestic not much).

[0] I don't recall if it was the election where the PM accepted an offer of a well paid NATO job while on duty, or the one where the former PM accepted an offer of a well paid Facebook job immediately afterwards... (as for our current PM, she alleges publicly that she "is not interested if an offer should come" confirming the trend by denying it... )

A Dutch Quandary Offers a Glimpse of a Deepening Problem for Europe

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