Holland

Youtube user Crosscream, who was good enough to send me the translated videos of the crowd outside the Dutch courthouse where Geert wilders is on ‘trial’, has written the following article about the fall of the government in the Netherlands.

He has included some important context and history on when and why the government has fallen previously.

Thank you CC for responding so well and so quickly.

Eeyore for Vlad

The Dutch ruling-parliament has fallen, or as we say in Dutch ”Het kabinet is gevallen” this means that the political coalition between the 3 ruling parties have fallen into such an disagreement that they thought it was wise to hold new elections. It is the third time this has happened this decade with an extra emergency ruling-parliament to fill in the gaps.

The first time was after the assassination of Pim Fortuyn. The Dutch people who felt anger and resentment voted his party into office in enormous numbers, making it with 26 seats, the second largest party in the Netherlands, only half the number the Christian-Democrats got who are traditionally the biggest party in the Netherlands.

The introduction of an anti-immigration and center-left party into the Dutch parliament caused disagreements, the LPF which was run by Fortuyn before his death needed a large amount of ministers to take the extra governmental seats, party leadership changed and eventually without the charismatic leadership of Fortuyn, the different political viewpoints within the LPF could not be united and the ruling-parliament fell on the day that Prins Claus was buried.

The second time was about disagreements between heads of one of the ruling parties called D66 and Ayaan Hirsi Ali affair and the fact that she lied about her Dutch nationality. The liberal-right D66 disagreed about the Uruzgan mission (Afghanistan), the votingblok of the D66 disagreed about the relaxed attitude that Pechhold held against Verdonks immigration policies and the cabinet fell again.

After this the rompkabinet, which is basically an emergency parliament without one of the coalition members was ended, the D66 removed itself from the coalition and in it’s place the VVD and CDA ruled for 7 days.

The third ruling-parliament was held between Christian-democrats and social-democrats, an unusual union that has now lasted for 3 years. It survived the crisis concerning the double nationality of certain members of the parliament and the stress placed upon the ruling-parliament to solve the problems of the bad economy, but because of the growth of Wilders PVV the social-democratic PvdA lost a large amount of it’s voting block. The end came partly due to the growing disagreement between the two groups of democrats and the worsening economy. Eventually this lead to debate about the continuing presence of soldiers in Afghanistan. With the PvdA demanding they leave the region and the CDA wanting to wait until making a choice. The debate went on the entire night which ended with the PvdA leaving the coalition and leaving the Christian CDA and CU alone with a possible new rompkabinet.

Islam, the bad-economy, mass-immigration and the emerging populist parties will most likely be the new destabilizing faction within Dutch politics. We will see the election of a very large PVV into the second chamber, and attempts by many other political faction to find a way around forming a coalition with them. Because Christians are very loyal and always vote for there own the CDA has still a very large voters block of around 30 seats, making them equal to the PVV which also has around 30 seats at any given time. In order to make a majority of 75 seats they have no choice but working together and forming a union with the center-right VVD which is the only other party with more then 15 seats and without direct hostility towards the PVV.

This is also the first time that a fallen government could cause serious problems: Because of the Wilders-trial and the coming county elections, it is possible that we will see certain parties fall into insults and verbal attacks, careers might end, riots could start and extremist groups might attack the PVV.