The International Herald Tribune
November 23, 2006 Thursday
Dutch vote may herald important shift to left;
Christian Democrats lead, but polls showa ‘move to fringes’
AMSTERDAM
The Dutch are likely to keep their sitting, conservative prime
minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, following general elections
Wednesday, but early exit polls suggested that any new government
might have to make an important shift to the left.
With only a small portion of the ballots counted, the prime
minister’s Christian Democratic Party retained the largest number of
votes but fell far short of forming a government. Given the new
fractures on the right, the prime minister may have to work with two
leftist parties: the moderate Labor Party, which came in second, and
the new far-left Socialist Party.
In this case, the conservative prime minister would have to make
deals with political leaders with whom ideological relations have
been uneasy at best. The result may be more lenient policies toward
immigrants and asylum seekers, and less, rather than more, of the
recent social welfare reform.
Wouter Bos, the Labor leader, is a familiar face on the Dutch scene.
But the big surprise of the day was likely to fall to Jan
Marijnissen, a plainspeaking advocate for the underdog.
Dubbed the wizard of Oss, after his hometown, the former welder has
been called the political phenomenon of the year.
Once a Maoist, he took his party from its inflexible communist roots
and adapted it to become a working-class movement that got wide
backing from young people off all stripes as well as artists and
intellectuals.
Early results projected that the party could make a leap from its 9
seats to end up with 25 seats in the 150-member Parliament.
Marijnissen said he favored a general amnesty for all the failed
asylum seekers who may face deportation from the Netherlands.
Exit polls Wednesday night showed that the far-left Socialists
increased their vote to overtake the liberal VVD, Balkenende’s
coalition partner, making his job of forming a strong government much
more difficult.
”These are very disappointing results,” said Defense Minister Henk
Kamp, a member of the VVD.
He declined to comment on whether his party would be able to continue
in government.
”We’ll see who the CDA chooses. The initiative lies with others.”
Who joins the next coalition will determine how closely Balkenende
sticks to his business-friendly policies and tough line on
immigration, long a major concern of Dutch voters.
The other big winner, according to the exit polls, was the new party
of an anti-immigration maverick, Geert Wilders, who says the
Netherlands risks being flooded by Muslims and wants an immediate
halt to new migrants.
”What we see is a move to the fringes,” said a former CDA minister,
Piet Hein Donner. ”Whoever puts together the coalition will have a
very hard time transforming that into a good government agenda.”
The one coalition that looked most likely to have the 76 seats needed
for a majority was an uneasy partnership between the CDA and their
Labor rivals, likely to produce discord over tax, pensions and
immigration policy.
”My fear is that the CDA and Labor will form a coalition on the
basis of the present polls and that would mean a very unstable
government,” said Jan Kleinnijenhuis, a political science professor
at Amsterdam’s Free University.
Balkenende, 50, took credit for a strong economic recovery in the
last year that he said was supported by unpopular welfare reforms
that he pushed through early in his term. He has vowed to continue
his pro-business policy line.
”We have strengthened the economy,” he said Tuesday during a
televised debate with the leaders of the biggest parties.
”It has been a really hard fight for us, but we’ve come out
better.”
Charles Kalshoven, a senior economist at ABN Amro Holding NV in
Amsterdam, agreed: ”In the first years of his cabinet, Balkenende
made all the painful reforms. The economy is doing a lot better this
year. Consumer confidence is really very strong and if consumer
confidence is up, so are the ruling parties in the polls.”
Bos, the Labor leader, accused Balkenende of pandering to big
business and the wealthy while failing to fight inequality. He has
pledged to slow corporate tax cuts and increase spending on childcare
and job-creation programs. Labor has also promised an amnesty for
some immigrants who have waited years for asylum.
Balkenende has implemented tough immigration and integration laws
since the killing of Theo van Gogh, a Islam critic and filmmaker, by
an Islamist militant in 2004 and the murder of Pim Fortuyn, a popular
anti-immigration politician, in 2002.
His government has also said it will ban the wearing of burkas and
other Muslim face veils in public.
The election, originally scheduled for May 2007, was called after the
center-right coalition collapsed in June in a row over the
government’s handling of the disputed citizenship of Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
a Somali-born Dutch politician and Islam critic.
Back then, Labor had a strong lead in the opinion polls, but that
evaporated as the economy rebounded and as Balkenende went on the
offensive, portraying the telegenic Bos, a former manager for Shell,
as slick and superficial.
Labor had hoped for strong backing from the almost 10 percent of the
electorate of immigrant origin, although Turkish voters were angered
after it dropped an election candidate for not accepting Ottoman
Turkey’s killing of Armenians as genocide.
”The economy has clearly been the ruling coalition’s focus,” said
Joop van Holsteyn, a professor of political science at Leiden
University. ”Balkenende’s campaign was all about continuing on this
path.”
Immigration, the issue that has dominated Dutch politics in recent
years, played a less important role in the campaign than the economy,
despite the government’s backing the proposal last week to ban
face-covering clothing.