Brussels Journal, Belgium
Nov 24 2006
Pat Buchanan Wins Dutch Elections
>From the desk of Paul Belien on Thu, 2006-11-23 22:37
Jan MarijnissenWednesday’s general elections in the Netherlands were
won by the far-left. The Communist Socialistische Partij (SP) added
17 seats to the 9 it previously held, securing an overall number of
26 seats in the 150-seat Dutch Parliament. The SP became the
country’s third largest party, overtaking the center-right Liberal
Party VVD, which fell to 22 seats from 28. The centrist
Christian-Democrats (CDA) of Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende
remained the biggest party with 41 seats (44 previously), followed by
the center-left Labour Party (PvdA) which lost ten seats, ending up
with 32 seats. To the right, the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF), the
anti-immigrant party of the late Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in
2002 by an animal-rights activist, lost its 8 seats. It was replaced
by the `islamophobic’ Freedom Party (PVV) of Geert Wilders, a
breakaway Liberal, who gained 9 seats. The remaining 20 seats were
divided among five parties, including the PvdD, a party of animal
right activists who gained 2 seats in the first elections they
participated in, and the Christen Unie (CU), a Calvinist and morally
conservative but economically leftist party, whose seats doubled to
6.
The 2006 elections mark a dramatic shift to the Left. Theoretically
Labour, the SP and all the various smaller leftist parties can form a
76 seat majority, since the parties of the Right hold only 33 seats
and the centrist CDA holds 41. This, however, is unlikely to happen
as it would require a coalition of no fewer than 6 parties. Moreover,
Labour regards the SP as too far to the Left and too radical on other
issues, such as European unification which the SP is very critical
of. Hence a center-left coalition of CDA, Labour and the Christen
Unie is the most likely successor to the current center-right
coalition of CDA, Liberals and Liberal-Democrats. This will allow
Balkenende to succeed himself as Prime Minister.
The swing to the left had been predicted. Last March the local
elections in the Netherlands revealed the growing importance of the
Muslim vote. Immigrants overwhelmingly vote for left-wing parties.
This is hardly surprising since most of the immigrants were attracted
to the country by its generous welfare benefits, which they want to
safeguard. Official statistics show that the Netherlands have 16.3
million inhabitants, of which 1.7 million are non-Western immigrants.
Most of the latter are Turks and Moroccans. Indeed, already one
million of the country’s inhabitants are Muslims. Many have become
Dutch citizens.
Seventy per cent of the immigrants participated in yesterday’s
elections, indicating a political awareness almost as high as that of
the indigenous Dutch. Though not all the elected candidates are
officially known yet, at least eight Muslims are expected to have
been voted into Parliament. If Labour joins a government coalition
the Moroccan-born Amsterdam politician Nehabat Aboutaleb is likely to
become the first Muslim minister in Dutch history.
The new generation of immigrant politicians do not have much in
common with the former Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a
Somali-born immigrant who moved to the Netherlands in 1992. Hirsi
Ali, a Muslim apostate, was a member of the Dutch Parliament for the
center-right free-market Liberals from January 2003 until last July.
She has since moved to the U.S. because Islamist fanatics threatened
to kill her and the Dutch were not able (or willing) to adequately
protect her. Hirsi Ali was very critical of Muslim immigrants who do
not want to embrace Dutch secular values. The newly elected immigrant
politicians, on the contrary, represent a growing and demographically
young electorate that insists on its Muslim identity. Often their
loyalties lie more with their countries of origin than with the Dutch
nation, which they look upon mainly as a welfare distributing Santa
Claus.
Over 80% of the immigrants voted for Labour in last March’s local
elections, so this party was very keen on attracting their continued
support. It placed many Moroccan and Turkish candidates on its list,
but fell out with the Turks when the latter discovered the official
party line on the Armenian genocide. Labour’s position is that this
genocide really took place and that Ankara should recognize it as a
historical fact before Turkey can join the European Union. As a
result the Turkish vote in the Netherlands seems to have migrated to
smaller parties of the Left and to the Socialistische Partij of Jan
Marijnissen, the biggest winner of yesterday’s elections.
The SP’s ideological roots are Marxism-Leninism and Maoism, although
the American politician who comes closest to it might very well be…
Pat Buchanan. The latter is, of course, not at all a Communist, but
the end of the Cold War has led to political realignments which today
may put Marijnissen and Buchanan closer to each other than one would
think.
The SP (its party symbol is a tomato) was founded in 1972 by young
Marxists who deemed the official Dutch Communists too reformist and
too submissive to Moscow. They preferred a pure, radical Maoist and
Leninist line. Jan Marijnissen, then a 20 year old blue collar
worker, became the party’s leading figure. Marijnissen was born in
1952 in Oss in the province of North Brabant, the Catholic southern
part of the Netherlands, in a very Catholic family, the youngest of
four. When his mother was widowed she sent him to a boarding school
run by monks. The 1960s were the years of rapid secularization in
Europe, especially in the Netherlands, and especially among the
Catholic half of its population. Marijnissen never finished school,
but when he left it he had lost his faith in God and found another
faith in Socialism.
He returned to his home town and became a factory worker, organizing
wild strikes all over the Oss area. For a long time the SP was a
local Oss phenomenon. In 1975 Marijnissen became an Oss town
councillor. Other 1970s far-left parties in other West European
countries, were run by disillusioned children from bourgeois families
and soon turned to violence and even terrorism, as in Germany. Jan
Marijnissen, however, was a man of the people, who spoke the language
of the people. Though he sympathized ideologically with the
international far-left, he realized that the European blue-collar
workers did not have a high opinion of the
offspring-of-the-rich-turned-terrorist-in-the- name-of-the-workers.
Marijnissen shunned the terrorist methods of the hares and worked
like a tortoise, solidly establishing his party locally.
It took decades, but the strategy worked. In 1987 Marijnissen became
a provincial councillor in North Brabant, in 1994 he was elected to
the Dutch Parliament, in 1998 the SP gained 5 seats, in 2002 9 seats,
and yesterday it jumped to 26. In the European Parliament the SP
belongs to the group of the European United Left, together with
parties such as the French Communist Party, the Italian Refounded
Communists, the German Left Party (the former GDR Communists), Sinn
Féin, and others.
Though Marijnissen is said to be an authoritarian party leader, he
never lost touch with the blue-collar workers. He realized they did
not like the immigrants. In the late 1990s Pim Fortuyn, a gay
intellectual who, like Marijnissen, had been raised a Catholic, began
to criticize Muslim immigrants for their unwillingness to integrate
in Dutch society. The mainstream media and parties branded Fortuyn a
`racist’ and a `xenophobe.’ Marijnissen never joined the
name-calling. After Fortuyn’s assassination in 2002 the parties that
had attacked him, especially Labour, got a terrible beating, but not
the SP which gained four seats.
In Marijnissen’s view the immigration problem was not caused by the
welfare state but by the capitalist system which invited foreign
`guest workers’ over to Europe in order to keep the wages of
indigenous workers low. Unlike the other leftist parties in Europe
the SP was not very fond of immigrants. It cared more for the native
lower classes, who felt threatened by the newcomers. In the 1990s the
SP’s election slogan was `Against’ and one of the things it was
against was immigration – this weapon used by the capitalists to
exploit the workers.
Though the SP has immigrant members Marijnissen never actively
encouraged them to stand for election. In 2004 Ali Lazrak, one of the
SP’s elected representatives, was ousted from the party because he
had accused Marijnissen of dictatorial behaviour. In a newspaper
interview Marijnissen commented: `This is what you get if you put
forward candidates not because they are qualified for the job but
because they are immigrants.’ He insists that immigrants learn to
speak Dutch, that Dutch national history be taught at school, and
that immigrants be spread over the country in order to avoid
ghettoization.
The SP is also against the European Union. It is the largest
Eurosceptic party in the Netherlands. It is significant that Geert
Wilders, the other victor of yesterday’s elections, is also an
outspoken Eurosceptic. However, while Wilders can be called a
neo-conservative, Marijnissen resembles a paleo-conservative. He is
also an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq and one of the fiercest
critics of America’s international policies.
Marijnissen’s leftism is most apparent in the economic policies he
proposes – protectionism, higher taxes for the rich, state
interference to curtail the `greed’ of the markets, free healthcare,
more social benefits for the poor,… On cultural [Americans would say
`social’] issues, however, the SP has become ever more conservative.
During the past decade its ideology moved towards communitarianism.
Marijnissen even rediscovered his former Christian faith. One of his
supporters is Monsignor Tiny (Martinus) Muskens, the `red’ Bishop of
Breda, who once said that stealing is not a sin for the poor, but who
also stressed that dialogue between Christians and Muslims will lead
nowhere so long it remains impossible to build churches in Saudi
Arabia. The SP’s party conference last month resembled a Christian
meeting. Huub Oosterhuis, a Dutch theologian and former priest who
was excommunicated by the Vatican over sexual ethics, held a sermon
extolling the virtues of Christianity. The audience sang psalms and
listened to gospel music. In this sense the SP, though one of the
most anti-American of the Dutch parties, seemed almost the most
American of them.