The Dutch elections – making sense of its fractures

Surinamese radio and television entertainer Sylvana Simons entering politics to contest discrimination. During an interview by Wilfred Genee. De Balie, Amsterdam, 26 Nov. 2016. Wikicommons/De Balie, Amsterdam. Some rights reserved.Much to everyone’s surprise, it turns out
that this is not the election we expected. At the start of the campaign season,
with the right-wing populist Geert Wilders riding high in the polls, the
prediction had been that it would come down to a race between the conservative
Liberals and Geert Wilders’ populist, right-wing Party for Freedom (PVV),
leaving all others in the dust.

Following on the heels of the US election
of Trump and the UK vote for Brexit, and with right-wing populists in France
and Germany looking well-positioned for upcoming elections, all international
attention was trained on Wilders.

There was much speculation that if Wilders
won the elections, the Netherlands would be the next country to withdraw from
the EU (Nexit), setting off a chain-reaction across the continent that could
very possibly lead to the EU’s collapse and a new continental political regime.
Instead, within a few short weeks, the election has
turned into a massive scrum.

Instead, within a few short weeks, the
election has turned into a massive scrum. At this point, on the cusp of
election day, support for Wilders has declined and the Liberals are ahead by a
few seats, followed by the center-right Christian Democrats (CDA) and a flurry
of progressive parties – the Democrats of ’66 (D66), the GreenLeft, and the
Socialists – all breathing down their necks in close formation. It is a tight
yet unpredictable race.

At the same time, nearly three-quarters of
the voters still at this moment have multiple parties in mind and are not sure
which one exactly will get their vote.

Labour
Party losses

In any and all cases, though, the Labour
Party – which has been governing in a coalition with the Liberals for the past
four years – looks set to suffer an astounding historical loss. Now holding 38
seats in Parliament, they will be lucky to win more than ten this time around,
as voters punish the party fiercely for collaborating so effectively in cutting
back the welfare state.

Crucial to note here is that even the most
successful party, the Liberals, are only netting about 17% of the vote (25
seats), while Wilders is polling at 14%, very similar to the Christian
Democrats, even as the next set of political parties has only slightly smaller
margins. In other words, whatever the result, the outcome will require that a
coalition of four to five parties be formed in order to create an effective
government. This form of proportional representation is the opposite of a
winner-take-all-system. Mandating negotiations and compromises across
ideological and policy lines – along with the pragmatic bracketing of
principles – it variously contains or excludes extremes the better to ensure
that the country does not lurch too quickly in one or another direction. The Dutch political field exploded in 2000 with the entry
of the gay anti-Islam populist Pim Fortuyn and has never been the same since.

In total, there are 28 parties in the
running, though ‘only’ about thirteen to fifteen parties look like they will
win seats in Parliament. Even by Dutch standards this fragmentation of
Parliament is quite extreme. Long dominated by three centrist parties –
Christian Democrat, Labour and Liberal – to the point of utter, boring
predictability for years on end, the Dutch political field exploded in 2000 with
the entry of the gay anti-Islam populist Pim Fortuyn and has never been the
same since. The first rumblings began before 9/11, but it was the al Qaeda
attacks in 2001, followed in quick succession by two political murders (first
of Pim Fortuyn by an anti-racist, animal rights activist and then Theo van Gogh
by a militant Muslim) that completely altered not just the landscape but the
logic of Dutch politics.

Austerity
with a vengeance

It became de rigeur to decry the hegemony of a politically correct “Left
elite” and to loudly declaim that immigrants from the global South and Islam
were problematic, incompatible with western society and wilfully resisting
integration, while simultaneously asserting that only the truly bold and
courageous dared to state such truths. The violent deaths of Fortuyn and van
Gogh, after three centuries without a political murder, legitimated histrionic
performances in a society more generally known for phlegmatic pragmatism underscored
by (petit) bourgeois sensibilities. Many careers were built on such tactics,
most especially that of Geert Wilders.

Living underground in hiding since the
murder of van Gogh in 2004, he has been offering
the example of his life as a testimony to the dangers facing the Dutch and the
West in the face of immigration and Islamic violence. Over the years, he has
self-radicalized dramatically; while in 2001 he still explicitly distanced
himself from Pim Fortuyn and refused to denounce Islam and Muslims as such, he
has now become a politician who wants to shut all mosques, ban the Koran,
abolish dual-citizenship, encourage Muslims to emigrate and denaturalize any
dual citizen who commits a crime.

At the same time, following all this
upheaval and in line with ‘Third Way’ politics, Labour shifted rightward, even
as the Liberals became the largest party. The result has been an age of
liberalization, austerity measures, and cutbacks
to the welfare state. These have been legitimated by and driven
the introduction of a crude, rather reductive,
individualist-corporatist economism as the guiding logic for reforming labor relations,
housing, urban development, education, research funding, the arts,
international relations, health care, immigrant regimes, and environmental
regulations. Ostensibly this was necessary to deal with the 2007/2008 financial
crisis, but in fact the Dutch carried out neoliberal austerity with such a
vengeance that for years economic growth was noticeably worse compared
to neighbors to the west and east.

The consequence is that while the Dutch are
among the richest and most egalitarian countries in the world, much of its
population has been experiencing levels of unsettledness, insecurity,
stagnating incomes and shrinking futures for their children that mirror
developments in less wealthy and less economically egalitarian western countries.

This is crucial to understanding the
politics of existential crisis that has been a constant for the past fifteen
years in the Netherlands and its
significance to the current election. Housing stress offers a particularly fine
– though neglected – example, particularly in comparison to the US. As a number
of economists and journalists have uncovered, one
of the key issues driving Trump voters in the United States, including
wealthier ones, was increasing financial stress and distress related to home
ownership. In particular, those with heavier mortgage payments relative to
income were more inclined to support Trump, even as those with negative equity
(in which homeowners are paying off mortgage loans higher than the current
value of their house) were more likely to switch from the Democratic to the
Republican party and to vote for Trump. As in the
US, in the Netherlands housing has become drastically unaffordable to growing
groups of people.

As in the US, in the Netherlands housing
has become drastically unaffordable to growing groups of people. Following
Liberal policies, the stock of social housing has shrunk by nearly 300,000
since 2009. During the same time, the number of people requiring social housing
increased by several hundred thousand under pressure from shrinking incomes. So
too did cutbacks in the number of homes caring for senior citizens, the
mentally ill, and handicapped; stricter mortgage requirements; increases in
temporary contracts that make one ineligible for mortgages; and increases in
the number of refugees.

That is to say, the very same
liberalization that introduced growing precarity (flex-work) in the labor
market and reduced state care, at the same time reduced the stock of social
housing available to those who were most
directly experiencing the wrenching effects of these policies.

Worse yet, the liberalization of the rental
market means that since 2009, yearly rental costs have increased on average by €900,
even as the combined effect of the economic crisis, austerity measures and
labor market liberalization has meant that the income of renters has decreased by €2200/year. (I am taking
these figures from an
excellent Dutch-language article by Mirjam de Rijk.)[1]
At the same time, the requirements for gaining access to social housing were
further restricted, increasingly locking out the middle class. Finding
affordable housing is, then, an increasingly desperate endeavor for both low-
and middle-income groups.

Blaming
refugees

The Liberals and Wilders have done
everything they can to blame refugees for these developments, often with great
success. A perfect example is the picturesque fishing village of Volendam,
where tourists love to visit and have their pictures taken in traditional
attire. For years, the village has stood out in elections for its
disproportional support of Wilders. The very close-knit relations and high
levels of social trust that in other regions such as northern Friesland have limited
Wilders’ success here appear to boost it, and
as elections approach one or more villagers will be sure to appear on one or
another television talk show to affirm their warm support.

Volendam. Flickr/Jose A. Some rights reserved.Journalists who stop by the village for a
day, can quickly gather anti-Muslim and anti-Europe quotations, drawing
their own conclusions. But just possibly this is much too superficial. Once
you find out that the community has a longstanding feud with the government
regarding the placement of refugees in rental housing, the material base to the
prejudice suddenly makes sense. Out of roughly 12,000 properties in the
village, 1,400 are social housing, for which there are long waiting lists. The
government, whose policy is to spread refugees proportionally across the
country, has demanded in recent years that Volendam take in several hundred
refugees. The villagers have protested loudly: after all, they have been paying
taxes for years and patiently waiting their turn to get an apartment: why
should refugees be able to jump the line, and get housing for
free at that?

Out of roughly 12,000 properties in
the village, 1,400 are social housing, for which there are long waiting lists.

For the villagers, the housing competition
both instigates and legitimates their prejudices against foreign intruders and
the government. The government, however, blames the housing corporation for not
building enough rental apartments and has told the village to deal with it.
Notably, the government here ignores the fact that the whole thrust of its
policy has been to entice housing corporations to do just what was done here:
shift their emphasis from rental properties to home ownership.

Now imagine such scenes spread all across
the country – as housing possibilities decrease drastically, even as the felt
need for such housing and economic precarity more generally increase – and the
support for Wilders and antagonism to refugees begins to take on more concrete
shape. Rather than simply Islamophobia or simply material competition for
scarce housing and social services, it is the dynamic way in which prejudice, fear
and material competition reinforce one another that helps to explain the
persistent attraction of Wilders.

Wilders’
“tsunamis” and the wars of religion

A rather different but complementary factor
in understanding the Netherlands’ politics of crisis is the country’s high
exposure to global flows and developments – as an export and trading nation – in
combination with its miniature size (a mere 17 million people on 41,500 square
kilometers, much of it below sea-level). This graphically reinforces the sense
of precarity: the Dutch never forget that they live by the grace of dykes
protecting them from a deadly sea, nor that they are a miniscule and weak
country in a vast world. The intense psychological impact of this aspect is
often hard for those from larger countries to imagine. By way of comparison,
the area of the United States is 237 times as large. What the anthropologist Arjun
Appadurai dubbed “the fear of small numbers” – by which a society’s anxieties
around globalization are projected onto local minorities, who are assumed to be
under the control of outside forces – is an anxiety always-already waiting to
be triggered. Notably, Wilders is particularly adept in his use of water
metaphors to describe Muslims and refugees as unstoppable “flows,” “floods,”
and “tsunamis.” Wilders is particularly adept in
his use of water metaphors to describe Muslims and refugees as unstoppable
“flows,” “floods,” and “tsunamis.”

Further pressure on the Netherlands comes
from the extremely high levels of diversity it encompasses, particularly when
compared to other small European countries. Amsterdam itself has 180
nationalities, leading it often to top the charts as the most internationally
diverse city in the world. At the national level, 22% of the Dutch population
is either a recent immigrant or of recent immigrant descent (including the 5-6%
of the population that is Muslim). At the same time, historically, the majority
of Dutch, some 98%, have foreign ancestors – ranging from sixteenth century
Ottoman traders, to the more well-known Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, English
Puritans, French Huguenots, Scandinavian sailors, Italian bankers, Polish
mineworkers, and German Lutheran laborers and traders among many others, along
with (post-)colonial immigrants from the Indonesia, Suriname, the Antilles, Turkey,
Morocco, India and China.

The religious fractures across the country
only add further to this. Even as the conclusion to the vicious religious wars
between Protestants and Catholics was foundational to the Netherlands as an
independent state in 1648, it has continued to shape the Dutch psyche, along
with (post-religious) political identities and landscapes. It is no accident
that Geert Wilders gets most of his support from the historically Catholic
South, which for centuries has had a deeply ambivalent relation to the centers
of political and economic power in Protestant “Holland” up north.

A hazy National Us with a gas problem

All this makes the notion of Dutch national
origins, even when invoked by nationalists, an utterly vague and hazy one.

And this raises a final crucial component
of current conflicts, namely the economic geography of the Netherlands. On the
one hand, the Netherlands has for centuries been one of the most urbanized
countries in the world – a distinguishing factor is the way in which those
cities are spread around the country.

As in the recent US elections and UK Brexit
referenda, there is a clear voting pattern to be discerned in which cities –
particularly university cities – are inclined to vote more progressively than either
monochrome suburbs filled with those fearful of the cities they see in the news
or shrinking countryside towns and villages losing their youth to the cities
and social services to austerity.

In practice it’s more subtle than this
though, as the geographer Josse de Voogd has shown, and voting patterns in
cities break down neighborhood by neighborhood along lines of class, income,
consumption, ethnicity, and region. At the same time, as his national political
maps make clear, the Netherlands too has its rustbelts, post-industrial areas
of shrinking possibility, that track anti-establishment voting patterns rather
closely. Whether looking at those who voted against closer EU-ties with Ukraine
(the Ukraine Referendum) or those voting for Wilders or those voting for the
Socialists, it is precisely those areas that show up with greatest intensity:
the Limburg (ex-)mining region in the south; the post-industrial areas to the
south of Rotterdam, and northeast Groningen, pressed against the
German border, the
most destitute area of all, with a higher
density of children growing up in poverty than any other sub-region.
The province of Groningen for years has delivered
great profits to the Dutch government from tapping underground reservoirs of
gas.

This is particularly striking since the
province of Groningen for years has delivered great profits to the Dutch
government from tapping underground reservoirs of gas. In 1995, the government
created the Economic Structure Enhancing Fund (FES) as a way of putting aside
some of the profits in order to invest them in infrastructure and, later, to
strengthen the knowledge economy. A subsequent investigation revealed, however,
that of all the FES funds only 1% had been invested in the region itself and 88%
had gone to the already-rich west of the country.

Even under conditions of great wealth
production in Groningen, the historic impoverishment of East Groningen
persisted relentlessly. Adding insult to injury, the Dutch government has
done little to address the concerns of those whose houses have been damaged by
the earthquakes that gas extraction brings. That is to say, even a
rich miniature country like the Netherlands is deeply marked, even scarred, by
the capitalist logic of exploiting center and languishing periphery. Little
wonder that at the (sub-)regional level, these should be
the areas most likely to be enticed by Wilders’ anti-establishment siren song.
The fascinating aspect here is that Wilders has not picked up the issue: his
program ignores it completely, possibly because
his strong ties to the south
make northern issues less enticing.

***

“I understand
completely that people think: if you reject our country so fundamentally, I’d
rather if you left. Because I have that feeling too: act normal or get out.”

The Netherlands has the strange quality of
being able to be simultaneously behind and ahead of the times. This is the
country that so early legislated gay marriage, euthanasia, legalized
prostitution and pot consumption. But also the country where the German poet
Heinrich Heine wanted to go when the world ends because, he quipped, everything
in Holland happens 50 years later.

The Netherlands today has one of the most
viciously racist public domains. Activists who protest Black Pete; Black
politicians, artists, writers and public figures who protest discrimination;
Muslims critical of the west and Muslims who are simply visible as Muslims are
structurally, consistently subjected to the most vile, the most aggressive
stream of hate wishing them violence, rape, torture and death. When the
Surinamese radio and television entertainer Sylvana Simons entered politics
some months ago to contest discrimination, the putrid stream of hatred unleashed
on her was so extensive that her formal police complaint contained literally
thousands of examples, extending to a
video inserting her into lynching photos.

Dutch police and politicians have for years
openly advocated ethnic profiling, even as police perpetrating violence against
citizens of color have largely gone scot-free. Two officers involved in the shocking
death of Mitch Henriquez were fired, but not prosecuted, much less
convicted. Other police have acted with great violence towards activists and
protesters such as the poet Jerry Afriye, whose work as
a security guard was made impossible after the policed attempted to prosecute
him (wrongfully) for attacking a police officer. Soon after a judge fully
cleared Afriye of all charges in a highly unusual decision, the police once
again arrested Afriye, with video images showing one officer punching him in
the face.

Rutte’s
open letter

At the same time, the Liberal Party of
prime minister Mark Rutte has taken over the language of crude nationalism from
Wilders. Early in the campaign season he published an open letter describing:

“our growing
discomfort when people abuse our freedoms to mess things up here, even though
they came to our country for such freedoms. People who do not want to adapt,
who disparage our ways of doing things and reject our values … [who] call
normal Dutch racists. I understand completely that people think: if you reject
our country so fundamentally, I’d rather if you left. Because I have that
feeling too: act normal or get out.”

Coming from the Prime Minister, who is
meant in the Dutch tradition to stand above social conflicts the better to
resolve them, this letter hit those Dutch born and bred here but being
addressed as visitors and strangers who might be ejected at any moment, with
particular and brutal harshness. To criticize racism, Rutte said, is to be
un-Dutch. It is not normal. And you have no place here.

This year for the very first time there are
two minority parties participating in the elections: the largely Turkish-Dutch
Denk and Sylvana Simons’ multi-racial Artikel 1. Their simple existence has
infuriated many, who accuse them rather strikingly of “racializing politics.”
As if, before this – notwithstanding the looming influence of Wilders and the
willingness of many parties and politicians to take over his pejorative take on
Muslims and Moroccan immigrants – Dutch politics was neither racial nor racist.

Rather the opposite is true: their critical
presence makes visible at the national, public level just how racialized and
racist our politics has been and how little Dutch society has been concerned to
protect its brown and Muslims citizens from violence, denigration and
discrimination. While these two parties themselves look likely to just win one
or two seats, the effects of their presence are already being felt. Two other
parties – D66 and the GreenLeft, and even at moments the Labour Party – have
taken to making forceful, explicit and unapologetic arguments for embracing
pluralism and diversity as an essential element of Dutch society.

Jesse Klaver, Groen links, 2014. Wikicommons/BoelensLeon. Some right reserved.Missing still in their platforms is any
criticism of the brutal violence facing critical Blacks and Muslims who speak
up and the banal stream of indignities to which so many are exposed at an
everyday level. But still, it is a start.

And just maybe, Wilders notwithstanding, it
is a sign that it will not take 50 years for Holland’s political elite to join
the anti-racist present.

[1] See also, in English – http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2017/02/the-big-election-issues-dutch-housing-market-under-mounting-pressure/

Labour Party losses

Austerity with a vengeance

Blaming refugees

Wilders’ “tsunamis” and the wars of religion