JUST OVER a month before the general election in the Netherlands, polling shows that all the usual coalition combinations seem likely to fall tantalising short of an overall majority. This potentially leaves the country facing months without a government after the September 12th vote.
The traditional Dutch model of highly structured negotiations after an election meant it took four months to put a coalition together following the 2010 vote.
This time, given the euro zone crisis, the decline of the economy, and anger over austerity cuts, it’s expected to be even more difficult.
Since the election was called in April, all the polls have been consistent in showing a polarised electorate, with a strong surge of support for the anti-austerity Socialists – matched by reasonably solid conservative backing for caretaker prime minister Mark Rutte’s centre-right Liberals.
That left-right divide is confirmed in the latest figures from pollster Maurice de Hond, who says the Socialists, currently with a modest 15 seats, would more than double that tally to 34 if an election were held tomorrow – becoming the country’s most powerful political party.
Although they have never been in government here, the Socialists are also being buoyed by the fact that – although untested as a minister, much less prime minister – their leader, Emile Roemer, a former teacher, is by far the most popular politician in the country.
The Socialists are opposed to the €13 billion of budget cuts agreed by the caretaker minority Liberal Christian Democrat coalition and three smaller parties in April – with the aim of forcing the country’s budget deficit below 3 per cent of GDP next year. That affects its relations with neighbouring Germany and with Brussels,
The Socialists have pledged to tear up that austerity package – which has already been sent to the European Commission – and abandon, in particular, cuts in healthcare, a higher retirement age, and an increase in VAT. Their alternatives remain unclear.
Despite worries about the economy – the finance committee of parliament has already been recalled twice during the summer recess, most recently last Thursday – the Maurice de Hond figures place Mr Rutte’s Liberals, highly experienced in government and in coalition deals, virtually neck-and-neck with the Socialists, on 32 seats.
The immediate problem for both the Socialists and the Liberals is that in each case their most likely coalition anchor partners are weaker than ever.
The Liberals’ current partners, the Christian Democrats, are at an all-time low in the polls and they are widely regarded as having lost touch with their traditional base.
The Socialists’ preferred partners, Labour, are not – yet, at least – experiencing the same left-wing boost, and have a relatively new leader in Diederik Samsom.
As a result, just about every likely coalition combination works out at a total of 71 seats in the 150-seat parliament – just a few seats short of the 76 needed for an overall majority.
This potential for tortuous coalition negotiations is being compounded by the fact that 26 per cent of those polled say they are determined to vote “strategically” – transferring their loyalty from the party they usually support to the party most likely to make a difference.
For instance, a massive one-third of those who voted Labour in 2010, and a quarter of those who voted GreenLeft, say they will now vote Socialist for the first time – convinced by Mr Roemer’s consistent anti-cuts message.
Even more surprisingly, other converts to the Socialists are also coming from the Liberals, the Christian Democrats – and even from Geert Wilders’s right-wing Freedom Party, on the basis, apparently, that he may not be in as strong a position in the next government, as he was in the last, to oppose the might of Brussels.
“I believe there’s a new reality on the ground,” says Amsterdam political scientist, André Krouwel, “and I really don’t think centrist Dutch politicians are grasping it yet.”
