Right-wing party may benefit most from rerun of Dutch election

HAGUE LETTER:Nearly seven months after the collapse of the Dutch coalition government, there is still no replacement

EVEN THE phlegmatic Dutch are not immune to the cult of the celebrity chef, which is why big, bald and beaming Herman den Blijker was named Culinary Mayor of Rotterdam, in an effort to modernise the troubled image of the rambling port city.

He’ll have his work cut out. In many ways, the tangled politics of Rotterdam – home to the late Pim Fortuyn, the gay right-wing politician assassinated during the 2002 elections – encapsulate the tensions that have bedevilled the creation of a replacement for the coalition government that collapsed on February 20th.

More than half the city’s population is of non-Dutch origin, and the rights and wrongs of immigration are dangerous business here. Fortuyn was the first high-profile fatality.

Theo Van Gogh, great- grandnephew of the artist, was assassinated in 2004, having just completed a film about the shooting of Fortuyn.

Van Gogh, in turn, had worked with the Somali-born writer and former member of parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali – once named by Timemagazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world – to produce the movie Submission, critical of the treatment of women in Islam.

Hirsi Ali received credible death threats as a result of the movie and now lives in Washington, where she is a fellow at the conservative think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute.

She was one of the first to criticise the appearance in New York on Saturday of the anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders who, predictably, attacked plans to build an Islamic cultural centre close to Ground Zero. "If I were Wilders, I would have been back in The Hague at the negotiating table," the Dutch daily De Telegraafquoted her as saying. Was that the mood on the streets here? As usual, the Dutch are non-committal and slow to criticise. According to pollsters Maurice de Hond, 20 per cent of voters supported Wilders's New York appearance; 39 per cent opposed it, while 41 per cent had no opinion.

Therein lies the crux for Dutch politics this autumn: nobody knows quite how to handle Wilders and his PVV or Freedom Party, which won 24 seats in the general election in June, making it the third-largest party.

The Freedom Party wants to ban the Koran, charge women who wear the headscarf an annual tax of €1,000, end immigration from Muslim countries and ban the construction of new mosques.

The latest attempt to form a right-leaning minority coalition comprising the Liberals or VVD (which narrowly won the June election, taking 31 seats), the Christian Democrats (which crashed into fourth place) and the Freedom Party collapsed just over a week ago, forcing Queen Beatrix to meet her advisers to decide between continuing the talks and calling new elections.

The former remains the preferred option, for the moment, despite the little-known fact that it has historically taken an average of 87 days to form a Dutch government after an election, roughly the amount of time that has now passed since the June 9th vote. The longest, by the way, was in 1977, when it took just shy of seven months.

"While it may seem unusual in other European countries, this type of drawn-out round-the-houses consensus-building is not unusual here," leading organisational psychologist Tineke Dufour- Liefhebber, author of Vermist: Mijn Tweede Helft( Missing: My Second Half)told The Irish Times.

“We call it ‘the polder model’ because of the fact that with so much of the Netherlands below sea-level, ever since the Middle Ages groups with opposing interests have been obliged to set aside their differences to maintain the polders and prevent the country being flooded.

“But the important thing is that – unlike the British, for instance, who were thrown into chaos at the prospect of that terrible thing, a ‘hung parliament’ – we Dutch do not consider the absence of a government for a few months to be the death-knell of democracy. Rather, we consider this process as the essence of democracy in action.”

Several political options remain. Labour leader Job Cohen continues to rule out a three- party centrist coalition with the Liberals and the Christian Democrats. However, he has indicated that he is willing to work with Liberal leader Mark Rutte – widely regarded as the prime minister-in-waiting – so that may change.

A left-leaning coalition of the Liberals, Labour and the smaller Green Left and Democracy 66 is also possible, but unlikely. It is also possible but unlikely that the queen could ask for a non- partisan, non-political government or zakenkabinet– the last one was from 1879-1883.

New elections may seem the easiest option. However, polling shows that the only party benefiting from the current uncertainty is the Freedom Party of Wilders, which could increase its haul of seats from 24 to 34 in a rerun.

So the talking continues. Even in the Netherlands, it appears, there is such a prospect as too much democracy.