Netherlands of all places had the far right running? Hope the far right had no chance.
They have their own version of Trump called Geert Wilders.
The guy looks like Trump even. Has the orange skin and same color hair.
He’s even calling bullshit of The election results
I mean… this is the same netherlands that spawned the Dutch East India Company.
The overton window of each country is unique. The far right in Australia is still less extreme than the far right in the US. For example, they likely wouldn’t just dismantle healthcare for everyone. They generally all rely on populism though.
Far right suffering big losses? If only…
How many dead?
The Far-Right really took off in the Netherlands under the leadership of Pim Fortuyn who was very openly gay.
Think about it: one of the first leaders of the modern Dutch Far-Right was openly gay and nobody cared to the point that he was politically very successful as a Far-Right leader. In which other country in the World would the Far-Right types be fine with their leader being gay?!
In my own personal experience (I actually lived there for almost a decade), the Dutch have the healthiest take of all when it comes to sexual orientation: it’s all normal and in domains outside sex and romance treated as just about as relevant as people’s eye color (i.e. pretty much nobody cares).
All this to say that from a Dutch point of view the sexual orientation of the prime minister being homosexual is irrelevant.
Beware of projecting the weird Anglo-Saxon viewpoint on sexuality and sexual orientation onto events taking place in a Dutch context.
One of the main leaders of the german nazi party is a lesbian, and her partner (wife?) is a foreigner. People will see this, and in their heads make up an explanation, labelling such people as “the good exception” to their rule. My neighbour has dark skin, and she keeps hearing this a lot. Oh, we are not against YOU, you are different. We just hate everyone who looks like you because everyone else who is like you is scum.
That’s the thing: Prejudice is always bad, be it directly (presuming people are somehow worse or lesser than others based on some characteristics they were born with) or indirectly (presuming people are somehow better than others based on some characteristic they were born with, which means the evil types which are found amongst those people just as much as amongst the rest, get away with far more evildoing than otherwise: a great example of this being how Zionists have taken things to the point of committing Genocide because for decades they were leveraging “positive” prejudices about people who are Jewish to get away with doing seriously evil shit).
That’s why I really like the Dutch take of “those things are irrelevant for judging the character of a person” when it comes to sexual orientation - it totally avoids prejudice in any form, both the obviously bad prejudices AND the supposedly positive but in practice also negative, just indirectly.
People are people are people - best not presume things about them based on traits that have nothing to do with how good or bad they act, even “nice” presumptions.
^ “In the Netherlands, just because gay, doesn’t mean not Nazi.”
In terms of people’s own ideology, that’s everywhere, really.
The upside of seeing sexual orientation as irrelevant outside sex and romance is that one has no tendency to assume that just because somebody has a specific sexual orientation, that means they think in a specific way (which is just a variant of “they’re all the same”), most notably in terms of Politics. This stands in contrast with what you see mainly in Anglo-Saxon nations.
So once one looks at the world like that it’s obvious that people whose sexual orientation is one of the less common ones are just as likely to be Nazis as the rest.
The difference in The Netherlands versus other countries is on how free people feel to let society know what their sexual orientation is, rather than the proportion of those who are gay and have Nazi beliefs being higher in The Netherlands than elsewhere - in other words people who have Nazi beliefs there and who happen to be gay are more likely to let others know that they’re gay than elsewhere.
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Well yes, but also no.
Far right hardly suffered losses, their seats in parliament just shuffled around a bit meaning one of the far right parties is no longer the largest in parliament like last election. Which cleared the way for a gay PM, which we love.
His mysoginist comments from the campaign trail are duly noted though 👀
Well look at that, Europe may finally be turning the page on right wing populists.
France and England rejected their alt-right parties, and with the Netherlands following suit I am hoping the Trump effect will help reset politics on the old continent back to more moderate viewpoints.
Note the far right part they refer to is the second biggest with only a 15k difference in votes at the time of writing.
I definitely wouldn’t say people are turning the page on them, it’s definitely still a very real and sizable threat to our democracies. Managing to keep them out of power by the skin of our teeth is the best we got right now.
Most hopeful thing re: populism that happened in the Netherlands so far is that our local trump crashed the cabinet but that’s barely changed people’s minds on blaming minorities for their problems, they just picked different representatives for it this time around.
Excuse my ignorance of the nuances of the political situation in the Netherlands, but I was under the impression that D66 are center-left liberals with some right of center economic policies. I didn’t know they had similar stances on migration and foreigners as the PVV do.
D66 is that, yes.
What I’m saying is that the far right parties, summed together, went from 40 to 42 (out of 150) seats and so their threat is still as real as it ever was. (‘proper’ left parties are ~30 seats taken together, for reference, everything else is relatively center)
In other words, just because PVV isn’t the biggest party in parliament anymore and won’t be in charge of forming a cabinet, the voters’ sympathy for far right policies is still alive and kicking.
Oh wow, that puts a very different perspective on this “victory”. Thanks for providing that insight. What’s driving the far right in the Netherlands? Same-same story of “I don’t like brown people”?
I wouldnt be too sure on the UK and France yet, the far right parties in both are leading in the polls right now. The UK has a lot of local elections next spring and Frances’s parliament seems like it will probably collapse and require new elections soon, maybe by this time next year if the far right havent gained significant power we can talk about turning a corner.
While I understand the concern about these parties polling well, the old adage that “the only poll that counts are the elections” still applies. I am at least still cautiously hopeful that the Trump effect will continue to pay dividends across the rest of the world by making the majority of the electorate reconsider supporting parties styled after the MAGA movement.
The leader of the modern Dutch Far-Right some years ago, when it really took of, was very openly gay.
I suspect that you’re from a society where sexuality and sexual orientation are massively affected by Moralism and heavilly politicized - in other words treated as heavy and important subjects aligned with certain political forces - which is totally different from many other countries, most notably The Netherlands were they just treat all sexual orientations as just normal (which is why Dutch Far-Right muppets couldn’t care less that their leader was gay).
All this to say that your reading about the sexual orientation of a countries top politicians and what it says for populist politics, doesn’t at all apply outside very specific societies with wierd political takes on such subjects.
I get what you’re implying, but no it’s not a big deal here in Canada either. I was just optimistic to see a stalwart alt-right staple party like Wilders’ PVV suffer a quite significant election defeat.
I get what you’re implying, but no it’s not a big deal here in Canada either.
Number of gay PM’s in Canada = 0, we don’t even elect women. Poilievre was up 30 points while gay bashing.
Number of gay PMs in the Netherlands = 0 too. This guy hasn’t been sworn in yet. PP was mostly trans bashing by the way, but my point is that I don’t recall the sexuality of candidates being a relevant thing in elections here. Also, “We don’t elect women?” that’s just downright incorrect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_first_ministers_in_Canada
I totally agree that that’s a good thing.
More in general it’s a good thing that the era of rightwing cohalitions governing the country, which lasted almost 2 decades, seems to be finally over, as the other parties of the governing cohalition have all lost votes.
The Netherlands has actually been quite a neoliberal country for a while now, with steadilly degrading public services (still Scandinavia-style personal taxes but ever more American style public services) and one of the worse realestate bubbles in Europe.
Hopefully this is a change in direction back towards traditional social democrat ideals and away from deregulation, trickle-down delusions and even support for the modern version of the Nazis (the Zionists).
I have heard some concerning stuff coming out of the Netherlands for a while, yes. Especially the gradual erosion of the social safety net they erected back in the 60s and the privatization of core parts of the country’s public infrastructure. I’ll share in your hope that this may see a reversal, or at the very least a stay under whatever new government results from these elections.
Funny you mention Scandinavian levels of taxation by the way - when I lived in the Netherlands for a few years I paid significantly more income tax than I did in Sweden. Not sure how progressive the tax system still is in the Netherlands, but it felt like all but folks on income assistance were taxed similarly.
France and the UK are both very likely to see their far right parties win their next major elections, and far right parties are continuing a net rise across Europe. They’re struggling badly whenever they do get into power at all, but they’re likely to come to power everywhere at least once, and with those monsters you never know which election will be the last.
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Technically the libs did do something this election.
Last time they opened the door to a possible collaboration with the PVV. This in turn caused a lot of (far-)right wing voters to flock to the PVV. This time they joined in ruling out any collaboration with the PVV. 99 out of 150 seats in the Dutch parliament now refuse to work with Wilders. This turned out to be their saving grace too, because a lot of those former PVV voters now went for the liberal right-wing VVD, as they were told it was the “only way to prevent a left-wing cabinet”.
So in effect they basically undid their fuckup from last time.
England rejected their alt-right parties
what? I missed when that happened
I was referring to UKIP and Le Pen losing the elections, but perhaps my optimism was misplaced reading the rest of the replies.
I mean, from all accounts of how Starmer has been as a prime minister, Labour marched hard towards the right to get elected.
Same for Carney to be honest. The Liberals were never truly left wing to begin with here, but even then he’s a clear rightward departure from Trudeau.
Hell yeah! I hope things go well for him
Trump is going to faint from this.
Maybe he’ll have a heart attack and die.
Brave to assume that will change anything. I am pretty sure that if he dropped dead today, he’d be turned into a marionette for the moneyed interests propping up the MAGA/Nazi movement to control by tomorrow morning.
They don’t need him for his political acumen, they need him as their mouthpiece. And with the direction genAI is going, I’d start to worry if I were Trump…
Fingers crossed
