The Netherlands is set to get its first openly gay prime minister, Rob Jetten, following strong results in the country's recent election, which saw his party gain 17 seats, and Geert Wilders' far-right party lose 11.
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.
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”?
What’s driving them? My educated guess would be your usual blend of misinformation, xenophobia and egotism / fear of losing what they perceive (and are told, by like minds) to be their birthright.
Symptoms include but are not limited to:
othering minorities
racism
fear of trans people
telling n-th generation Dutch people who happen to be not white to ‘go back to their own country’ (an all time favourite)
fear of refugees (only when they’re brown of course, no problem accepting Ukrainian refugees)
violent protests against local govt when they announce a new refugee center
nationalism
misplaced nostalgia for when we were a ‘proper’ country (think white)
Probably forgot some but you get the idea. Then there’s also some flavours that are just straight up fascism like Forum voor Democratie.
Recent low point includes above party initiating a motion to mark antifa as a terrorist organisation (they wish they were trump so bad) and it being passed in parliament by a majority (all the right wing parties summed) because no one bothered to think about it for even 2 seconds.
Thanks for elaborating on that. Honestly it sounds very similar to racists here, albeit without the mental gymnastics required to somehow justify the occupation of indigenous lands they need to do in order to avoid having to come to terms with that they themselves are immigrants.
I did read about the antifa thing a while ago. To my knowledge that didn’t actually get implemented though, did it?
They actually cannot implement it. They voted that antifa is a terrorist organisation. But antifa is not an organisation and they cannot do that, because in the Netherlands only judges can decide what organisations are terrorist.
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”?
What’s driving them? My educated guess would be your usual blend of misinformation, xenophobia and egotism / fear of losing what they perceive (and are told, by like minds) to be their birthright.
Symptoms include but are not limited to:
Probably forgot some but you get the idea. Then there’s also some flavours that are just straight up fascism like Forum voor Democratie.
Recent low point includes above party initiating a motion to mark antifa as a terrorist organisation (they wish they were trump so bad) and it being passed in parliament by a majority (all the right wing parties summed) because no one bothered to think about it for even 2 seconds.
Thanks for elaborating on that. Honestly it sounds very similar to racists here, albeit without the mental gymnastics required to somehow justify the occupation of indigenous lands they need to do in order to avoid having to come to terms with that they themselves are immigrants.
I did read about the antifa thing a while ago. To my knowledge that didn’t actually get implemented though, did it?
They actually cannot implement it. They voted that antifa is a terrorist organisation. But antifa is not an organisation and they cannot do that, because in the Netherlands only judges can decide what organisations are terrorist.
Hurray for sanity. Glad to hear the Netherlands still has institutional backstops to this kind of nonsense.