Cogs can think.

The Dutch government has fallen. Prime-minister Jan-Peter Balkenende has declared in the Lower House that he and his secretaries will offer their resignations to the Queen tomorrow.

All this over the issue regarding Ayaan Hirsi-Ali. One of the coalition members, D66 (Democrats ‘66), a small party with only two secretaries in the government, opted for the resignation of the Secretary of Integration and Immigration, Rita Verdonk, after handling the matter of Ayaan’s naturalisation into our country rather amateurishly. This failed to go through the Lower House, and as a result, the government saw no reason to i.e. remove Verdonk from office.

This proved to be too much for D66 Lower House leader Loesewies van der Laan, who, this afternoon, withdrew the party’s support for the government. This set in motion a chain of events in which the two D66 secretaries resigned, and following those resignations, the rest of the government also resigned, just now, including the prime minister.

This will most likely mean new elections. First, the PM will offer the resignations to the Queen tomorrow, which the Queen will accept (theoretically, she could refuse to accept, but that won’t happen); the Queen will then seek advice from all the political leaders, after which we will know what happens; new elections immediatly, or, not unlikely, that this government will continue to run the country only attending to daily matters until the normal, planned elections in May, 2007.

I applaud that the government has fallen from a political point of view; they made some very bad decisions, some very impopular ones at that, and they always seemed to be fractured, unstable, and generally one big mess. Balkenende was not a strong leader.

I have absolutely no idea what I will vote for. The reason this government fell is appaling; everywhere in the world there is war, people are dying of AIDS and hunger; in our own country, public transport is a mess, the entire nation is gridlocked on the highways twice a day, we pollute too much, we barely reach our Kyoto goals, publich health and health insurance are in the middle of huge transitions, the economy is still not strong enough, 26000 immigrants who are victims of our failing immigration policies are on the brink of being thrown out of the country, and there are a million other important matters our government should attend to.

But what do they debate about for days on end? The naturalisation of one Somali woman, 12 years ago. And that brings our entire nation into turmoil, hurting political continuity and stability.

Disastrous. How on earth can I give my support to any of these parties in our Lower House? They simply don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about the real issues in the world. Appaling.