Government
January 13, 2010And here we are, the new year barely under way, and the government is about to fall apart. Good times, good times.
After years and years of blocking an investigation into the Dutch involvement in the illegal war in Iraq, our prime minister grudgingly buckled under the pressure early 2009, and ordered an independent investigation, the outcome of which was presented yesterday.
It was a bit of a shock. The report was extremely critical: the war was illegal (and as such, we should have never given our support to the US), and the Lower House was not given all the information the government had access to - which is a major political offence in this country. This harsh outcome came as a total surprise to the government, even though most of the rest of the country already knew this.
The outcome was indeed a shock, but the situation only turned full-scale ugly when the PM held a press conference yesterday, during which he basically declared the entire report to be nonsense. What made it worse was that he spoke for the entire cabinet without actually conferring with the three parties that make up the cabinet. One of those three is extremely pissed off about that.
The problem is that all these three parties are currently extremely unpopular, and as such, they are willing to swallow a whole lot of each other’s stuff to prevent elections from taking place. We’ve had numerous sticky situations, but they were all resolved because of the mutual fear of elections. This time, however, it could actually happen. One of the most despised governments we ever had could fall today.
It’s about fcuking time.
Politics | 
Be careful what you wish for… If elections are to be held right now, I’m quite sure that Wilders will get lots and lots of voters on his side. And, well, I’m not a big Wilders-fan, so I’d rather have a pissed off cabinet in charge than seeing Wilders take the lead…
Comment by LoeZ — January 14, 2010 @ 8:48 am
I agree with LoeZ: times are not right for elections, Wilders will be the only one to profit from it, and although D66 will profit considerably as well, i don’t see those two forming a coalition either. So the only two solutions would be to either form a minority parliament, or a four-party parliament, and to be honest, neither of those solutions sound like real solutions to me.
Thank god we know now that you were right about swallowing much from each other because neither of the parties is very popular (although CDA did somewhat better than the other two parties). I just don’t think that elections would do any good at the moment, but just/barely governing the whole country is better than waiting until elections are over and a new coalition is formed…let’s deal with the economics and problem of an ageing population first :)
JW
Comment by JW — January 14, 2010 @ 11:49 pm
I also share the worries of the previous posters. PVV could turn out to be the second-strongest party in Netherlands. This alone wouldn’t be so bad if PVV had yet proposed any other valid and important issues in their programme than xenophobia and islamophobia. There are many problems that need to be tackled and a future government just cannot There will be a huge economical fall out in the EU and you need a reasonable government to deal with out otherwise isolation and national extremism will ensue.
Geert Wilders is just a figurehead, he is well spoken and popular but without any clear definition of a political course. What else the PVV could bring into a new government is plain scary though.
Comment by Rink — February 21, 2010 @ 12:54 am