Decision time for divided Netherlands as Europe looks on
AMSTERDAM: When they wake up in the morning of the most crucial election in decades, many Dutch voters will still have to make up their minds on which of the 28 parties to mark with the red pencil.
Six days before the elections, pollsters Ipsos found that just 46 per cent of voters had made up their minds definitively, 39 per cent had a party they were tending to, and 15 per cent had yet to decide.
Bread and butter issues have often been decisive in the past, but this time “normen en waarden” are central. The words may mean “standards and values” but they go proxy for the heated debate on immigration.
Events over the weekend, when a Turkish minister was escorted across the border to Germany, prompting Ankara to threaten retaliation, served to inflame the debate.
Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders tweeted: “To all Turks in the Netherlands who agree with Erdogan: Go to Turkey and never come back!”
His Party for Freedom (PVV) has lost support in recent weeks after narrowly topping the polls in December, partly in response to Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s call on those not accepting Dutch values to “behave yourselves or go away.”
Speaking on Sunday, Rutte said he would stand his ground while seeking to defuse tensions with Ankara.
“I’m going to de-escalate, but not by offering apologies,” he told public broadcaster WNL. Dutch commentators were near-unanimous in believing the prime minister had emerged well from the spat.
Two days before the elections, which kickstart a super electoral year in Europe that will also see France and Germany head to the polls, Rutte’s promarket VVD was put at 16 per cent support ahead of the PVV on 13 per cent.
“I still don’t know. It’s very difficult,” says Margot Reesink, a 50-year-old mother of two. Social and environmental concerns top the list of priorities for this divorced mother.
After watching a televised debate between the party leaders, Reesink says: “I’m not sure, but Pechthold was good. Either him or Jesse Klaver.”
Alexander Pechthold heads D66, a social-liberal party that is well supported among university graduates but often criticised as elitist.
It has also attracted a substantial following among the Turkish minority, taking its support to around 12 per cent, level with the Christian Democrats (CDA).
Klaver’s Green-Left (GL) party on 11 per cent is bidding to be the left’s standard-bearer.
The traditional left, represented by the social democrat Labour Party (PvdA) and the more leftist Socialist Party (SP), are on 7 and 10 per cent respectively.