March 15, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
12:52
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| The 2017 Dutch general election will occur tomorrow, and it should come as no surprise that the world is watching. | |
| The Dutch political landscape is quite different to that in Britain and the United States, so counterculture spectators who hotly anticipate a repeat of Brexit and Trump are likely to be disappointed by the results. | |
| Politics in the Netherlands is nowhere near polarised enough to create a winner-takes-all scenario. | |
| The Dutch House of Representatives has 150 seats, of which 75 must be filled by a single political party to create an absolute majority with which to form a government. | |
| The balkanization of the Dutch political landscape all but prevents this, with an absolute majority having never been achieved since the introduction of the current proportional representation system, which was implemented in 1918. | |
| The Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy, and the incumbent Prime Minister is Mark Rut of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy, abbreviated as VVD. | |
| He became the Prime Minister of the Netherlands in 2010, and a deadlock on the subject of an austerity budget led to a snap general election, called in 2012, in which VVD won with an even stronger mandate. | |
| He resumed his duties as Prime Minister after forming a coalition government with the Dutch Labour Party, abbreviated as PVDA, who are led by current Deputy Prime Minister Ludwig Ascher. | |
| To put this into perspective, out of 150 potential seats, this high watermark achieved 41 seats. | |
| The PVDA achieved 38 seats, and the Party of Freedom, abbreviated to PVV, achieved only 15. | |
| The Party of Freedom are led by Gerd Wilders. | |
| Goethe Wilders has garnered a great deal of controversy due to his anti-immigration, anti-Islam, and anti-European Union positions. | |
| He has acted as a lightning rod in these discussions and brought much of the focus onto himself and the PVV. | |
| As with all counter-culture politicians, Wilders received much negative press and his views are presented in the usual distorted, heavily biased manner. | |
| Here is a short clip of Wilders giving his talking points on a range of relevant political subjects. | |
| I'm going to give you a few words, and I'd like your thoughts on them. | |
| Trump. | |
| Trump. | |
| A politician that... | |
| Just briefly. | |
| Trump. | |
| Well, I don't agree with everything he does, but still, he is a lot better than Mrs. Clinton would be. | |
| Brexit. | |
| Fantastic. | |
| I hope we can follow. | |
| Theresa May? | |
| Well, she is taking Britain out of the European Union, so I applaud her for that. | |
| What? | |
| The European Union. | |
| Worst thing ever, and like the old communist empire. | |
| Muslims. | |
| I have nothing against Muslims. | |
| I have a problem with Islam. | |
| The Koran. | |
| A book full of hate and violence and more anti-Semitism in the Koran than in Mein Kampf. | |
| Refugees. | |
| Every real refugee should have shelter, but preferably in their own region, for instance, in Saudi Arabia instead of here. | |
| And finally, gay people. | |
| I support gay people a lot. | |
| My fight against Islam is also to support gay people and they support my party in Holland a lot as well. | |
| Wilders and his party are remarkably centrist in most regards, and even socialist in many of their policies. | |
| It is his stance on Islam that is most contentious, being distinctly liberal, and this is the core of the media narrative surrounding him. | |
| Well, I'm particularly worried about what it will mean if Geert Wilders ends up being the biggest party on March 16th, as I stated before, because that will have an impact on how the Netherlands is seen in the rest of the world. | |
| So that's one of the reasons I'm extremely motivated to win these elections. | |
| I'm also very motivated to win these elections because I want to pursue my policies. | |
| I don't think this is a time to start experiments in terms of the content of the type of government policies which need to be pursued over the next four years. | |
| So these are the two reasons. | |
| The fact that we need to keep our course, that we have to maintain this successful strategy to get the Netherlands out of a crisis, we are now one of the best performing economies in the Western world. | |
| We are the most competitive economy in the European Union. | |
| We had the lowest, the biggest drop in our unemployment, the biggest drop in unemployment in 10 years last year. | |
| So this is all very positive news. | |
| So my message to the Dutch public is no experiment. | |
| Make a choice for leadership to keep this country safe and stable in an increasingly unstable world. | |
| And at the same time, let's prevent on March 16th that we wake up seeing that Geert Wilders has won the elections. | |
| The most recent polls show that the VVD have a clear lead with 17%, followed secondly by the PVV with 14%, contested hotly by the Christian Democratic Appeal, the CDA, with 13%. | |
| This is likely to translate into 14-28 seats for the VVD, 19-22 seats for the PVV, and 19-21 seats for the CDA. | |
| Support for the Labour Party collapsed for the same reasons that support for the Liberal Democrats collapsed in the UK, leaving the VVD and the PVV vying for supremacy. | |
| Wilders is a total political outsider in the Netherlands, receiving little to no support from other major political parties who have actually pledged to form a coalition against the PVV in the event of a surprise win for Wilders' party. | |
| This means that Wilders will become the Dutch Prime Minister only in the highly unlikely event that his party wins the first absolute majority in over 100 years. | |
| Put bluntly, this is probably not going to happen. | |
| Even if, as with Brexit and Trump, the polling is inaccurate and skewed, Wilders would have to achieve a massive swing of undecided voters to his party, a feat that seems even more unlikely due to the record number of 28 different political parties competing for votes. | |
| Unlike with Brexit and Trump, a narrow margin will not be enough to secure victory. | |
| Interestingly, four days before the election, a staggering 54% of Dutch people polled said they still did not know for which party they would cast their vote, with 15% not having even narrowed it down to a few choices. | |
| This is significant because in the 2012 elections, 75% of the electorate voted. | |
| This is a huge number of undecided voters. | |
| If a similar number is seen tomorrow, out of the 9.5 million voters who cast their ballots in 2012, over 5 million Dutch voters are still undecided. | |
| While polling indicates the PVV will probably double the number of seats that they will take in the House since 2012, Wilders would need a majority of undecided voters to vote for the PVV. | |
| The recent diplomatic spat between the Netherlands and Turkey might appear to lend political support to Wilders. | |
| A Turkish minister had arrived in the Netherlands to speak at a pro-Erdogan rally in Rotterdam and was prevented by the Dutch authorities. | |
| This caused a large protest and an international incident in which Turkey responded by expelling Dutch diplomats. | |
| While there was little violence, the entire situation had poor optics for advocates of multiculturalism, which appeared to show a large body of citizens who considered themselves Turkish and not Dutch. | |
| Inflammatory rhetoric by Erdogan did nothing to temper the situation, as he referred to them as his citizens and encouraged them to take action against those who had insulted him. | |
| Wilders' response to this was characteristically strident. | |
| Today, I have a message for the Turks. | |
| Your government is fooling you into believing that one day you will become a member of the European Union. | |
| Well, forget it. | |
| You are no Europeans, and you will never be. | |
| An Islamic state like Turkey does not belong to Europe. | |
| All the values Europe stands for, freedom, democracy, human rights, are incompatible with Islam. | |
| We do not want visa-free travel for Turks coming to Europe either. | |
| European governments that agree with this will be voted out of office by the people. | |
| Turkey voted for Erdogan, a dangerous Islamist who raises the flag of Islam. | |
| We do not want more, but less Islam. | |
| So Turkey, stay away from us. | |
| You are not welcome here. | |
| This will doubtless give Wilders a boost in the election, but certainly not enough. | |
| Mark Rut also rebuffed Erdogan's demands for an apology, endearing him to voters as well. | |
| With the other political parties in harmony against him, Wilders will not become the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, barring some freak unforeseen act that I wouldn't rule out. | |
| Although he will remain an influential figure in both Dutch and international politics. | |
| Vilda's remarkable popularity should be a wake-up call to not only the Dutch establishment, but the entire Western world. | |
| Wilders, to put it bluntly, is not running a professional political campaign. | |
| He practically has a one-man party that has an amateurish manifesto that is only one page long and is, frankly, rather fascist. | |
| Here is the manifesto in its entirety. | |
| 1. De-Islamize the Netherlands. | |
| Zero asylum seekers and no immigrants anymore from Islamic countries. | |
| Close the borders. | |
| Withdraw all asylum residence permits which have already been granted for specific periods. | |
| Close asylum centers. | |
| No Islamic headscarves in public functions. | |
| Prohibition of other Islamic expressions which violate public order. | |
| Preventative detention of radical Muslims. | |
| Denaturalization and expulsion of criminals with a dual nationality. | |
| Jihadists who went to Syria will not be allowed to return to the Netherlands. | |
| Close all mosques and Islamic schools. | |
| Ban the Quran. | |
| 2. The Netherlands is independent again. | |
| Leave the European Union. | |
| 3. Direct democracy. | |
| A binding referendum power to the citizens. | |
| 4. Completely abolish healthcare deductibles. | |
| 5. Lower housing fees. | |
| 6. Retirement age at 65, indexation of supplementary pensions. | |
| 7. No public money for development aid, windmills, art, innovation, broadcasting, etc. | |
| 8. Rollback cuts in home care and elderly care, more hands on the bed. | |
| 9. A lot of extra money for defense and police. | |
| 10. Lower income taxes. | |
| 11. Halving of car taxes. | |
| Unlike with Donald Trump or Nigel Farage, this manifesto actually threatens the civil liberties of Dutch citizens. | |
| The constraints of government on the citizens' right to read what they choose, wear what they desire, and practice their religion will be denied. | |
| Worse still, policies like preventative detention of radical Muslims and the prohibition of Islamic expressions which violate public order will see an inevitable expansion of the definitions of these terms and sets the stage for the public demonization of a minority group. | |
| What politicians in the Western world must ask themselves is why are there so many people voting for this? | |
| Why has the PVV doubled its share of the Dutch vote since the last general election? | |
| These questions loom large over Europe, and if the left-wing establishment will not answer them, then the right wing will. | |
| The internet is awash with pro-Trump, pro-Farage, pro-Le Pen, and pro-Vilde's content. | |
| Memes, commentators, and content creators can scent the blood in the water and are pushing hard against the establishment because the establishment has failed to take their concerns seriously. | |
| The issue of mass immigration and the subsequent lack of integration is the most pressing political issue of our time and must be addressed frankly. |
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