Pim Fortuyn is still alive - but this year, he's a Socialist
Dutch politics, nowadays, is never boring - at least definitely not for those interested in the marbles rather than the game, as we say - in the numbers and results rather than the discourse.
Something extreme once again appears to be happening in Holland - underscoring the almost lottery-like character that party fortunes have taken on in election seasons now.
Sturdy stability makes way for postmodern lottery: the Dutch system adrift
Up through the mid-nineties, the Netherlands had a party political system that was sturdy to the extreme. Holland has a confusing number of parties represented in parliament, in the eyes of a Brit, American or even German - but they had mostly been the same ones for decades. And their general "band" of support was also stable throughout the decades; if one of the main parties gained or lost 5% in an election, it was considered a major upset.
The mid-nineties saw the first tears in the system. In the run-up to the 1994 elections, the two "elephants" of the Dutch party system, Labour and the Christian-Democratic Appeal (which at the time governed together), plummeted in the polls in unprecedented fashion. Labour recovered in time with a successful election campaign and kept its loss limited to 7%; the Christian-Democrats caught the brunt of it and lost 20 of their 54 seats in one fell swoop, its vote share slashed from 36% to 23%.
But that first rupture was relatively bland. The election winners themselves were largely placed smack in the centre of the political spectrum. The centre-left Democrats 66 won 8%, and two new parties for the elderly came out of nowhere to pool 5% of the vote. People were highly concerned about how the far right edged up to 2% (3 seats).
The second time the whole system was overturned was, of course, in 2002. The year of Pim Fortuyn, the populist anti-immigrant politician who was to be assassinated on the eve of the elections. For the first time, a politician bypassed the cosy one-twos of parliamentary conversation and played it from the outside. He fully utilised the new power of the greatly expanded media landscape, which had seen the number of national TV stations, all hungry for scoops and sensation, roughly triple in a decade or so. Fortuyn played it like a finely tuned fiddle, providing as much shock, surprise and political entertainment as the talkshow hosts desired.
The "List Pim Fortuyn" (LPF) shot up to 12% in the polls out of nowhere, then, after the famously calamitous debate of party leaders after the local elections of March 2002, to 17%, overnight. This was volatility never before seen.
Unsurprisingly, when Fortuyn was murdered on the eve of the elections, the result was another high-voltage shock to the system, though not, unexpectedly, benefiting the LPF. The Christian-Democratic Appeal, seen as a safe haven in a time of crisis, ended up with 29% of the vote - almost one and a half times as much as it had polled the week before. If you click on the thumbnail below (you might have to click once more on the picture at Imageshack to see it in real size), you can see the green line shoot up on the far left of the graph. Labour, meanwhile, lost almost half its seats, tumbling from 30% to 15% of the vote.
Labour, carried up by the waves, slammed back down by the waves
It seems that since that time, it is par for course for one or more of the lines to shoot up - or down - when an election campaign erupts. In the early elections of 2003 (after the rapid fall of the Christian Democratic/Fortuynist government), it was Labour's turn. Newly elected in a referendum among party members, young Labour leader Wouter Bos was the media darling, with his fresh 'outsider' face, articulate enthusiasm and, it was not left unmentioned, cute butt. He personified hope for a demoralised Left and whoop, up goes the red line about a quarter into the graph.
Right now, almost four years on, another election campaign is at its hottest. Just five days to go. And this year, nobody likes Wouter Bos. After leading the opposition for four years, he is perceived as somewhat whiny and shrill.
Yet just half a year ago, with discontent with the rightwing government running high, and Bos mostly keeping his party out of the media eye, he nevertheless appeared to be heading for a monster victory. But what he failed to do was make a clear decision. With the journos already asking him whom he wanted to govern with, he never clearly chose: would he prefer a leftwing government with the Greens and Socialists, or a centrist government with the Christian-Democrats? Opting for the former seemed political suicide, as it would drive cautious centrists back to the right. But confirming the latter would make a lot of Labour voters who wanted a leftwing government cast a strategic vote for the Greens or Socialists. So, understandably, Bos prevaricated.
Now, he stands branded as both shrill
and an indecisive opportunist. Christian-Democratic leader and Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende keeps hammering home the point that Bos is untrustworthy. The media play up the image of a prevaricator, who steers on the winds of political opportunity. And to be honest, everybody is just kind of bored with him. The same lines, the same complaints. The impatient, hype-fed society wants a new act.
This year, we present: the Socialist Party!
No fear! To Wouter's left, there is a new guy! Well, he's been around forever actually, but he's finally a fully-fledged major player: Jan Marijnissen, leader of the Socialist Party.
Jan is a regular guy. he is that friendly uncle or neighbour on a family birthday, the one with a twinkle in his eye. He is plain-spoken, can explain things in a simple way. And even if you dont agree with him, you can trust him to be honest.
Jan knows what regular people think about things. At the same time, he's got firm convictions. He's been the leader of the Socialist Party (SP) since it was a tiny party on the far-left margins, barely rubbed of its Maoist past, not even represented in parliament. Like all Socialist MPs, he get to keep only a basic standard wage, and the rest of the money he earns as MP goes to fund the many SP activities.
They do a lot of neighbourhood-based work, and have sturdily made their way to current prominence from local bases. In their hometown of Oss, they set up a free medical centre; they set up a telephone service to register environmental problems at. They are an action party: dominantly present on all demonstrations, protests and actions, thanks to an army of motivated, regular folk volunteers. The kind that the Green Left, party of busy-busy-busy downtown dwellers, can not bolster.
They are everything the Green Left and the modern Labour party are not - not their poster children the well-intended liberal middle classes, the technocratic government officials, the postmaterialist cosmopolitan elites. They are like the Labour Party of yore - regular folk, whom everyone can relate too. With always an open ear.
They've also ditched the more radical points they still had in their program - abolishing the monarchy, getting out of NATO. No more need for that. But they've kept the parts of their past "anti-politics" that actually chime in with what people at large feel - scepticism towards the EU. Resentment of globalisation. On immigration, they've largely taken the politically correct positions of the left, but in a softly-softly manner - not with the stridency of the Green Left.
All of this has brought them far. They gained their first modest two seats (1%) in parliament in 1994. Four years on, then-Labour Party leader and Prime Minister Wim Kok still refused to even talk with Jan Marijnissen. He erupted in anger when the hosts of a debate show featuring him and other national party leaders allowed Marijnissen to call in with a question and comment. Back then, the slogan was: "Vote Against, Vote SP!", and the party went from 2 to 5 seats (3%). By 2002, when the SP reversed its slogan to "Vote For, Vote SP!", waging an almost stealth campaign in the shadow of Fortuyn's antics, it got 6% of the vote.
Its first major breakthrough came in the autumn and winter of 2002. With the rightwing government, which included the Fortuynists, bumbling on, leftwingers started to stir again. But after its devastating 2002 defeat, the Labour Party was still in a leaderless, demoralised mess. That was the first time Jan got to do all the talkshows, and mainstream voters started considering the SP. It briefly went up to 16% in the polls. But when
Bos pulled the Labour Party back together, just in time for the 2003 elections campaign, SP support collapsed like a soufflee as Labour voters returned home. It ended up stable at 6% in those elections.
The SP again returned to polling highs during the 2005 referendum on the European Constitution, when it thrived as the only leftwing party to campaign for a "No" vote. Otherwise it remained pretty stable around the 10% mark. It had edged up to 12/13% by the time this year's election campaign kicked off a couple of weeks ago, but was expected to actually lose a bit of ground again as the campaign heated up.
An unexpected turn of events
This was the theory: as the election campaign would get into full swing, Labour and the Christian-Democrats - Bos and Balkenende - would end up in a personalised neck-and-neck race for first place. The party who ends up the largest in parliament, after all, gets the first shot at creating a government, and is likely to get the Prime Minister. As that race would tighten, small party voters like those of the SP and the Greens on the left, and those of the Christian Union and the Freedom Party on the right, would flock (back) to the two titans, the major contestants, where many had their home loyalties.
It was a plausible theory, considering that the same thing had happened in 1977 and 1986 - and in 2003, for that matter. But instead, we appear, so far, to see the exact opposite. The more Wouter Bos and his Labour Party slide away, the less there is any 'race of the titans', as Balkenende's Christian-Democrats look ever surer to come first anyway. And the less there is such a tight race for primacy, the less reason there is for floating voters to 'rally home'; freed of such strategical considerations, they can instead vote purely on principle or preference.
For the Socialists, for example.
For the past week, the Socialists have been gaining a seat
a day in the opinion polls. They've gone from 12% to 19% in two weeks, and yesterday came within 4% of Labour.
Of course, it has helped that Jan Marijnissen has been judged to have done very well in the televised election debates so far. He is liked almost as much as Bos himself by Labour voters, and he has the striking advantage that, unlike Bos and the Green Left's Femke Halsema, he enjoys a considerable cross-over appeal to former Fortuyn voters. Moreover, as a native son of the Catholic south, where his party has its traditional base, he appeals to some Christian-Democratic voters as well.
Both this graph and the one thumbnailed above are based on calculated averages of the opinion polls of the Political Barometer, Maurice de Hond, and NIPO. They measure support in number of seats (total: 150).
It remains striking to see polls showing that a former Maoist party, a party that just a few years ago was considered to be on the margins of the far left, has a wider cross-over appeal than any other party. (Interestingly, the other party leader who enjoys personal respect from left to right is Andre Rouvoet of the strict-Protestant Christian Union; but his appeal doesnt translate in extra votes in the same way). But on the other hand, the way the Socialists mix nostalgia for the comfort of traditional social-democratic politics with protest-vote populism, it was always well-placed to fill the gap Pim Fortuyn left.
After all, Fortuyn, too, appealed to nostalgia for the cosy old times of the 50s, when life was safe and secure - he just phrased it in cultural rather than socio-economic terms, evoking those pre-immigration times when Holland was relatively homogenous. And he, too, combined this nostalgia with protest vote populism.
Will it last? Just today, for the first time, two polls hinted that Labour may have stopped, or even reversed, the hemorraghing to the SP. Will there be a last-minute rallying behind the "home flag" of Labour after all? Will it be in time to even just save Labour from ignonimous defeat? The Socialists have been worried about a repeat of 2003, about seeing their electoral gains evaporate at the last moment. But with just five days to go, it's hard to imagine them not making a major breakthrough this year.
