The Country is Screaming
Sex education, sexual harassment, and a disheveled government
The Government is Rattled
Last week’s provincial elections hammered Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s cabinet. All of his coalition parties - which comprise the cabinet - lost seats in the Provincial Council. Most of those lost seats went to BoerBurgerBeweging (Farmer-Citizen Movement), which gained an astounding 138 seats from a previous 0.
Rutte - his party, the VVD lost 17 seats - called the results a "scream from the country that must be heard in the cabinet." Deputy Prime Minister Wopke Hoekstra - his CDA party lost 29 (!!) seats - said that the election results are a "crystal clear signal," and that the government "cannot just go on like this and pretend nothing has happened." Hoekstra also keeps appearing in front of the press looking exhausted and disheveled.
It’s too soon to tell how the government will reshape itself after these loses; we’ll know more after the beleaguered cabinet convenes next Tuesday.
What is clear: it would be political suicide for the government to continue on its current course.
🍿 Dutch Background:
The BBB’s electoral windfall is the result of widespread protest votes against the government’s nitrogen (stikstof) policy - which includes the proposed expropriation of hundreds of livestock farms.
In 2019, a Dutch court found that the government was violating EU law by not taking enough steps to reduce nitrogen emissions. To come into compliance by 2030, the government introduced new policies for transport, construction emissions, and, most critically, agriculture (landbouw) - in particular livestock farming - to which farmers and their interest groups are vociferously opposed.
🥳 Fun Fact: The Dutch livestock industry is bigger than you might imagine; the Netherlands is the EU’s largest meat exporter.
🇫🇷 Another Thing
This Dutch government shakeup came the same week that French President Macron pushed through an initiative to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, despite massive protests. He survived a no-confidence vote on Monday, but the vote was tighter than expected and Macron’s approval rating was down to an abysmal 23% on Tuesday.
Are French pension protestors and Dutch BBB protest-voters basically the same? Some French people see raising the retirement age as an assault on their way of life even if doing so might be necessary to ensure the survival of the French welfare state; and some Dutch people feel the same about farming - whether or not they are farmers. As a non-farmer member of the Farmer’s Defense Force told the Volkskrant:
'I feel very connected to the farmers. We are of the same blood group: farmers, builders, demolition companies, contractors, container companies - they are all the same rough people… My friends at school all came from farming families, I spent my entire childhood playing in the hay and riding tractors. I wish my children and other children a life like that, but in recent years I have seen more and more farmers disappear. That worries me.
Emotional parallels, yes, but there’s a big political difference here: Macon had to sideline the French parliament to push through his initiative, and Dutch voters have reassigned seats in parliament to mirror their interests. However economically necessary French pension reform might be, Macron has come out of this period looking both weak and authoritarian. Rutte, meanwhile, has a chance to look receptive, democratic, basically the opposite, via parliamentary collaboration. And that’s the beauty of the Dutch system… in theory.
We’ll see how this plays out.
Spring Fever Week Uproar
The Dutch right wing and some parents on social media lost their minds over a 3D anatomical model of a clitoris designed to teach children about sexuality during this “Week van de Lentekriebels,” a special period of sex education.
The program has been running for 18 years, and schools can choose from a variety of teaching packages from various health organizations - the clitoris was an option for older children, if educators chose to include it in their lessons.
This was the first year the program caused any kind of uproar.
The theme of this year’s Spring Fever Week was: “What do I like?” (Wat vind ik fijn?) It involved learning about one’s body, discussing likes and dislikes, and developing a positive self-image. Also: consent, boundaries, friendship, infatuation, and love.
Thierry Baudet, (who notoriously compared corona lockdown measures with the persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust) leader of the far-right Forum voor Democratie (FVD) party complained in the Eerste Kamer on Tuesday.
“In primary schools throughout the Netherlands, children as young as four are being urged by adults to think about gender reassignment, anal sex, threesomes and drag queens. Picture books with illustrations about, for example, how you give blow jobs are distributed as well. Again to children four year-old children. This sexualization of children is wrong and it must stop… and the insidious normalization of pedophilia must also stop.”
This is completely false. And wrong-headed: studies have shown that comprehensive sexuality education can reduce sexual abuse by empowering children to speak up when their boundaries are crossed. Further, informed children are more likely to start having sex later in life.
By the way - the FVD was slaughtered in the provincial elections last week.
Investigative journalism site Pointer as an excellent rundown of how this Baudet’s misinformation “fueled the online hate machine” against Spring Fever Week. And indeed, there’s something about the idea of pedophilia and the online world we live in that… compliment each other. Social media platforms are designed to reward negativity and conflict, and what’s more enraging than a pedophile? And what’s scarier? Anyone can be a pedophile. They’re out there, living amongst us.
This “sexualization of children” as a right-wing hobby horse goes back at least to Pizzagate, a 2016 American conspiracy theory that a cabal of elites, including the Clintons, were pedophile sex traffickers trading children out of the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C. A key QAnon conspiracy theory in the Trump area, it leeched from the online world into the public consciousness: by 2020, seventeen percent of Americans believed that “a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.”
Which is all to say: right wing populist-instigated pedophilia social media hate campaigns are going anywhere. The good news…
🍿 Dutch Background
According to Dutch law, all primary school students must receive sexuality education. The government also provides De Kindertelefoon, a hotline where children 8 to 18 can ask anonymous questions, which are often about sexuality. It receives 400,000 calls per year.
Studies show that children who receive sex education become more sexually resilient and autonomous, start having sex later, enjoy it more when they do, are more likely to use condoms, and understand their limits
According to a Hart van Nederland poll, 83% of Dutch people are in favor of sex education. Outside of the online debate, the real differences in opinion lies around what age this education should start: 12% believe it should be in secondary school; 21% at group 7; 19% group 8; 17% group 6; 8% in the lower years.
(Another!) Dutch Television Sexual Harassment Scandal
Very famous NOS Sport presenter Tom Egbers, accused of sexual harassment in the Volkskrant’s bombshell report last week, admitted to an affair with an intern on national television… in an odd attempt to clear his name. He also admitted calling the intern a ‘serpent’ and ‘the axis of evil’ after the relationship ended. Cool boss!
The Volkskrant uncovered that nearly one hundred former employees had reported stories of bullying, sexual intimidation, discrimination, and verbal aggression at NOS Sport (which is like the Dutch BBC) by Egbers and others to an external confidential counselor.
Nevertheless, Egbers feels that… he was the one who wronged. And is his interview on the talk show Khalid & Sophie on Monday expressed his verdriet (sadness! grief!) at… being wronged.
Michael Persson from the Volkskrant has nice thread on Twitter describing the interview as “a non-journalistic addition to a journalistic production,” and that by “presenting this interview as 'the other side of the story' to de Volkskant, Khalid suggested that the truth lies in the middle, not with the facts described in the article.”
So why did Khalid & Sophie give Ebgers a platform to to tell his side of the story? There are seven daily talk shows on Dutch television battling it out for ratings, and Khalid & Sophie is one of the most heavily criticized. The Egbers interview was a boost: the episode attracted 989,000 viewers.
One hundred employees report to an “external confidential counselor” and this guy gets thirty minutes of emotional bloviation on prime time television? Yet another man in power failing to recognize his abuses as abuses. What’s special about is that Egbers was given a platform - television, the medium that made him powerful in the first place - to embarrass himself with his inability to take responsibility for his part creating an unsafe workplace.
“I myself have a completely different perception of what it is like there,” he said.
Also mind-boggling: Egbers is married to Janke Dekker, who was, until she was forced to resign on Sunday, the head of Mores, a hotline for reporting “undesirable behavior” in the Dutch media sector. The entire board then stepped down on Wednesday.
Dekker gave a long, sad interview also rehashing the affair in another long, sad attempt to clear his name.
🍿 Dutch Background
The NOS scandal comes in the context of many others in the Netherlands in sport, politics, and entertainment. The biggest boomshell had to do with The Voice of Holland, a story broken with some incredible reporting last year on the program BOOS: THIS IS THE VOICE - watchable with English subtitles on YouTube.
And the fallout from this scandal continues: The Public Prosecution announced just last week that three famous men involved in the show, Marco Borsato, Ali B., and Jeroen Rietbergen will be prosecuted for rape.
The Netherlands in the International Press this Week
How will we feed Earth’s rising population? Ask the Dutch. - Vox
Fascinating piece about agricultural science in the Netherlands. North of Amsterdam in “Seed Valley” scientists are at work crafting fruit and vegetable seeds that can produce more food per acre.
Dutch leadership in this space began after the WWII Hunger Winter famine killed 20,000 people. Post-war, the government heavily invested in subsidies, infrastructure, and industrialization.
Today, the Netherlands produces 6% of Europe’s food with only 1% percent of the continent’s farmland.
Trump and Le Pen backed these Dutch farmers – now they’ve sprung an election shock - CNN
Bit of a misleading headline. The Farmer’s Defense Force, which staged farmer protests in 2022, and the BBB party, are two different things.
The worldwide far-right latched onto farmer’s protests in the Netherlands since images of tractor convoys smacked of good ol’ rural freedom-fighting - but the BBB party isn’t (yet) that much of a far-right party. They are in favor some traditionally left wing policies and BBB’s leader, Caroline van der Plas seems to be exceptionally collaborative.
Beyond TikTok, Dutch tell government staff to uninstall Chinese, Russian apps - Politico
Dutch intelligence services provided guidance that lawmakers should not use apps “originating from countries with an offensive cyber program against the Netherlands and/or against Dutch interests.”
Dutch Lesson
A couple of random Dutch expressions I learned this week
“Als je wordt geschoren moet je stilzitten.”
When you’re being shaved you have to sit still.
For example: A different, wiser approach Tom Egbers could have taken this week.
“Als het kalf verdronken is, dempt men de put.”
When the calf is drowned, they empty the well.
For example: Putting parental settings on your daughter’s iPad after she has already watched porn.
Leuk Dingetjes
a lil pop: Rood Licht from ZWIJMEL
a lil electro: Changed for the better from Weval