The Dutch Obama
How a new party leader is blowing up politics
Last week, Pieter Omtzigt, leader of New Social Contract (NSC), a new party which since August has polled highest in the country, finally announced his platform ahead of the next Dutch prime ministerial election on November 22.
Usually a party platform wouldn’t be so fascinating! But this one encapsulates mainstream Dutch political consciousness right now, and how priorities in the Netherlands have recently… shifted.
The NSC platform seems surgically designed to appeal to the most average Dutch voter imaginable. Het Parool called it “a real middle party,” leaning left on issues like social security and health care, and right on immigration and defense.
And remember BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB), the “farmer party,” so popular back in April that it was polling even higher than the NSC is right now? They were connected to the tractor protests and months of inverted Dutch flags?
Not only have they seriously have fallen out of favor, this week they kicked out a party member out after discovering he ran an anonymous Twitter account during Corona, where he repeatedly called politicians Nazis and pedophiles.
Which goes to show just fast parties can explode in popularity, or crash and burn, in Dutch politics. And also—the perils of a party growing super fast.
Anyway, here’s a snapshot of the Dutch political atmosphere right now, via a few of significant issues in the NSC’s new platform—immigration, nitrogen, and good governance—and why Omtzigt might be the Dutch Barack Obama.
“Positie Omtzigt, functie elders”
First, a little background.
Omtzigt, the former leader of the Christian Democrats and an MP for twenty years, is well known in the NL for helping to expose the disastrous “benefits affair”—a period between 2005 and 2019 when Dutch tax authorities wrongly accused thousands of people of making fraudulent benefits claims, and driving them to financial ruin.
It’s a horrible story, a point of national shame, and symbolizes the failures of Mark Rutte’s thirteen years as prime minister.
That the NSC had been polling so high even before it had a party platform strictly has to do with Omtzigt’s popularity as a government watchdog.
In 2021, Omtzigt was in the news again when a minister involved formation of the upcoming cabinet was photographed leaving the Binnenhof with visible notes reading “position Omtzigt: function elsewhere.” This was taken to mean: get rid of him, he’s trouble. Even though he at the time he was a party leader.
The photographed minister resigned, Rutte lied, then was busted for lying, then barely survived a motion of censure. Rutte came out of the whole affair once again looking slimy.
Omtzigt came out of it looking squeaky clean, and this reputation has persisted.
Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer wrote in HP/De Tijd this week that NSC’s platform was barely necessary.
[Omtzigt’s] voters do not vote for him because of his political program, but because he is the perfect opposite of Rutte. Instead of a jovially glib, optimistic everyone’s friend, people now want a difficult-looking, unsympathetic nag with a messiah complex.
Put a different way by IO Research after polling August:
The party is doing well mainly because Pieter Omtzigt himself is very well appreciated by voters. They see him as reliable, honest and the embodiment of a possible new political culture in which the population is better listened to.
Getting a “grip” on immigration
The NSC’s immigration proposal represents a big shift in the Dutch immigration debate, which for the last few years has been super-focused on limiting the number of asylum seekers.
Asylum reception centers in the countryside were so overcrowded in the summer of 2021 that people slept outside. In April, immigration authorities said they could not cope with the processing an overload of applicants. The cabinet even collapsed this summer over a crisis about family reunification (which is why we’re having an election in November.)
The NSC wants to limit net migration to the Netherlands to around 50,000 people a year. This includes labor migrants, expats, asylum seekers, and students.
According to de Volkskrant: “In practice, NSC’s proposal means that access to the Netherlands will be severely limited.”
Fifty thousand seems like a shockingly low target considering that last’s year net migration number was 224,000. (Although that includes an influx of 100,000 Ukrainians.)
Low, but back to what it was in the 1990s.
And also, low, but that number will be popular. All of the major parties propose to get a handle on immigration one way or another. Immigration is the fourth most important issue for Dutch voters, according to this Ipsos poll from last week:
Focusing exclusively on asylum seekers is a little out of fashion. A little hard-right. Now, mainstream politicians want to talk about reducing migration across all categories.
Nitrogen… what nitrogen?
For a couple of years nitrogen completely dominated Dutch politics.
Nitrogen emissions—released by many things but most significantly in the Netherlands, livestock waste—degrades the environment. In order to reduce these emissions and hit EU targets by 2030, a few years ago the Rutte administration came up with emissions reduction plan, which included the potential forced sale of livestock farms.
Which was a terrible idea since, you know, economists would say property rights are the basis of democratic society, and furthermore it made the cabinet seem very Brussels-y, out of touch with real Dutch people. Thus came the rise of the BBB and tractor protests.
And now… the NSC wants to stick to the ‘significant’ reduction of nitrogen emissions by 2035. No further details provided. The livestock herd must be smaller—but it’s not clear by how much. The party wants a stop to the construction of new mega stables. How? They’re not saying.
Farmers will be ‘given space’ to meet nitrogen emissions targets. Omtzigt wants to ‘green the industry, but not chase it away.’
Six months after nitrogen completely reshaped Dutch politics—the BBB had their landslide victory in parliamentary elections only in March!—it’s barely on the agenda.
Three things about this.
First, with tangible issues like the housing crisis and a serious increase in the cost of living, something as intangible as nitrogen or long-term environmental degradation has become a lot less compelling as a mainstream issue.
Extinction Rebellion might be thriving to the point that they pulled off a blockade of the A12 for 27 days, but fossil subsidies are not going to be a deciding factor in this election.
Second, it goes to show how fast things change things can change in a fragmented political system with nearly twenty parties.
Third, because the Dutch system has so many parties, a new one can pop up out of nowhere to address a hot issue, voters can take to the polls and feel like their voice has been heard—because it has—and move on, shifting their votes to parties which more broadly represent the scope of their interests.
Good governance
The number one issue in the NSC’s platform is good governance—which is essentially the Omtzigt promise, an issue his has been discussing for years and embodied in the House of Representatives.
“The most important thing is the restoration of the administrative order in the Netherlands,” Omtzigt said in his announcement, otherwise people will “disengage from politics and sometimes completely from Dutch society.”
The NSC wants to establish a constitutional court and provide compensation to the victims of government meltdowns like the benefits affair.
The Dutch Obama
And this all reminds me a lot of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign in the US. After eight years of George W. Bush, who brought us his own disasters—like the Iraq war and the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, to name a few—Obama ran on the message of “hope and change.”
Which is like the hyped-up corn-syrup American version of the NSC’s dry party platform document entitled: “Time for Recovery.”
The change message works on voters anywhere after long, dissatisfying leadership by other parties. And there’s no one in Dutch politics who represents the kind of “hope and change” that mainstream voters want right now more than Pieter Omtzigt.
Unless something insane happens in the next month.
🥳 LEUKE DINGETJES
Here’s something I never wondered about before: why there are three Dutch football teams inspired by Homer’s poems, and two derived from Latin. Ajax, Sparta Rotterdam, Heracles Almelo, Vitesse, and Excelsior. ESPN explains:
Unlike in most other parts of the world, where football originated as a working-class sport, the game in the Netherlands was played more commonly by the educated middle and upper classes, who founded teams in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
“A lot of children were not going to school, especially the poorest children," Dutch sports historian Jurryt van de Vooren told ESPN. “By using all those names, they [the richer members of society] could show they had some good classic education.”
Boring architecture
Niet zo leuk, but interesting—Aaron Betsky explains why architecture in the Netherlands has recently become so… boring.
Several decades of right-wing-dominated politics and cost-cutting have eroded the generous subsidies the Dutch used to give to young firms to help them get started, travel or exhibit and publish their work.
Since fewer younger firms with interesting POVs are coming up, developers and the state tend to look towards foreign firms for interesting designs.
*all typos in this post are on purpose