Turning against Europe
Wednesday 15 July 2009By EU Reporter Correspondents
There is no doubt about who “won” the European elections in the Netherlands. The Freedom Party (Partij voor de Vrijheid PVV) led by Geert Wilders entered the European Parliament with 17% of the votes and four out of the twenty-five Dutch seats with a clearly anti-EU programme. If Lisbon enters into force, the resultant fifth seat for the PVV will make the party the largest Dutch delegation to the ?European Parliament along with the Christian Democrats. Anybody who remembers that 67% of the Dutch said no to the European constitution in 2005 may suspect that this once ?pro-European founding member of the EU has turned its back on Brussels. Is that the right conclusion?
The leader of the social-liberal pro-European party D66 ?Alexander Pechtold rejected the idea that The Netherlands is turning eurosceptic and noted that only eight out of twenty five elected MEPs were critical of the EU. Indeed, apart from the Freedom Party, only the far-left Socialist Party (SP) and a small Christian party managed to consolidate their two seats with a clear “less Brussels” campaign. Libertas and other fringe parties, which campaigned on the EU’s democratic deficit did not even come close to picking up a seat. To ignore voices claiming that the Dutch are frustrated with the EU is nevertheless unjustified.
In order to see that there has been a shift in Dutch ?attitudes towards the European project we have to look closer at the remaining parties that Pechtold labelled pro-European. The established Christian-democrats (CDA), Labour party (PvdA) and conservative liberal VVD, normally favourable towards the EU, ran their election campaigns with significant ?hesitations about defending Europe.
During campaigns in 2004 and 2005, these three ?parties tried to convince people to vote in favour of “our ?guarantee for peace, stability and welfare”. This year however, ?Wouter Bos, vice prime minister and leader of the Labour Party ?admitted voting for a prominent EU critic on his own party’s voting list instead of number one candidate and MEP Thijs Berman. The CDA for its part suggested cutting EU civil ?service jobs just as much as any eurosceptic party. The ?election slogan of the VVD read “The Netherlands is working hard for Europe… let us reverse that”.
The established parties clearly thought that in order for them to compete with Wilders’ rising Freedom Party, they needed to show at least some criticism of the EU as it ?exists today. D66 as well as the Green party chose the opposite ?strategy and showed themselves as ultimate defenders of Europe. Public debate in the run up to election day focused almost exclusively on the division of competences between Brussels and The Hague and not on how Europe should deal with the economic crisis, the common agricultural policy or Russia.
This fight about more or less “Brussels” clearly delivered losers and winners. The attempts of the three big established parties to mix their pro-European roots with a little EU-?critical flavour, was punished in all cases. The clear “no” to the Union put forward by the far left, christians and ?notably the populist right was rewarded by the people. More ?remarkable however is the fact that the pro-EU camp also made significant gains.
No clear picture of a country turning eurosceptic can be drawn from the election results. The outcome rather ?coincides with a thesis adhered to by René Cuperus, the EU critic Wouter Bos voted for. Cuperus claims a new cleavage is emerging in Dutch society with people who benefit from increasing European integration on one side and people that get scared by it on the other. A highly qualified cosmopolitan elite that speaks several languages, travels, studies and works abroad, votes in favour of “Brussels” because it has ?experienced the advantages of EU integration in a globalised world. Another big part of society however does not feel ?protected at all by a multinational body like the EU that ?allows an enlarging group of new nationalities to enter their labour market. The “Holland first” approach of Wilders turned out to be the most effective way to comfort the victims of globalisation.
However true or false the projected images by these two categories may be, the pronounced adherents and adversaries of the EU managed to convince voters on the basis of one of these extremes. A tough job is waiting for the more moderate parties. CDA, VVD but especially PvdA, which lost four seats, should seriously start considering how to transform Cuperus’ sound insights into votes. ©