[LIVE] Nederland Kiest #34 The After Party

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What Will Dutch Elections Mean for Afghanistan?
Posted June 9th, 2010 at 11:00am in American Leadership with 1 comments Print This Post

The Dutch electorate takes to the polls tomorrow, following the Government’s collapse in April. In fact, it was the fourth fallen Administration of Christian Democrat Jan Peter Balkenende—this time over claims that one coalition party withheld information from another. Quite simply, it looks as if the uneasy partnership between Labour and Christian Democrats finally gave way after much political infighting. The government’s declining enthusiasm to fulfill NATO’s request to extend the Dutch deployment to Afghanistan was merely a convenient scapegoat.

The polls have had almost every major contender leading the field at some point in the past eight weeks, including controversial right-winger Geert Wilders. However, his Party for Freedom’s initial early showing has slipped, showing them now finishing last in the latest national polling although still set to pick up more seats than at present. The front-runner to become Prime Minister and take a shot at forming a coalition looks set to be the youthful Mark Rutte, leader of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy. The classical liberal has already ruled out forming a coalition with Wilders’ and a three-way coalition is now likely with Labour and the Christian Democrats.

As with most elections in Europe, the top issue affecting voters is the economy. It seems that the electorate has finally come to terms with the fact that governments shouldn’t spend more than they earn, and that cut-backs are now inevitable; better to get the pain over with sooner rather than later. But there is one budget that the Dutch cannot afford to cut: the defense budget. Past defense cuts, as well as operational costs, have already placed a tremendous strain on Holland’s military capabilities. A further round of cuts will likely leave the Netherlands unable to contribute substantively to NATO missions in the future.

Dutch troops have fought bravely in Afghanistan, enduring long deployments in hostile provinces where German, Turkish and French troops among others, have been barred from going by their national capitals. Dutch forces are scheduled to leave Afghanistan on August 1—at precisely the time when they will be needed most, to support the hardest push of General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy. It is difficult to ask the Dutch to extend their deployment when others are not equitably sharing the burden. But the US will ask nonetheless and despite the political difficulties, the next Prime Minister should respond positively.

The mission in Afghanistan is not a war of choice. With a catalog of successful and thwarted al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on Britain and Europe since 9/11, it is imperative that all NATO members recom­mit to the mission in Afghanistan. The horrific terrorist attacks on London and Madrid, and Dutch-based Islamist attacks in Holland, serve as stark reminders of why NATO undertook the Afghanistan mission in the first place.
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Op donderdag 10 juni 2010 10:18 schreef Cobra4 het volgende:
Europese verkiezingen voor Nederland!? Lijkt mij een oud bericht.

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As the Netherlands prepares to vote, it's worth remembering that the nation's odd brand of right-wing populism grew out of 1960s radicalism. Dutch demagogues want to resist intolerant Muslims in the name of traditional Dutch liberty -- while denouncing traditional Dutch tolerance as elitist propaganda. This paradox may not survive.

Two utterly contradictory images of the Netherlands circulate in the international press. One is the idea of a wild, unruly place where policemen smoke marijuana, gay men dance in the streets, and euthanasia can be arranged in an instant, a multiculti society that is so tolerant that even violent Islamic extremists are subsidized by the state. This caricature is especially popular in the United States.

But after the sudden emergence of populist demagogues, such as Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders, who rant and rave about the "Islamization" of Europe, a very different image has dominated the press: a country of reactionaries and racists, leading the rest of Europe in a march towards a new dawn of fascism.

Both images are wildly exaggerated, of course. And both seem to contradict Heinrich Heine's famous notion that in placid, sleepy, bourgeois Holland everything happens fifty years later than everywhere else. They also contradict the image of a calm, phlegmatic people, who can never get excited about anything. In fact, on the whole, people are relatively calm in the Netherlands. But there is indeed something a little frenzied about the new populism, exemplified by Geert Wilders, just as there was something overexcited about the social changes in the 1960s: sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll as a reaction to centuries of dull Calvinism. Long periods of calm, then, occasionally interrupted by bouts of hysteria: That might sum up much of Dutch social history.

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Cliff-hanger result in Dutch elections June 10, 2010 - 2:44PM

The Liberals were one seat ahead of Labour with 88 per cent of the vote counted after cliff-hanger general elections in the Netherlands, while a far-right anti-Islam party scored its best-ever result.

The Liberal party (VVD) led by Mark Rutte, which had campaigned on the need for deep spending cuts, and the Labour party (PvdA) of Job Cohen had been tied for hours at 31 seats each in the 150-seat parliament after Wednesday's polls.

But with a greater percentage of the votes counted, published partial results showed the Liberals with 31 and Labour on 30 in the 150-seat parliament early on Thursday.

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Op donderdag 10 juni 2010 11:52 schreef capricia het volgende:
Ah, hier zijn jullie!

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Op donderdag 10 juni 2010 11:54 schreef Dark_Angelus het volgende:
Fractievergaderingen dag 1

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Op donderdag 10 juni 2010 11:55 schreef Kwaliteit het volgende:

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moeten we daar slowchatten?

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Op donderdag 10 juni 2010 11:58 schreef Dark_Angelus het volgende:

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Nah ik wilde daar mere de nieuwtjes delen.

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Op donderdag 10 juni 2010 11:53 schreef MrBadGuy het volgende:
80.000 stemmen voor met 99% geteld, nu de buitenlandse stemmen nog en de 32e zetel is binnen