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New Politiek

My timing for moving was lousy, hobby-wise. I had spent the last few years sometimes making myself a little bit useful to the PvdA (Dutch labour party) but I was in between foreign countries (Ecuador and Scotland) when the government fell, and didn't have much spare time to devote to political musings, what with the moving and everything. I left thinking we were in for the dirty PvdA-CDA (Christian Democrats) war, part III - and didn't mind not being around for it.


But then. A text message with a lot of exclamation marks alerted me to a game-changing change: a new labour leader. Everyone excited, the party sky-rocketed in the polls, politics seemed fun again - and I wasn't there.


The British government must have felt sorry:  Gordon Brown called the inevitable election just a few weeks after my arrival, just so I could enjoy TWO campaigns! To make me feel more at ease, the British decided their campaign should look familiar, though with some delay: only 50 years after the first televised election debate in the US, the 'historic' debates were imported in the UK. They even imported Dutch (ok, half-Dutch) politicians.


And now they've imported Dutch-style politics! The election results forced the parties to form a coalition government, something which the UK hasn't had since the WWII. Not that they haven't had 'inconclusive' results since then, but this usually meant that the prime minister would tell the electorate 'hey, come on you guys, make up your mind! I'll ask you one more time: who do you want to govern you?' and then the electorate duly gave him a ´conclusive´ result.


So, on a sunny afternoon in May, the new prime minister and his deputy (aka the former rivals) gave a romantic press conference in the garden of Downing street, and had even hired some birds to do the singing.


That didn't look too Dutch, come to think of it. And when was the last time a Dutch coalition government was formed in five days? Or when they wrote a coalition agreement of 6 pages? Yes, granted, the full government had still to be formed, and the full coalition agreement still to be written*, but they held hands, pinched their noses, and jumped.


There is, in fact, a lot of nose-pinching going on: since the parties aren't used to coalitions, they consider compromise not as inevitable, but as betrayal. In both parties, activists are protesting against the mere fact that they are part of a coalition and are walking away. Their electorate are actually used to the parties' election manifesto being a pledge of what their government will do if elected, instead of it being a needlessly big stack of paper just so the party can decide which half of it to ditch during negotiations. And, come to think of it, is that bad?


Migration is just a slightly more drastic look at it from the other side. The big Netherlands - UK political contest in my head:
- The UK are trying to ditch some of their antagonistic politics in exchange for a government which, for the first time in ages, actually represents a majority of not just the parliament but also the electorate (1-0). 
- The UK electorate are used to knowing what they vote for (1-1). 
- The UK electorate are also used to knowing who they vote for: the district system means you get your daily share of flyers telling you that your candidate in your district is a strong local campaigner (trust me, the stack of paper by the door knows). If an individual MP (member of parliament) has her husband buy porn on the taxpayers' expenses, she will be dealt with. In the Netherlands, voters have absolutely no say in who represents them - that's for lobbied together candidate selection committees to decide (1-2).
- Small parties are unfairly disadvantaged in the UK: the Lib Dems got 23% of the vote and 8.7% of the seats (2-2). But then,  the Netherlands are at the other end of the extreme, with rather too much pluralism in parliament (what does the woman with this message  contribute?) (2-3)
- The UK has an infinitesimally small number of women both in government and in parliament (3-3). 


Can't wait for the 9th of June.


*update: even the full agreement needs only 34 pages.

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