Centrists are out of favour. But as the Netherlands is learning, the alternative is far worse
Arnon Grunberg
THE GUARDIAN
Wed, 6 December 2023
Photograph: Jeroen Jumelet/EPA
It has become something of a cliche to reflect on the state of your country after you have woken up to – putting it somewhat euphemistically – disappointing election results.
Be it the Brexit referendum in 2016, Donald Trump’s victory mere months after that, or the election victory of Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands, the reactions were very similar. Analysts claimed that voters hadn’t been properly listened to and that neoliberalism had left a trail of destruction, and the failure of the left was pointed out. Then came the obligatory mention of the elite, who are said to have alienated part of the electorate. The citizen no longer recognises himself in the administrators. As if citizens would have done so a few decades ago.
To be fair, the Netherlands was once “pillarised”. Before being secularised, people were Catholic, Protestant, Reformed, socialist or liberal, and for as long as most citizens remained loyal to those pillars, they sought politicians for whom the same applied. Secularisation and depillarisation were considered a great liberation – the somewhat sentimental sense that something had been lost in that liberation only set in later. What was left of you without a pillar to cling to? “Dutch” turned out to be too feeble as an identity on its own. As Queen Máxima put it in 2007, when she was still a princess: “The Dutchman does not exist.”
And it is equally uncertain whether such a thing as Dutch politics even still exists. Since 2001, the year of the attacks in New York and Washington, so-called centrist parties have been steadily weakening in almost all countries in the west. In France, first Jean-Marie Le Pen and now Marine Le Pen, with her National Rally, hollowed out the electorate of both the socialists and the traditional right, and in Flanders the far-right Vlaams Belang proved particularly alluring to many voters – so alluring that many Flemish people wanted to liberate themselves not only from foreigners but from the Belgian state itself.
In the US, as Trump and then Trumpism took over the Republican party, some American evangelists probably saw and see in Trump the antichrist who brings the coming of the messiah closer. Some Americans appeared charmed by Trump’s uninhibited “honesty”; something that the Dutch populist Pim Fortuyn, who was murdered in 2002, also prided himself on: “I say what I think.”
Although certain aspects of Wilders’ win particularly pertain to the Dutch context, it fits within a wider international development. The western nation state appears to be less unique than many of its residents had hoped, although many Dutch people like to look at their own country through a narrow lens, undoubtedly in the hope of preserving some of their uniqueness.
Larry Bartels, an American political scientist, has claimed that the pool of Europeans willing to vote for anti-democratic parties is stable, so that there is no question of a jerk to the right. But the results in the Netherlands still point towards a gradual erosion of the left, and towards the almost complete decimation of the centrist parties. The Christian Democratic CDA landed a historically poor result, with five seats (out of 150), and the merger of the social democratic PvdA and the liberal-ecological GroenLinks got less than half of what both parties tallied separately in the 1970s and 1980s. A large minority or a small majority of the Dutch electorate finds progressive ideals, to use a populist turn of phrase, zum kotzen.
After freeing themselves from the church, people want to liberate themselves from the secularised counterpart of Christianity, humanism, also called social democracy. It is not without reason that the right wing of the electorate likes to use the phrase, always with mild disgust, “leftist church” to refer to their opponents inside politics and beyond. Unlike in the US, many Dutch people believe that religion is something for the stupid, for people who are not yet enlightened.
This does not refute Bartels’ theory, but in the Netherlands the claim can be made: if the pool of antidemocratic or extreme rightwing voters is indeed stable and not growing, then this reservoir comprises at least 25% of the Dutch electorate. What matters is that this minority is so large that, for some time now, every election has contained the real risk of a pivotal disruption.
Bartels exonerates the people as a group; it is the politicians who must lead the sheep in the right direction. After all, the voter is being seduced. It is a sympathetic idea: people are susceptible to temptation, and perhaps it is a characteristic of an ageing democracy that there is never a shortage of people willing to seduce them. The era when politicians accepted that there were limits to how they could mobilise voters, that breaking taboos didn’t guarantee liberation, undoubtedly also upheld by the memory of the massacres of two world wars, is behind us.
The centre is drying up, in some countries faster than in others, but the trend is observable almost everywhere. That centre is all too easily portrayed as elitist, oblivious to the concerns of the so-called ordinary citizen, sometimes even as the corrupt extension of the business world or as a proxy for foreign powers. Some of these accusations are justified. The Netherlands has seen government officials leaving politics only to become lobbyists for the industry they were formerly supposed to regulate. Not good. But to dismiss the entire centre is an antidemocratic reflex that can only cause harm. That reflex is also present in the left knee: some progressive analysts, thinkers and politicians have seemed in recent years to have a keen desire to declare the Dutch universe the worst of all possible universes, undoubtedly in the hope of bringing about the desired revolution. They are unwilling to see that their rhetoric did not help the progressive cause, but provided antidemocratic and far-right forces with new ammunition and new impulses.
For this reason, in 2021, I spoke up for the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, who was facing the prospect of resigning because he was accused of lying about the process of forming his government. I believed that Rutte was the katechon, a concept from the New Testament, the opposing force that delays the arrival of the antichrist (the far-right parties). In practice, Rutte was a relatively left-leaning rightwing politician who, in terms of pragmatism, prudence and strategic finesse, had much in common with Angela Merkel, still a hero for many progressive Dutch people. Where Rutte participated in elections, he kept the PVV reasonably small; that was his merit.
This summer, Rutte announced his departure, thereby bringing an end to the katechon in Dutch politics. Who should take his place in countering the antidemocratic forces in the Netherlands is unclear. Wilders’ party has grown so large that it will be difficult to govern without him.
Ironically, most electoral arsonists never intended to start a wildfire. They merely wanted to modestly express their understandable dissatisfaction, which also entails expectations no government will ever be able to meet. Perhaps only a god could. But in the Netherlands and its surroundings, God has finally been declared dead, for ever.
Arnon Grunberg is a Dutch novelist and essayist
Wed, 6 December 2023
Photograph: Jeroen Jumelet/EPA
It has become something of a cliche to reflect on the state of your country after you have woken up to – putting it somewhat euphemistically – disappointing election results.
Be it the Brexit referendum in 2016, Donald Trump’s victory mere months after that, or the election victory of Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands, the reactions were very similar. Analysts claimed that voters hadn’t been properly listened to and that neoliberalism had left a trail of destruction, and the failure of the left was pointed out. Then came the obligatory mention of the elite, who are said to have alienated part of the electorate. The citizen no longer recognises himself in the administrators. As if citizens would have done so a few decades ago.
To be fair, the Netherlands was once “pillarised”. Before being secularised, people were Catholic, Protestant, Reformed, socialist or liberal, and for as long as most citizens remained loyal to those pillars, they sought politicians for whom the same applied. Secularisation and depillarisation were considered a great liberation – the somewhat sentimental sense that something had been lost in that liberation only set in later. What was left of you without a pillar to cling to? “Dutch” turned out to be too feeble as an identity on its own. As Queen Máxima put it in 2007, when she was still a princess: “The Dutchman does not exist.”
And it is equally uncertain whether such a thing as Dutch politics even still exists. Since 2001, the year of the attacks in New York and Washington, so-called centrist parties have been steadily weakening in almost all countries in the west. In France, first Jean-Marie Le Pen and now Marine Le Pen, with her National Rally, hollowed out the electorate of both the socialists and the traditional right, and in Flanders the far-right Vlaams Belang proved particularly alluring to many voters – so alluring that many Flemish people wanted to liberate themselves not only from foreigners but from the Belgian state itself.
In the US, as Trump and then Trumpism took over the Republican party, some American evangelists probably saw and see in Trump the antichrist who brings the coming of the messiah closer. Some Americans appeared charmed by Trump’s uninhibited “honesty”; something that the Dutch populist Pim Fortuyn, who was murdered in 2002, also prided himself on: “I say what I think.”
Although certain aspects of Wilders’ win particularly pertain to the Dutch context, it fits within a wider international development. The western nation state appears to be less unique than many of its residents had hoped, although many Dutch people like to look at their own country through a narrow lens, undoubtedly in the hope of preserving some of their uniqueness.
Larry Bartels, an American political scientist, has claimed that the pool of Europeans willing to vote for anti-democratic parties is stable, so that there is no question of a jerk to the right. But the results in the Netherlands still point towards a gradual erosion of the left, and towards the almost complete decimation of the centrist parties. The Christian Democratic CDA landed a historically poor result, with five seats (out of 150), and the merger of the social democratic PvdA and the liberal-ecological GroenLinks got less than half of what both parties tallied separately in the 1970s and 1980s. A large minority or a small majority of the Dutch electorate finds progressive ideals, to use a populist turn of phrase, zum kotzen.
After freeing themselves from the church, people want to liberate themselves from the secularised counterpart of Christianity, humanism, also called social democracy. It is not without reason that the right wing of the electorate likes to use the phrase, always with mild disgust, “leftist church” to refer to their opponents inside politics and beyond. Unlike in the US, many Dutch people believe that religion is something for the stupid, for people who are not yet enlightened.
This does not refute Bartels’ theory, but in the Netherlands the claim can be made: if the pool of antidemocratic or extreme rightwing voters is indeed stable and not growing, then this reservoir comprises at least 25% of the Dutch electorate. What matters is that this minority is so large that, for some time now, every election has contained the real risk of a pivotal disruption.
Bartels exonerates the people as a group; it is the politicians who must lead the sheep in the right direction. After all, the voter is being seduced. It is a sympathetic idea: people are susceptible to temptation, and perhaps it is a characteristic of an ageing democracy that there is never a shortage of people willing to seduce them. The era when politicians accepted that there were limits to how they could mobilise voters, that breaking taboos didn’t guarantee liberation, undoubtedly also upheld by the memory of the massacres of two world wars, is behind us.
The centre is drying up, in some countries faster than in others, but the trend is observable almost everywhere. That centre is all too easily portrayed as elitist, oblivious to the concerns of the so-called ordinary citizen, sometimes even as the corrupt extension of the business world or as a proxy for foreign powers. Some of these accusations are justified. The Netherlands has seen government officials leaving politics only to become lobbyists for the industry they were formerly supposed to regulate. Not good. But to dismiss the entire centre is an antidemocratic reflex that can only cause harm. That reflex is also present in the left knee: some progressive analysts, thinkers and politicians have seemed in recent years to have a keen desire to declare the Dutch universe the worst of all possible universes, undoubtedly in the hope of bringing about the desired revolution. They are unwilling to see that their rhetoric did not help the progressive cause, but provided antidemocratic and far-right forces with new ammunition and new impulses.
For this reason, in 2021, I spoke up for the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, who was facing the prospect of resigning because he was accused of lying about the process of forming his government. I believed that Rutte was the katechon, a concept from the New Testament, the opposing force that delays the arrival of the antichrist (the far-right parties). In practice, Rutte was a relatively left-leaning rightwing politician who, in terms of pragmatism, prudence and strategic finesse, had much in common with Angela Merkel, still a hero for many progressive Dutch people. Where Rutte participated in elections, he kept the PVV reasonably small; that was his merit.
This summer, Rutte announced his departure, thereby bringing an end to the katechon in Dutch politics. Who should take his place in countering the antidemocratic forces in the Netherlands is unclear. Wilders’ party has grown so large that it will be difficult to govern without him.
Ironically, most electoral arsonists never intended to start a wildfire. They merely wanted to modestly express their understandable dissatisfaction, which also entails expectations no government will ever be able to meet. Perhaps only a god could. But in the Netherlands and its surroundings, God has finally been declared dead, for ever.
Arnon Grunberg is a Dutch novelist and essayist
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