Kaj Leers writes: The Netherlands since World War II has been at the vanguard of social welfare reform in Europe. Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in tandem laid the foundations for a true welfare state in the late 1950s and the 1960s.
A pensions savings system, improved collective health care, basic government-financed unemployment insurance, welfare benefits, and state-financed education plans were introduced within a generation. Employers, workers, and the government all picked up part of the tab, and the discovery of huge gas fields in the north of the country removed all restraints.
From the 1970s onward, welfare schemes expanded. New benefits were designed, health care costs ballooned, and education expenditures increased. In the early 1980s, government expenditures had increased to such heights – just as the global economy pushed inflation to unsustainable levels – that the government pushed the major labor unions and trade unions to reach a national labor agreement. Unions would no longer demand outrageous raises; employers would invest in jobs.
In the mid-1980s, government expenditures accounted for more than 60 percent of Dutch gross domestic product. In those days, the Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, and Liberals were the biggest parties in parliament. They formed alternating government coalitions, with the Christian Democrats always being the centrists who pivoted to the Liberals or the Social Democrats depending on the outcome of the vote.
Since the late 1980s, much has changed – especially for the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats. Both parties, formerly responsible for the creation of the welfare state, set about tempering it, cutting back on expenses. Government-owned companies were privatized, markets were liberalized, and expenditures on government programs were cut.
But while parties dealt with the outsized welfare state, many of their voters didn’t follow. The year 2002 saw voters revolt. Out of nowhere one man, Pim Fortuyn, galvanized the discontent that part of the electorate had silently carried for years. Much to the surprise of many a complacent politician, it turned out that a sizeable non-voting portion of the population felt deeply disenfranchised and ignored by what Fortuyn dubbed “the establishment” or “the elite.”
Many of the discontended voters had grievances that had also been largely ignored. Whereas most of the political debate in the country had for decades centered on socioeconomic issues such as health care, education, social security, unemployment, and economic growth, a great number of these people were also worried about sociocultural issues.
The Netherlands saw the emergence of a PEGIDA movement avant la lettre – one made of people who didn’t demonstrate in the streets, but rather voiced their protest in the voting booth. Fortuyn played the identity politics fiddle so well that it was picked up by many other political parties, including the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats. Ever since the time of Fortuyn, who was assassinated just before the national elections of 2002, sociocultural issues such as crime, integration, and immigration have sat solidly at the forefront of Dutch politics.
Geert Wilders of the Freedom Party has pushed matters further than Fortuyn ever did.Wilders is currently in the crosshairs of the country’s Prosecution Office for alleged discrimination against Moroccans during an election rally. But the movement that supports him is unfazed; in polls, Wilders looks set to be the solid winner of the elections on March 18, handing him many new seats in the Senate.
Meanwhile, something else has changed. Among voters concerned with predominantly socioeconomic issues, even those on the right, are far less keen on cuts in health care, education, and even social security than they once were.
This has led the government coalition parties (left-wing Social Democrats and right-wing free-market Liberals) to turn the tables on the opposition.
In the Netherlands, political truisms have been turned on their heads. With even cost-cutting, small government-type voters rejecting austerity, it seems that ideas that were once vilified as leftist tax-and-spend politics have been internalized as schemes you can now take for granted.
Once again, Dutch voters in this respect may stand at the European vanguard.
