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Pat Buchanan Wins Dutch Elections

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  • Pat Buchanan Wins Dutch Elections

    Brussels Journal, Belgium
    Nov 24 2006

    Pat Buchanan Wins Dutch Elections
    >From the desk of Paul Belien on Thu, 2006-11-23 22:37

    Jan MarijnissenWednesday's general elections in the Netherlands were
    won by the far-left. The Communist Socialistische Partij (SP) added
    17 seats to the 9 it previously held, securing an overall number of
    26 seats in the 150-seat Dutch Parliament. The SP became the
    country's third largest party, overtaking the center-right Liberal
    Party VVD, which fell to 22 seats from 28. The centrist
    Christian-Democrats (CDA) of Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende
    remained the biggest party with 41 seats (44 previously), followed by
    the center-left Labour Party (PvdA) which lost ten seats, ending up
    with 32 seats. To the right, the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF), the
    anti-immigrant party of the late Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in
    2002 by an animal-rights activist, lost its 8 seats. It was replaced
    by the `islamophobic' Freedom Party (PVV) of Geert Wilders, a
    breakaway Liberal, who gained 9 seats. The remaining 20 seats were
    divided among five parties, including the PvdD, a party of animal
    right activists who gained 2 seats in the first elections they
    participated in, and the Christen Unie (CU), a Calvinist and morally
    conservative but economically leftist party, whose seats doubled to
    6.


    The 2006 elections mark a dramatic shift to the Left. Theoretically
    Labour, the SP and all the various smaller leftist parties can form a
    76 seat majority, since the parties of the Right hold only 33 seats
    and the centrist CDA holds 41. This, however, is unlikely to happen
    as it would require a coalition of no fewer than 6 parties. Moreover,
    Labour regards the SP as too far to the Left and too radical on other
    issues, such as European unification which the SP is very critical
    of. Hence a center-left coalition of CDA, Labour and the Christen
    Unie is the most likely successor to the current center-right
    coalition of CDA, Liberals and Liberal-Democrats. This will allow
    Balkenende to succeed himself as Prime Minister.

    The swing to the left had been predicted. Last March the local
    elections in the Netherlands revealed the growing importance of the
    Muslim vote. Immigrants overwhelmingly vote for left-wing parties.
    This is hardly surprising since most of the immigrants were attracted
    to the country by its generous welfare benefits, which they want to
    safeguard. Official statistics show that the Netherlands have 16.3
    million inhabitants, of which 1.7 million are non-Western immigrants.
    Most of the latter are Turks and Moroccans. Indeed, already one
    million of the country's inhabitants are Muslims. Many have become
    Dutch citizens.

    Seventy per cent of the immigrants participated in yesterday's
    elections, indicating a political awareness almost as high as that of
    the indigenous Dutch. Though not all the elected candidates are
    officially known yet, at least eight Muslims are expected to have
    been voted into Parliament. If Labour joins a government coalition
    the Moroccan-born Amsterdam politician Nehabat Aboutaleb is likely to
    become the first Muslim minister in Dutch history.


    The new generation of immigrant politicians do not have much in
    common with the former Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a
    Somali-born immigrant who moved to the Netherlands in 1992. Hirsi
    Ali, a Muslim apostate, was a member of the Dutch Parliament for the
    center-right free-market Liberals from January 2003 until last July.
    She has since moved to the U.S. because Islamist fanatics threatened
    to kill her and the Dutch were not able (or willing) to adequately
    protect her. Hirsi Ali was very critical of Muslim immigrants who do
    not want to embrace Dutch secular values. The newly elected immigrant
    politicians, on the contrary, represent a growing and demographically
    young electorate that insists on its Muslim identity. Often their
    loyalties lie more with their countries of origin than with the Dutch
    nation, which they look upon mainly as a welfare distributing Santa
    Claus.

    Over 80% of the immigrants voted for Labour in last March's local
    elections, so this party was very keen on attracting their continued
    support. It placed many Moroccan and Turkish candidates on its list,
    but fell out with the Turks when the latter discovered the official
    party line on the Armenian genocide. Labour's position is that this
    genocide really took place and that Ankara should recognize it as a
    historical fact before Turkey can join the European Union. As a
    result the Turkish vote in the Netherlands seems to have migrated to
    smaller parties of the Left and to the Socialistische Partij of Jan
    Marijnissen, the biggest winner of yesterday's elections.

    The SP's ideological roots are Marxism-Leninism and Maoism, although
    the American politician who comes closest to it might very well be...
    Pat Buchanan. The latter is, of course, not at all a Communist, but
    the end of the Cold War has led to political realignments which today
    may put Marijnissen and Buchanan closer to each other than one would
    think.

    The SP (its party symbol is a tomato) was founded in 1972 by young
    Marxists who deemed the official Dutch Communists too reformist and
    too submissive to Moscow. They preferred a pure, radical Maoist and
    Leninist line. Jan Marijnissen, then a 20 year old blue collar
    worker, became the party's leading figure. Marijnissen was born in
    1952 in Oss in the province of North Brabant, the Catholic southern
    part of the Netherlands, in a very Catholic family, the youngest of
    four. When his mother was widowed she sent him to a boarding school
    run by monks. The 1960s were the years of rapid secularization in
    Europe, especially in the Netherlands, and especially among the
    Catholic half of its population. Marijnissen never finished school,
    but when he left it he had lost his faith in God and found another
    faith in Socialism.

    He returned to his home town and became a factory worker, organizing
    wild strikes all over the Oss area. For a long time the SP was a
    local Oss phenomenon. In 1975 Marijnissen became an Oss town
    councillor. Other 1970s far-left parties in other West European
    countries, were run by disillusioned children from bourgeois families
    and soon turned to violence and even terrorism, as in Germany. Jan
    Marijnissen, however, was a man of the people, who spoke the language
    of the people. Though he sympathized ideologically with the
    international far-left, he realized that the European blue-collar
    workers did not have a high opinion of the
    offspring-of-the-rich-turned-terrorist-in-the- name-of-the-workers.
    Marijnissen shunned the terrorist methods of the hares and worked
    like a tortoise, solidly establishing his party locally.

    It took decades, but the strategy worked. In 1987 Marijnissen became
    a provincial councillor in North Brabant, in 1994 he was elected to
    the Dutch Parliament, in 1998 the SP gained 5 seats, in 2002 9 seats,
    and yesterday it jumped to 26. In the European Parliament the SP
    belongs to the group of the European United Left, together with
    parties such as the French Communist Party, the Italian Refounded
    Communists, the German Left Party (the former GDR Communists), Sinn
    Féin, and others.

    Though Marijnissen is said to be an authoritarian party leader, he
    never lost touch with the blue-collar workers. He realized they did
    not like the immigrants. In the late 1990s Pim Fortuyn, a gay
    intellectual who, like Marijnissen, had been raised a Catholic, began
    to criticize Muslim immigrants for their unwillingness to integrate
    in Dutch society. The mainstream media and parties branded Fortuyn a
    `racist' and a `xenophobe.' Marijnissen never joined the
    name-calling. After Fortuyn's assassination in 2002 the parties that
    had attacked him, especially Labour, got a terrible beating, but not
    the SP which gained four seats.

    In Marijnissen's view the immigration problem was not caused by the
    welfare state but by the capitalist system which invited foreign
    `guest workers' over to Europe in order to keep the wages of
    indigenous workers low. Unlike the other leftist parties in Europe
    the SP was not very fond of immigrants. It cared more for the native
    lower classes, who felt threatened by the newcomers. In the 1990s the
    SP's election slogan was `Against' and one of the things it was
    against was immigration - this weapon used by the capitalists to
    exploit the workers.

    Though the SP has immigrant members Marijnissen never actively
    encouraged them to stand for election. In 2004 Ali Lazrak, one of the
    SP's elected representatives, was ousted from the party because he
    had accused Marijnissen of dictatorial behaviour. In a newspaper
    interview Marijnissen commented: `This is what you get if you put
    forward candidates not because they are qualified for the job but
    because they are immigrants.' He insists that immigrants learn to
    speak Dutch, that Dutch national history be taught at school, and
    that immigrants be spread over the country in order to avoid
    ghettoization.

    The SP is also against the European Union. It is the largest
    Eurosceptic party in the Netherlands. It is significant that Geert
    Wilders, the other victor of yesterday's elections, is also an
    outspoken Eurosceptic. However, while Wilders can be called a
    neo-conservative, Marijnissen resembles a paleo-conservative. He is
    also an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq and one of the fiercest
    critics of America's international policies.

    Marijnissen's leftism is most apparent in the economic policies he
    proposes - protectionism, higher taxes for the rich, state
    interference to curtail the `greed' of the markets, free healthcare,
    more social benefits for the poor,... On cultural [Americans would say
    `social'] issues, however, the SP has become ever more conservative.
    During the past decade its ideology moved towards communitarianism.
    Marijnissen even rediscovered his former Christian faith. One of his
    supporters is Monsignor Tiny (Martinus) Muskens, the `red' Bishop of
    Breda, who once said that stealing is not a sin for the poor, but who
    also stressed that dialogue between Christians and Muslims will lead
    nowhere so long it remains impossible to build churches in Saudi
    Arabia. The SP's party conference last month resembled a Christian
    meeting. Huub Oosterhuis, a Dutch theologian and former priest who
    was excommunicated by the Vatican over sexual ethics, held a sermon
    extolling the virtues of Christianity. The audience sang psalms and
    listened to gospel music. In this sense the SP, though one of the
    most anti-American of the Dutch parties, seemed almost the most
    American of them.

    http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1682
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