Well, I had to vote today. Tried not to be influenced by last week's shooting and I think I did well. Just stuck with the party I usually vote for.

Polling stations closed one hour ago and right now the first results are announced on tv. It looks like the party of Pim Fortuyn has become the second largest party!
If the tentative results prove to be true, I really fear that we'll have to vote again soon, because the party consists of people without any experience and no cohesion and might fall apart...

Read more about it here - CNN

Return of the Christian Democrats...Wim..Pim..Jan Peter ??

It's a hot topic on the news here in post Presidential election France and pre legislation sabre rattling, as they're trying to take back what they lost from Chirac's little cabinet.
Chirac is trying to hurry up and do some things like putting more police in the Metro in Paris and things so that his party will win against LePen and Jospin.

So the Dutch elections are important as they show the rise of the right wing.

They interviewed many Dutch people too.

Apparently they had no idea they would win and without the leader, they can't manage.

I already have a bet running with some of my friends as to the date of the next elections ! I think no one (not even the people who voted for it) can name more than 2 members of Fortuyn's party. They don't even have a chairman!

I liked it better when politics was still dull!

Some "thoughts":
1. It seems to matter more to be 'charismatic' on the telly than to be a hard-working, honest politician.
2. Cohesion in your views is something the viewer is not interested in; you have to be passionate, witty, provocative in debate, even if you say something different at every streetcorner.
3. When ex-PM Kok advised people to 'use their brains' this seems to have been interpreted by the voters as : express your discontent by voting for Christian democrats rather than LPF.
4. Elections are a golden opportunity to "zap" away faces you have seen too often.
5. Technocrats and "unemotional" politicians don't reach the heart of people anymore.
6. "Political correctness" is the new taboo.
7. It does not matter whether those who criticise your policies are telling the truth, have their statistics right, have the "correct ideals". What matters in an election is that you can make the voters believe you.

There is no guarantee that "democracy" produces the right leaders, the right views, the truth or whatever. There is no certainty that democracy "works". But of all the possible systems it is the only one that is worth 'fighting for'.

[ 05-16-2002, 11:36 PM: Message edited by: Dobrov ]

Flem, you have such insight. I was wondering if you might find it interesting to write a little here about what's going on with the Vlaams Blok. I would appreciate this a lot.

It took me quite some time to find some answer to dobrov's suggestion.
To me the so-called 'Flemish Block' and 'List Pim Fortuyn' are totally different things but feeding on some similar "Zeitgeist".
Just a few "notes" to try to make my point:
1. Pim Fortuyn postponed all "closer contacts" to which the F.B. had invited him till "after the elections".
Tactical delay because he did not want to compromise his popularity in the Netherlands by being linked to a character such as F.Dewinter who was definitely not the darling of the Dutch electorate?
My feeling is that he genuinely disliked the Flemish Block leaders but understood their voters.
In my view again Pim Fortuyn simply was NOT a racialist at heart. It simply was his opinion that there was no room for "more" in Holland and that Islam and Dutch society were mutually incompatible. This may be a matter for discussion, but it does not yet mean that one "hates" foreigners.
2. The origins of the Flemish Block are totally different than those of Pim Fortuyn's List.
The F.B. has its roots in the pre-war pro-German Flemish nationalistic groups. Some of them had strong sympathies for Hitler's New World Order.
That Flanders in those times had some reasons to complain about the Belgian State may be true and an excuse for some of those nationalists, but with hindsight one can see that many simply took the wrong options. Many of the present-day F.B. leaders are "the sons and grandsons" of that generation.
The F.B. got its opportunities to come to the front in Belgian politics when it began to 'hide' its nationalistic face behind a "xenophobic mask".
Instead of hammering home its anti-monarchistic anti-Belgian ideas it began to emphasize its "priority for the locals" slogan. Speaking of "Our people first", and not "Flanders first".
For some real Flemish nationalists the 'mask' has now become the 'face'.
3.It's quite typical that the F.B. got its first successes in Antwerp which traditionally is the rival of Brussels, and a town with a strong anti-Belgian tradition.
4.It's also typical that Antwerp had been a bastion of traditional socialism till the 1960s. When the 'uneducated masses' saw more and more Moroccons and Turks turn up in their streets and when socialism began to be discredited they turned their backs to the old "international ideas" and became adherents of the "Us First" slogans.
5. A common element with Le Pen (Marseille)and Pim Fortuyn (Rotterdam) is that these shifts in orientation among the working-class masses took place in a large port ( Antwerp) with a lot of petty crime, "street-pollution" and an ever increasing number of 'foreigners'. For some simple minds the word "foreigners" became synonymous with the two other phenomena.
6.Another element of similarity is that this "return of populism" ( LePen once was an aide of the famous Andre Poujade in France) brings together people of extremely different origins.
The F.B. harbours very different tendencies. There are the anti-abortionists and neo-moralists as Alexandra Cohen, there is the well-respected 'Knight in Shining Armour' Geerolf Annemans who was one of the most sensible voices during the Dutroux Affair, there is the somewhat stiff but morally inflexible founder Karel Dillen who is anything but a demagogue, there is the talented "tribune of the people" Filip Dewinter, there are a few "historical revisionists" such as one Mr.Raes who tries to belittle the Holocaust, there even is a handful of neo-paganists who want to replace christian values by a return to the Ancient Germanic Gods Odin and Co (Wagnerites??). And especially because they are excluded from coalitions with the other parties the cohesion within this odd mix of loyalties has never been seriously put to the test.
So in Flanders there are now more and more voices to "give them a chance" so that they can prove their solutions do not work.
It is not to be excluded that after the next elections (2003) one or other Flemish Franz von Papen feels the necessity to give them "a chance". Fortunately it's not a generally
accepted truth that "history repeats itself".
May be the Pim Fortuyn story in Holland will be an interesting testcase.

Thanks a lot Flem. I had to think a bit too before I responded. From what you say it seems the biggest difference between Pim Fortuyn's party and the FB is that while LPF is a collection of nonentities that gathered about a powerful central personality, FB seems to be a coalition of small groups of malcontents who are hanging together for strength and protection. That's interesting - I haven't gotten any sense of that from what I have read so far, but my reading has been spotty.

It might be helpful to define the term 'racist'. If defined in its fullest Blut-und-Boden, quadroon-octaroon sense, then I would think that some of the policies of the FB are racist (immigrants defined as such through four generations), while Pim Fortuyn's were not. However, 'racist' is now more often applied to anyone objecting to a change in their quality of life brought about (or perceived as such) by proximity to the different cultural and social values of another ethnic group (hmmmm...weird sentence). This is a racism that Pim Fortuyn, Pia Kjaersgaard, Christian Blocher, et. al. are 100% guilty of playing on.

The first problem with this is that the mainstream who hurl the accusation do not seem to be interested in exploring the meaning of the term or the reasons why it is provoked. It's easier to be holier-than-thou than to explore a real, very complicated and rather grotty situation. The second problem is that the relatively sophisticated messages of these, well, 'neo-racists' are too often taken up by the undereducated, unemployed, and dissafected and translated into a carte blanche to wreak mayhem. If you think about it, most revolutions work that way. I agree that 'giving them a chance' to prove their incompetence won't work. Once in power parties like this have tended to rely on the most brutish element from amongst their supporters to keep them there.

It's a very complicated problem and I don't see any solution forthcoming at the moment. I'm watching developements in the Netherlands with interest, but I don't see in the LPF or the FB, for that matter, much hope for a more reasonable exploration of some very basic problems.