By Violet Domínguez
Collage by Sabine Besson
— Camie Clarkson, a Dutch third-year Humanities student, cried, clapped and hugged her friends and family after screening the results of the general elections that took place on 22 November. “It was very emotional. We all got very drunk to drown our sorrows,” she laughs.
The far-right Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) had won the highest number of votes in the general Dutch elections. Their win marks the first time in 13 years that the centre-right Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD) and its leader Mark Rutte do not win the elections. The PVV is known for its anti-immigration and anti-Islam ideologies, amongst other extremist views.
This screening was the culmination of a couple days where Clarkson had hardly been able to concentrate on anything else. “It’s all me and my Dutch friends could talk about. Literally all day, every day, we were talking about it the whole time,” Clarkson shares. On the days leading up to the election, she spent quite some time doing online research, completing political party alignment quizzes (which are quite popular in the Netherlands), and checking the prediction polls.
For Amal, another Dutch third-year Humanities major, the day of the election at AUC felt weird. While Amal notes that on “the Dutch side of [her] world” it was the sole focus of the day, she felt a dissonance with other AUC students. “I was talking to my friend about the elections, and she was like oh, really, which ones?” Amal says. “Like, how can you not know?” She laughs at the anecdote, but it is hard for Amal to comprehend how a lot of students didn’t seem to be aware. Still, she understands that without the ability to vote, people might not be inclined to care as much.
There is a general consensus amongst students that AUC is like a “bubble,” separated from general Dutch culture and society. In this sense, the reactions around the elections “kind of emphasised how isolated we are from the rest of Dutch communities,” Amal says. A past Herring article already touched upon the ways in which AUC students do not seem to be very “locally-anchored,” and thus less informed about national politics.
Not only that, but AUC is also considered a political bubble, in which the majority of its students and staff are leftist or left-leaning. Nico Costa, a Catalan first-year Science student, created a poll for students to compare AUC political points of view to those of Dutch society leading up to the elections. He was interested in having a better understanding of the results, and the implications on AUC. “I wasn’t really surprised by the results. I expected most people to vote for left-wing options, which won in the poll,” Costa explains.
Results from the AUC poll by Nico Costa
These AUC-specific political surroundings also make it harder for students to perceive other political perspectives, which resulted in a shock when receiving the news of the results. “It threw me off,” Clarkson says about Geert Wilders’ win, the PVV leader. Although she was trying not to be too hopeful so as not to be too disappointed, the prediction polls had caused her to believe that the leftist GroenLinks/PvdA (Partij van de Arbeid) alliance had a chance. “It was this weird mix of anxiety and fear, but also hope. And then I did not see it [the PVV win] coming at all.”
Jikke Deppenbroek, a Dutch first-year Social Science major, shares that she actually expected Wilders’ win. Nevertheless, she was still surprised to see it materialise. “I didn’t want it to happen, that’s why it was a shock to see everything changing before your eyes, but it was expected.” Amal expresses a similar sentiment, as it was clear to her that more right wing parties were on the rise.
Deppenbroek believes that the majority of the Netherlands was “just done with the old regime.” “They wanted a change,” she says. In Deppenbroek’s opinion, there is a polarising trend in Europe as a whole: “the Left is becoming more left and the Right is becoming more right”. Therefore, a party such as VVD, which is considered centre-right, does not suffice anymore, as citizens’ views become more radical, she says.
The conflicts between the Left and the Right also resulted in many conversations about strategic voting, something that Clarkson, Amal and Deppenbroek all mention as being a huge phenomenon in the Netherlands. For Clarkson and Amal, this made their decision much harder, as they were undecided between voting more closely related to their values, or using the opportunity for leftist parties to win after over a decade. “People were still debating between that, including me, until the last seconds before going into the voting booth,” Amal shares.
Looking ahead, the future still seems uncertain. A Dutch second-year Social Science student, N. van Lieshout, worries about Wilders’ promises: “he says he does not want to ban the Quran and Islamic schools, and does not immediately want a Nexit [Dutch withdrawal from the EU], but if he has the power, I do not know what he will do.”
Ashley Mooney, a first-year Humanities student from Ireland, already plans to stay and live in the Netherlands after her studies. She feels the new changes are “concerning” for how the process of getting her citizenship may be. When coming to the Netherlands, Mooney thought that it was a generally leftist country, which felt inviting, but with the elections she feels “a reality check” in finding that the Netherlands “isn’t a magical wonderland where everything is perfect,” she jokes. Still, Mooney remains hopeful as she believes that the Netherlands is still better than Ireland. When speaking of Dutch politics, she struggles: “It’s a weird feeling being in a country that doesn’t quite feel like yours yet,” she admits, continuing, “they’re making decisions that will affect you, but it feels weird to say anything about it. It feels like I’m an intruder complaining.”
At the same time, Deppenbroek believes that not much will change. PVV still needs a coalition in order to govern, which could hinder the realisation of many of Wilders’ ideas. Since other parties don’t agree with his extremist views, Deppenbroek thinks that “if he wants the PVV to rule, all the extreme stuff isn’t going to happen, they’re going to compromise a lot of that.”
Not only does it feel impossible to change the Constitution and put laws into effect that would entail leaving the EU, Deppenbroek believes that the ideologies Wilders preaches are just populist propaganda. With the PVV in coalition with another party, she thinks the Netherlands might even change for the better. “The PVV also has some points of view that I think are really good. They want to get rid of Eigen Risico [the deductible, which is the amount to pay towards one’s own medical expenses] within the health insurance, and he also wants to get rid of taxes on groceries, especially vegetables and fruits,” she explains, optimistic. “I think that’s a good thing. People shouldn’t be too worried.”
However, other students take the opposite perspective, as they believe that his seeming toning down simply opens the door for a normalisation of his ideas. Van Lieshout worries because, although Wilders’ ideas used to be seen as extreme, they are more widely propagated now. Costa adds that “the moderation of the PVV in the debates — which contrasted with their electoral program — allowed it to be seen as a viable alternative against left wing parties.” Clarkson also emphasises how Wilders moderated his speech in the month leading to the election. She explains this resulted in the nickname “Geert Milders,” as his opinions started to sound mild. “The media really normalised his ideas by saying that he had become milder, but he was solely doing that to win votes,” she asserts, “because if you actually read their political plan, there’s nothing mild about it.”
The Herring 