The pinball wizard voting of the Dutch electorate

Our guest writer is René Cuperus, of the Dutch think tank Wiardi Beckman Stichting; René is a member of the Dutch Labour Party

We have entered the age of weird election results. After the unprecedented election outcome in the UK, which forced the most famous two-party Westminster model to make way for a Coalition Government, the elections in the Netherlands also led to unpredicted, historical results.

As seems, this very Sunday, to be the case in the Belgian elections, the traditional parties are being totally outflanked by an outsider party. Take the Netherlands as the most extreme example of the new spectacular voting by electorates in flux.

The Netherlands are world champions at electoral volatility, thanks to our radical proportional system. There is no threshold nor district voting. New parties and political entrepreneurs have easy access to the Dutch parliament.

So the Netherlands acts as an unscrupulous barometer of moods and temperaments within the Dutch electorate. What this ruthless barometer is more and more demonstrating, is that nearly all the people have lost nearly all party identification. ‘Floating voter’ has become a euphemism; ‘pinball wizard voting’ is more what we can observe in the Netherlands.

People switch quickly from parties and party leaders. Media effects – in Holland we had up to four television debates, the Prime Minister’s Debate consisted of 4 potential prime ministers – have free play. Political campaigns have become X-factor entertainment shows, election day is the Idols’ final.

According to pollsters, the difference between big parties and small parties, ‘governing’ parties and ‘opposition’ parties, has nearly disappeared in the mind of the voter. As many as five parties could have become the biggest party in Holland. The traditional voting base of the postwar centre-ground parties has gone; this is the new phenomenon: mass parties without masses, people’s parties without people.

In the last national elections, as a result, we witnessed a complete meltdown of the party political system. For the first time in history the liberal-conservative VVD became the biggest party in the Netherlands, garnering 31 of 150 seats in parliament, by the way an all-time low amount of seats for a prime minster’s party.

We faced a total implosion of the traditional pillar of the Dutch party system, the Christian-democratic CDA, which lost 20 seats (from 41 to 21). This was accompanied by a new eruption of right-wing populism, represented by the big victory of the PVV party (‘Freedomsparty’) of Geert Wilders, the maverick politician, world notorious for his radical Islamophobia. Wilders more than doubled his position in parliament, from nine to 24 seats. A case of anti-establishment identity voting in a country suffering from ‘globalisation scare’ and ‘immigration trauma’.

The Dutch Labour Party, led by former Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen, became the second largest party with 30 seats: never was the margin separating the runner-up from the winning party so slim. The parties for academic professionals only – the Greens, social-liberal D66 and the Animal Party – did reasonably well, and scored up to ten seats.

The election results show a total fragmentation of the political landscape. They produced, what we might call, a horrific Coalition Sudoku. There are at least four coalition options, involving more than four parties. But none of these options will be an easy representation of the will of the electorate, nor a simple ticket for stable government in times of financial crisis and populist revolt.

The moods and temperaments of electorates in affluent postmodern democracies: they remain a mystery for both politicians, political scientists and media. To the next Dutch elections we look!