Dutch Elections: Right victorious as socialist illusions are shattered

2012-09-15 · first published in International Viewpoint · 162 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “International Viewpoint”

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did. The original is still readable at International Viewpoint: read it in full. The full piece runs to about 1,324 words against the 162 that survive here.

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International Viewpoint

The right-wing, neoliberal VVD of prime-minister Mark Rutte won the parliamentary elections of 12 September. His party won 41 of 150 seats, beating the social democractic PvdA that won 38 seats. Among the losers is the christian democratic CDA – for decades the dominant party in Dutch politics, now reduced to 13 seats. The Greens lost 6 seats, falling to 4, and Geert Wilders right-wing, anti-Muslim, anti-European Union party retained only 15 of its 24 seats. The Socialist Party (SP) gained a disappointing 15 seats, the same number it already had.

The SP has its roots in Maoism but evolved into a party left of social democracy. A few weeks ago, this party seemed to be the main challenger of the incumbent prime-minister. Some polls from mid-August even gave the SP 37 seats, predicting it could become the largest party in parliament. But in the end the elections became a duel between Rutte and the new PvdA leader, Diederik Samson.