Thursday, March 16, 2017

After the Dutch Election

The Dutch Parliament election is wrapped up and there are generally six things that you can observe.

1.  If you wrote down the top three winners of 2012, and compared against this election....ALL three lost support of the public.  Rutte's VVD Party still won, but it's a 21-percent win....roughly five or six down from the last election.  Public confidence with those three parties?  Sailing south.  The PvdA Party?  The slightly left-of-center party took only 5.7-percent and lost a hefty number of seats in the Parliament.

2.  For Wilder's far-right anti-immigration party?  They still took home 13-percent of the national vote.  In some ways....it's a positive (they have 20 seats now out of the 150....which is 5 more than last time).

3.  The true winner of the election from all prospectives?  The Green Leaf (the Greens).  They tripled the number of seats that they had before.

4.  Minor parties seemed to take additional seats over the last election....which means that the top two or three parties lost support, and there's more of a split among public opinion.

5.  Rutte's coalition team?  It'll require a minimum of four parties at present, and there is some suggestion (the Guardian suggested that)....that it'll take more than 30 days to arrange this coalition.

6.  It's safe to say that the Germans are fairly happy about this election.  Rutte and his party won't change the direction of the govenrnment.

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