The Left in Europe - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

Netherlands
who themselves were surprised at their success in mobilizing such numbers.
The occasion was the aggravated dispute between government and
trade unions on the future shaping of welfare policy: The government was
trying to force the trade unions to accept its course (billed as “consensus”)
by threatening to discontinue the practice of declaring collective-bargaining
agreements to be universally applicable. This dispute was a product of the
socio-economic crisis in The Netherlands, which confronted large sections
of the middle classes with “fear of the abyss”.
Another phenomenon of the dual crisis in The Netherlands that attracted
world attention was the Dutch “Nee” in the referendum on the Treaty Establishing
a Constitution for Europe. The developments in The Netherlands
are all the more remarkable as even in the second half of the 1990s the
country was often held up as a success model: In all the rest of Western
Europe mass unemployment, the crisis of the welfare state and the disorientation
of its agents – social democratic parties, trade unions, charities –
were on the rise at a time when The Netherlands were considered to be an
exemplary market-oriented and yet consensus-based society, as reflected in
the talk of a “Dutch Miracle”.
The disputes on social, cultural and integration policy and the EU
constitution on the one hand and the crisis of the political system on the
other clearly indicate that such assessments were all too premature. The
campaign against the EU constitution had (unlike in France, where the role
of the anti-globalization network Attac was crucial) been conducted by a
party, namely the Socialist Party. For just over a decade this party-political
formation, which at national level had long been reduced to irrelevance, has
gone from one success to another, doubling its share of the vote in every
election except that of 2002.
On the history of the SP we may note that in 1994 – after five failed attempts
to enter parliament – it scored a major victory in the elections of
November 2006, winning 16.6 percent of the votes, which made it the
third-strongest force both in terms of its seats in the second chamber of parliament
and in terms of its members. Only 4.6 percent separated them from
one of the losers of the elections, the Dutch Social Democrats (PvdA), who
received just 21.2 percent of the votes.
In the run-up to the last elections the media-savvy and extremely popular
Chairman of the SP, Jan Marijnissen, appealed for a cooperation between
GroenLinks, Social Democracy and SP. The other two parties rejected
this, and the balance of power that emerged from the elections did
not permit a Centre-Left cabinet. For the third time as prime minister Jan
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