Why are voters so apathetic? It was the question of the week, after only half of voters showed up for the election last Wednesday. The diagnosis of experts is, in one word: fragmentation. There are simply so many parties that the voter suffers from choice stress. “I don’t know which party to vote for” was the main motivation of non-voters, according to research agency Ipsos.
But with all the focus on fragmentation, I think another cause is being ignored: clumping. In other words, the clustering of all political parties around the same position. Dutch democracy has always been geared towards consensus, but in recent years this tendency has become even stronger.
Take defense, nice and current. In 2012, only the SGP and the ChristenUnie wanted to increase defense spending, while the Netherlands was well below the NATO standard of 2 percent. The voter shared this disinterest, polls showed. This changed in 2014, with the invasion of Crimea and the downing of MH17. Suddenly a majority of the Dutch did want to invest; most parties changed their defense stance.
We have already seen such a sudden turnaround, after 2002, in the field of immigration and integration. After Fortuyn, hardly anyone dared to stand up for the multicultural society, not even left-wing parties. It was Diederik Samsom (PvdA) who came up with the Turkey deal in 2016.
On climate and sustainability, the spectrum moved to the ‘left’. That went fast: Klaas Dijkhoff called Rob Jetten a ‘climate pusher’ in 2019, now almost everyone wants to work on sustainability. Because of international obligations, but also because the mood has changed: seven in ten Dutch people are now concerned about climate change, according to Ipsos last year.
The cause is always different, but the trend is the same: the atmosphere changes, a new consensus emerges, and almost all parties pitch their tent there.
The clustering may also help to explain the current puzzle: that the left does not benefit from the return of socio-economic themes. For years there have been two explanations for the failure of the left: lack of inspirational leadership and the dominance of ‘cultural’ themes such as immigration and identity. The second explanation no longer applies, because suddenly everyone is talking about the housing market, flexible contracts and inequality of opportunity. This is due to economic developments, but also due to series such as classes† skewed growth and Sander and the gorgeand books like The Seven Checkmarks† Yet the left does not benefit from this. In the latest national polls, the left-wing parties together won less than 40 seats. Strange: I can’t remember a ‘more leftist’ moment in my life, in terms of attention to inequality; at the same time, the left was never worse off.
Here too, the consensus culture may play a role. Inequality is suddenly widely recognized as a problem, both inside and outside politics. This week, Rabobank Amsterdam called (opportunity) inequality in a report “a brake on the further development of the city and the region”, and the CPB noted that the strongest shoulders in the Netherlands do not carry the heaviest burden. Joris Luyendijk scours the business community to talk about unequal opportunities. D66 links Kaag’s ‘new leadership’ to the theme of equality, the CDA ‘wants to reshape solidarity’, according to a vision document last autumn. Last year, the VVD called inequality “a natural given”, but does advocate a “strong government” – Mark Rutte from ten years ago had a panic attack from that term.
There are, of course, other themes at play in local elections, but the national consensus has an impact on them. Politics also radiates through its unanimity that there is no discussion about the real problems.
‘Fragmentation’ sounds like the political spectrum is shattering into small pieces, and it seems so when you look at the number of parties. In terms of content, however, those parties have merged into a whole in which you can barely see the parts. So it is not the election results that have the greatest influence on the political course, but the zeitgeist – and this is only partly determined by the voters. Could it be that people realize that and think: I’ll skip this one time?
Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad of 26 March 2022
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of March 26, 2022