“Wait, just turn down Bontenbal,” says Richard Carter when he answers the phone. The bureau chief of AFP’s Netherlands editorial team tries every morning Good morning Netherlands every morning, he has his routine to keep up with. He also follows it the day before the elections. The British correspondent has now been in his post in The Hague for two years, this is his second election.
And yes, those Dutch elections can be “quite a challenge” to cover, with the number of parties. A week and a half ago, at a conference of the European Socialists in Amsterdam, he almost apologized to Frans Timmermans: he asked simple questions, but that was because the Dutch elections were such a “” for many news consumers abroad.alphabet soup” is that he had to keep it simple.
The broad context in which Carter and his four colleagues at the AFP office in The Hague view it: the rise of the far right in Europe. “So: Wilders, and how he is doing in the elections. The nitty gritty D66 will want to work with the VVD, but we don’t do that.” More international media are doing this: The Belgian VRT wonders whether Wilders will now become Prime Minister South German Zeitung opens its website on Tuesday evening with: “No one wants to govern with the unpredictable Wilders anymore.”
Isabel Ferrer, correspondent in the Netherlands for the Spanish-language newspaper for more than twenty years El Paisreads over the phone how many pieces she has to write about the elections here: at least four, maybe more. “You have to remember: every national election says something about how things will progress in Europe.” The Netherlands is interesting, she says, because for the time being it is a country with two faces: “stable, rich, modern, tolerant.” And then you have Geert Wilders as the biggest politician in the previous elections: that is not consistent.”
For the readers and listeners of El Pais she has often described what happens with that large number of parties. “The BBB, for example! You have a party for farmers? It is real detailed work with parties in this country. There are two parties for animals.” Ferrer’s audience knows that difficult coalitions sometimes have to be formed, but what is surprising is how Dutch politicians exclude other parties in advance.
In addition to Wilders, the Spanish public also wants to know what happens next with Timmermans: he is known there, from his time as European Commissioner, but also because he is a “political friend of Sánchez”, Ferrer explains: the Spanish Prime Minister is one of the few social democratic leaders in the EU.
The elections are a major production for AFP, Carter explains: he receives help from Brussels. The team in the Netherlands normally consists of five, now there are eight. “We will soon have people in Maastricht, Rotterdam, Scheveningen, in the Anne Frank House – there is a polling station there. And a camera crew at a beautiful canal somewhere, to cover the exit poll.”
Carter himself will mainly sit behind his desk to write an analysis. He hopes, he says, that coalition formation will not prove to be an impossible puzzle: because then there is a chance that he will have to explain to his international audience at two o’clock in the morning what the SGP is.
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