Mark Rutte sat relaxed at Eva Jinek’s talk show table. The VVD leader was completely in campaign mode: the top two buttons of his shirt open, joking with the gold-winning Olympians, just back from China, and a call for ‘fraternization’. In the coming years, he also predicted, billions of dollars in investment would enable “big problems to be tackled.”
That was the start of the municipal election campaign. It was also the end.
That same evening, Monday, February 21, Russian President Putin had recognized the separatist Ukrainian republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and announced a “peace mission”. War on the way. Later in the broadcast, Rutte resigned: staying longer was “uncomfortable” given the situation, he said. His performance reverberated for a moment (was this George Bush, who sat with a children’s book in hand, visiting a school class when the 9/11 attacks happened?), then it all came to naught from a campaign that wasn’t there. And, you could say: of a world that was no longer there.
In the weeks since Rutte’s TV appearance, decades passed to bring Lenin in. And the consequences of the February 24 raid will be felt not only in the coming years, but also for decades, wrote Jeremy Cliffeforeign affairs commentator for the British magazine New Statesman already on the morning itself. “In ways that no one, including Putin, can predict.” The only certainty: „It will be transformative.†
Broken optimism
Against the background of this disruption and uncertainty, the municipal elections seem almost ‘Lilliputian worries’, as Stefan Zweig in his melancholic The world of yesterday the “calm” years leading up to World War I. Not that the time before this new war was not turbulent. But after two years of the corona pandemic, there was optimism: major crises, such as climate, would be tackled with billions of euros. The dark corona cloud over everyday conversations had disappeared; it was about summer vacations and nonsense again. Not about whether there will be a nuclear war.
Yet the elections are essentially about the same questions that the war raises: does politics have a grip, can it meet the expectations of citizens? And: what if both are not possible? Voters have high expectations of what can be achieved locally in terms of affordable housing, safety, finance, sustainability and quality of life. NRC Wednesday based on voter survey. But municipalities only deal with the first four to a limited extent.
Social solidarity is also emerging. Everyone knows someone who something does for Ukraine. The unity with which the Netherlands receives Ukrainian refugees and turns its back on Russia is reminiscent of the early days of the corona pandemic.
But will it hold up? The war has only been going on for two weeks, no one can know what will come next. Will Putin stop at Kiev, or will it escalate into a war tearing Europe apart?
The war can amplify existing disruptive trends. The liberal world order, or what was left of it, was already under great pressure. The relative power of the West shrank. Liberal democracies were already crushed.
The Netherlands and Europe will have to choose a position. Especially given the strategic reorientation in which America has found itself since Barack Obama, in which it wants to look more at Asia than at Europe.
Meanwhile, Chinese (economic) aid to Russia could reinforce the ‘parallel order’ that has emerged in recent years. In a multipolar world, Western political and economic institutions then compete with those of China and other non-Western countries, as the German-Brazilian political scientist Oliver Stuenkel outlined in his book Post-Western World†
Polarization
The corona crisis also showed how quickly unity can turn into polarization – in the political, public and private domains. Rallying around the flag is easy as long as the opponent comes from outside (Putin), but that changes when the contradiction becomes domestic.
Two years of the coronavirus crisis has stretched citizens’ ability to deal with major changes to their limits. Thanks to the war, gas, energy and food are becoming more expensive. Bread prices could double, bakers warned this week. The purchasing power of everyone, but especially the lowest groups, is being hit hard.
In times of crisis, the prospect theory by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, people are willing to take greater risks. Radical anti-system parties can become attractive alternatives. Maybe not next Wednesday, maybe during elections afterwards – in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe.
The government’s power to leave everything the same is limited. The hundreds of billions of euros that have been pumped into the economies over the past two years cushioned the largest corona damage. But the ammunition is not unlimited. The cabinet is looking at energy compensation, at purchasing power compensation. What is the willingness to suffer? Politicians who went door-to-door were often asked what they were going to do about energy prices.
The new era is characterized by uncertainty, disruption and the (in)ability of politics to deal with this. Politicians – from city councilors to NATO leaders – are confronted with the same despair: how to get to grips with a time characterized by existential insecurity? The whole foundation falters.
Elections page 22-28
Correction (March 12, 2022): In an earlier version of this piece, author Olivier Stuenkel was mistakenly referred to as ‘Kuenkel’. That has been corrected above.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 12 March 2022
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of March 12, 2022