Politics and Elections in the Netherlands: coalition agreement presented

[DavidB.]

   What city or town has the biggest non-white voting percentage?  Also, any idea of the overall direction of the Dutch non-white electorate voting breakdown?  I'm guessing Denk did best among moslems, and GL among non-moslems?

Rotterdam, probably. DENK easily did best among Muslims; non-Muslim non-whites cannot really be lumped together. Judging by the results I think the PVV "won" Hindustanis and the PvdA or GL Creoles.

[DavidB.]

Ipsos, Kantar and Peil (in that order) were the most accurate pollsters. I&O and LISS (unsurprisingly) as well as EenVandaag did worse, which shows that pollsters should simply ask people who they will vote for instead of having them distribute a larger number of votes among parties -- that is simply not how our electoral system works. The Peilingwijzer performed better than any of the individual polls, though the difference with the Ipsos poll is very small.

Tom Louwerse, Leiden University, Peilingwijzer wizard:

[parochial boy]

Is there any way of telling how many non-Muslims voted for Denk? I am guessing virtually none?

[DavidB.]

Is there any way of telling how many non-Muslims voted for Denk? I am guessing virtually none?

No way of knowing for sure, since non-Muslims can vote in predominantly Muslim polling stations too, but virtually none seems the right answer. There was a chance of white SJWs voting DENK when Sylvana Simons was still a candidate and the veneer of being an anti-racist party rather than a Muslim interest party was still there, but that ended when she left. Judging by the results of non-Muslim minority areas in Amsterdam, DENK did very poorly there and was in all likelihood only supported by Muslims who live there. There seems a direct relationship between the percentage DENK got and the percentage of Muslims in a polling station/area/municipality/you name it. If there are virtually no Muslims, DENK got virtually no votes.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Judging by the results I think the PVV "won" Hindustanis

1. lol

2. That's an amusingly old fashioned phrasing (I presume a literal trans. from Dutch). Where in India are these people from?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Are there different voting habits between Moroccan, Turkish and Kurdish Muslims?

[jeron]

Judging by the results I think the PVV "won" Hindustanis

1. lol

2. That's an amusingly old fashioned phrasing (I presume a literal trans. from Dutch). Where in India are these people from?

The Dutch Hindustani didn't' come from India to the Netherlands directly.  After slavery was abolished in the Dutch colony of Surinam, the Dutch recruited Indian people to work in Surinam. After Surinam independence many Surinamese people came to the Netherlands including the Hindustani. They are still called Hindustani in both the Netherlands and Surinam.
People who come from India are called Indian in Dutch, Hindustani is only used for the Indian people from Surinam.

[DavidB.]

Are there different voting habits between Moroccan, Turkish and Kurdish Muslims?

In the past Turks, who are more often small business owners or highly educated, have been more inclined to vote D66 than Moroccans (and D66 allowing former MP Fatma Koser Kaya to deny the Armenian genocide while the PvdA not allowing their MPs to do so also may have played a role here), but otherwise voting patterns have been relatively similar. Nationalist Kurds are much more inclined to vote for the SP than Turkish and Moroccan Muslims: the SP have a very outspoken Kurdish Dutch MP, Sadet Karabulut, and want to take the PKK off the EU list of terrorist organizations. For this reason, nationalist Turks often hate the SP and DENK have troll-proposed investigating the relationship between the SP and the PKK.

[freek]

Judging by the results I think the PVV "won" Hindustanis

1. lol

2. That's an amusingly old fashioned phrasing (I presume a literal trans. from Dutch). Where in India are these people from?

Their ancestors were from what is currently Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

[Famous Mortimer]

Who votes for Labor at this point? Old people, labor union officials, and immigrants?

What do you think the split was between Muslims for voted for DENK and Muslims who voted for Labor?

Also, what other non-Muslim minorities are there? Who are the Creoles? Just anyone mixed Dutch and anything else? Are there Chinese from Indonesia? I thought the Labor Party had one Sino-Indonesian MP.

[DavidB.]

Who votes for Labor at this point? Old people, labor union officials, and immigrants?

Old people, middle-class babyboomers who never lost their left-wing ideals, some teachers, some working-class people who will never vote for another party regardless of what the PvdA do, and those who got the PvdA as their Votematch result, don't necessarily have a negative opinion of them and vote for them (I know students like this).

What do you think the split was between Muslims for voted for DENK and Muslims who voted for Labor?

You need to take this estimate with a ton of salt, but based on the election results in certain areas and polling stations in The Hague and looking at the DENK results in municipalities in general, I would say that somewhere between 40% and 70% of Turkish and Moroccan Muslims who turned out voted for DENK. The PvdA will probably be the largest party among those who didn't vote for them.

Also, what other non-Muslim minorities are there? Who are the Creoles? Just anyone mixed Dutch and anything else? Are there Chinese from Indonesia? I thought the Labor Party had one Sino-Indonesian MP.

Creoles are black, non-Indian Surinamese. There are Surinamese of Asian descent. There are Chinese from Indonesia too. There are Antilleans (a lot), Moluccans, Cape Verdeans (in Rotterdam; I know nothing about how they vote), Ghanaians (in Amsterdam)...

[DavidB.]

PvdA chairman Hans Spekman gets six more months to clean up the mess after basically begging the membership to get the opportunity to do so. PvdA leader Asscher stated he would not enter another coalition with the VVD this time after 80% of the membership voted for a motion against doing so.

Meanwhile, the "final" turnout figure proved to be not that "final": it continues to change as the last postal votes are counted. According to the NOS, which should be the most reliable source, we're now at 81.4%. That would be the fifth highest turnout since the abolishment of compulsory voting in 1970, behind 1977 (88.1%), 1981 (87%), 1986 (85.8%) and 1972 (83.5%).

[DavidB.]

Some maps by De Volkskrant.

Support of a potential VVD-CDA-D66-CU ("bourgeois right") coalition, which has 76 seats and is at about 50% of the popular vote. Mainly suburban, exurban and rural areas that aren't doing bad.


Green = "green" (D66, GL, PvdD) larger than populist (PVV, SP, 50Plus, FvD); yellow = the other way around. Map represents population distribution. The Alkmaar-Nijmegen progressive belt is real, folks.


Some maps by Josse de Voogd:

Left vs. right (note that D66 is considered to be left-wing here; makes the changes between 2012 and 2017 even more remarkable):


Support PVV in 2017, absolute growth (compared to 2012), and relative growth (compared to 2012): growth outside the urban West -- and Limburg.

[DavidB.]

Why this happened? Josse de Voogd: "When the left starts campaigning on the cultural dimension, the rest of the country says: get me outta here. This effect is stronger once you get closer to the border. The losses of the left are larger in the east and the south." Asscher campaigning against Wilders instead of Rutte was perhaps inevitable, but it's been a disaster for the party, one everyone could have anticipated (I certainly did).

[Hifly]

Does anybody know what the best polling station or sub-municipal unit was for the PvDA?

[DavidB.]

Alternatively I think the PVV could suffer like the SP did in 2012 when people watch the debates and realise that voting for them is ultimately a wasted vote. They will get 20 seats. Quote this on election day to make me look like an idiot.

This one aged well.

Does anybody know what the best polling station or sub-municial unit was for the PvDA?

NRC should come up with a map of all polling stations soon. For now, I expect it to be somewhere in Friesland or perhaps in a black area in Amsterdam-Zuidoost, but probably the former.

[DavidB.]

VVD+CDA (traditional right-wing parties*)
1989: 76
1994: 65
1998: 67
2002: 67
2003: 72
2006: 63
2010: 52
2012: 54
2017: 52

CDA+VVD+PVV+LPF+FvD (traditional right + radical right)
1989: 76
1994: 65 (but 3 seats for extreme right CD, which is a different category imo)
1998: 67 (no radical right)
2002: 93 (LPF surge)
2003: 72 (LPF collapse)
2006: 72 (LPF gone, PVV in)
2010: 76
2012: 69
2017: 74

PvdA+GL+SP+PvdD (combined left)
1989: 55
1994: 44
1998: 71
2002: 42
2003: 59
2006: 67
2010: 57
2012: 59
2017: 42

PvdA+GL+SP+PvdD+D66 (progressive/left)
1989: 67
1994: 68
1998: 75
2002: 49
2003: 65
2006: 70
2010: 67
2012: 71
2017: 61

The right isn't necessarily bigger -- but the left and progressives are definitely smaller.

*traditionally, the CDA cannot really be seen as a right-wing party (the Netherlands doesn't do the "non-socialist = right-wing" thing) and while this is irrelevant to the point, I still wanted to mention this. It used to be a centrist party, but it has moved to the right under Lubbers, under Balkenende and most certainly under Buma.

[Zuza]

Green = "green" (D66, GL, PvdD) larger than populist (PVV, SP, 50Plus, FvD)

It seems to be a rather unusual division. Isn't PvdD also has a significant populist (anti-establishment/anti-EU) component?

[windjammer]

VVD+CDA (traditional right-wing parties*)
1989: 66
1994: 65
1998: 67
2002: 67
2003: 72
2006: 63
2010: 52
2012: 54
2017: 52

CDA+VVD+PVV+LPF+FvD (traditional right + radical right)
1989: 66
1994: 65 (but 3 seats for extreme right CD, which is a different category imo)
1998: 67 (no radical right)
2002: 94 (LPF surge)
2003: 72 (LPF collapse)
2006: 72 (LPF gone, PVV in)
2010: 76
2012: 69
2017: 74

PvdA+GL+SP+PvdD (combined left)
1989: 55
1994: 44
1998: 71
2002: 42
2003: 59
2006: 67
2010: 57
2012: 59
2017: 42

PvdA+GL+SP+PvdD+D66 (progressive/left)
1989: 67
1994: 68
1998: 75
2002: 49
2003: 65
2006: 70
2010: 67
2012: 71
2017: 61

The right isn't necessarily bigger -- but the left and progressives are definitely smaller.

*traditionally, the CDA cannot really be seen as a right-wing party (the Netherlands doesn't do the "non-socialist = right-wing" thing) and while this is irrelevant to the point, I still wanted to mention this. It used to be a centrist party, but it has moved to the right under Lubbers, under Balkenende and most certainly under Buma.

Could you make something total left/total right in order to have something like 150 sears in the end please? (for 50+ I suppose you should divide in two right? )

[DavidB.]

Green = "green" (D66, GL, PvdD) larger than populist (PVV, SP, 50Plus, FvD)

It seems to be a rather unusual division. Isn't PvdD also has a significant populist (anti-establishment/anti-EU) component?

I wouldn't call them populist, but this is a fair point insofar that on the "demand side" it is true that PvdD tend to function as a "protest party" for a not insignificant number of voters. The PvdD could perhaps have been included in the yellow category too. Arguably the value of this map is that slightly less than half the country is green and slightly more than half the country is yellow, and the PvdD remain the most "green" party so it would have been weird to leave them out, but your caveat with the categorization of the parties is a legitimate one.

[DavidB.]

Could you make something total left/total right in order to have something like 150 sears in the end please? (for 50+ I suppose you should divide in two right? )

I don't think categorizing parties like 50Plus, CU and DENK as left-wing or right-wing is really meaningful, but I could do one on right-wing + religious parties (but let's ignore discussion on whether DENK are a religious party for the moment...).

VVD+CDA+PVV+LPF+LN+FvD+SGP+CU and predecessors+CD (right + religious):
1989: 83
1994: 75
1998: 75
2002: 101
2003: 85
2006: 80
2010: 83
2012: 77
2017: 82

The news is not really here (though note the uptick in right-wing support since the Fortuyn revolution compared to the 90s), but rather in the decline of the vote share of progressive parties.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Why this happened? Josse de Voogd: "When the left starts campaigning on the cultural dimension, the rest of the country says: get me outta here. This effect is stronger once you get closer to the border. The losses of the left are larger in the east and the south." Asscher campaigning against Wilders instead of Rutte was perhaps inevitable, but it's been a disaster for the party, one everyone could have anticipated (I certainly did).

I'm sorry to chime in like a noob like this (then again, I think I've done my part in answering noob questions about Italy and France. ), but why didn't the SP benefit more from PvdA's nice pragmatic centrist turn? My impression was that it was the one left-wing party that still focuses on bread-and-butter issues. I expected it to gain a few seats from disgruntled PvdA voters, at least (especially considering that many such PvdA voters almost voted SP back in 2013). Did something go horribly wrong with their campaign?

[DavidB.]

Why this happened? Josse de Voogd: "When the left starts campaigning on the cultural dimension, the rest of the country says: get me outta here. This effect is stronger once you get closer to the border. The losses of the left are larger in the east and the south." Asscher campaigning against Wilders instead of Rutte was perhaps inevitable, but it's been a disaster for the party, one everyone could have anticipated (I certainly did).

I'm sorry to chime in like a noob like this (then again, I think I've done my part in answering noob questions about Italy and France. ), but why didn't the SP benefit more from PvdA's nice pragmatic centrist turn? My impression was that it was the one left-wing party that still focuses on bread-and-butter issues. I expected it to gain a few seats from disgruntled PvdA voters, at least (especially considering that many such PvdA voters almost voted SP back in 2013). Did something go horribly wrong with their campaign?

Haha, no, ask whatever you like; if something is unclear about the patterns on any of the maps posted here I'd like you -- and others -- to ask too, rather than to stay in the dark. To me the patterns are so clear that I just don't start talking about it myself (where to start?) but I imagine this may be different to others.

The SP only focuses on bread-and-butter issues and chose to emphasize its support for a single-payer healthcare system. This didn't seem like a bad choice at first since polls showed healthcare was the single most important issue to voters this time around, with copayments having gone up from 150 to 380 euros over the last five years and over a million people having trouble paying the bills for basic healthcare. However, despite Wilders' absence in many debates, national identity became the overarching theme of the election (thanks to CDA and VVD), which basically left SP leader Roemer speechless. In addition to that, Roemer is a bad fit for non-working class voters, and many people who are on the left nowadays simply aren't working-class; to people who are working-class, the party's classic left-wing stances on refugees, immigration and integration may have been a serious turnoff, even if the party tries very hard not to place emphasis on these issues. I was surprised by the SP losing because of the fact that their campaign had been decent and Roemer had done well in the debates, but they just don't seem to attract many people who aren't part of their base already; however, exit polls suggest the SP did "win" a few seats from the PvdA -- it just lost even more support, probably to GL, PVV, 50Plus and PvdD. Due to the focus on national identity (and the SP's stance here) and the limited appeal of the SP and Roemer to non-working class voters and working-class westerners (let's not underestimate just how southern Roemer is; I've joked about subtitles), quite some disgruntled working-class PvdA 2012 voters may have gone to the PVV, CDA or even the VVD.

A socialist's analysis would be that right-wing party leaders made this election about national identity in order to make voters forget their socio-economic interests. This may be an important part of the picture. Another important part of the picture, however, is that working-class voters (and a lot of non-working class voters, for that matter) start running away really quickly once left-wing parties start to talk about culture, or identity, or immigration, and that perhaps they should think about this.

[Antonio the Sixth]

That is so utterly, soul-crushingly depressing, but not too surprising. Thanks for the explanation.

Maybe some day, voters will get tired of this whole "muh national identity" bullsh*t and realize that while they sit here worrying about those big bad refugees robbing their homes or something, billionaires have been robbing them of their basic welfare and dignity. Maybe... Or maybe the world is doomed.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

So are any of the leaders resigning? I mean, obviously Wilders won't go (unless he gets bored and flies off to America for a lucrative career at breitbart or something); but surely Roemer and Asscher need to leave pronto?