Europe inflames electoral debate

Peter has blond hair, rather long, and his dark suit is impeccable. A good father, he takes his daughter to school every morning, giving her a ride on the rack of his bike. And then, whistling, he heads off to his job at a trading company in Amsterdam’s financial centre. It’s a stressful job, where he watches the crisis up close. “When I read that the Netherlands is an island of prosperity, a happy country with the lowest unemployment (rate) in Europe, it makes me smile,” he says. Behind the postcard prettiness lies a different reality: the financial crisis of late 2008 lingers on in the eurozone. And with that crisis having tangible effects on his everyday life, the Dutch taxpayer regrets even more having to reach into his pockets to bail out Greece or Spain. “You won’t see people sleeping on the street in Amsterdam like you do in Paris, but that doesn’t mean that no one isn’t slaving away here,” Peter assures me.

Inequality is up and casual jobs are rampaging across the labour market. Out of nine million active workers, no less than 370,000 are living below the poverty line. The trend towards flexwerk, or casual jobs, is denounced by the unions, but they can’t do much about it. “We talk, talk, talk, but management doesn’t want to hear, and you never see the colour of an open-ended contract,” laments Farid, 20, an employee at Albert Heijn. Three-quarters of the employees of this supermarket chain are under 23, paid the minimum wage for part-time and fixed-term contracts.

An eloquent statistic: in 2011, only 2,000 people signed a permanent contract, an extremely steep plunge from the 83,000 who signed one the year before. While fixed-term contracts are becoming the norm, single-employee companies – that is, self-employed workers who are not shielded by any collective agreement – have doubled, reaching 750,000 in 2011. All this against a background of austerity, with a loss of purchasing power estimated at seven percent for 2012 and 2013. Retirees, for their part, will pay for the risks taken by the financial markets funds that manage their savings. As some of those were engulfed in late 2008, they will see their pensions shrink even further.

Is Europhobia is running deep?

And so, exit Islam and immigrants. These themes, which were at the heart of the parliamentary elections in 2006 and 2010, have ceded ground to a campaign focused on Europe, now accused of having brought on the end of the welfare state. The Netherlands, which voted overwhelmingly No in the 2005 referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty (as did France) has long been dragging its feet over the EU. The Christian Democrats and Liberals, who have been in power for the past decade, oppose Turkey's entry into the Union and Romania and Bulgaria’s admission into the Schengen area – and, above all, they oppose the bottomless bailouts to the southern European countries that are bungling their finances. The billions of euros swallowed up by the emergency funds are priming the debate because they are accompanied by swingeing cuts that are being felt in all areas – in culture, education, health and pensions. “Our elderly are not going to pay for the Greek fraudsters,” asserts the right-wing populist Geert Wilders, head of the PVV, the third-ranking political party in the country.

This nostalgia for the guilder, the Netherlands’ former currency, advocates a pure and simple exit from the EU – which according to Wilders’s estimates has cost the national economy a whopping 90 billion euros. Wilders is also fanning the fears linked to the influx of Polish workers who began to arrive when the borders were opened to eastern Europe in 2007. “There are 200,000 people who came from the East and made a mess of things everywhere by taking on low-paid jobs,” grumbles Martijn, 39, an accountant who was laid off in February because of the recession – not because of Poles – but who is still willing to vote for Wilders.

Left-wing populism is also on the rise. The Socialist Party (SP), once Maoist, has surged in the polls since May by standing up to the dictates from Brussels. “The European standard of a three-percent budget deficit should not prevent the Netherlands from loosening up our finances, as the country sees fit, to boost growth through major works,” says Emile Roemer, SP candidate.

Must we conclude that Europhobia is running deep in one of the six founding countries of post-war Europe? The answer calls for nuances. For Adriaan Schout, responsible for European Studies at the Clingendael Institute of International Relations, the debates on Europe may be vigorous, but they are nonetheless perfectly “healthy and normal.” “Wilders has let the debate mature: he came up with the figures and statements that allowed other parties to contradict him. Admittedly, there are problems and we do not want to pay any more for Greece. But no party wishes to stop European integration,” he says.

“In the end, what do we want to do with Europe?”

Proof? The pro-European Labour Party (PVDA) under Diederik Samsom has now overtaken the SP in the polls and is hot on the heels of the liberal party (VVD) under outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Samsom’s proposal? To “rebuild the bridge” to a more egalitarian society, which the Liberals believe has been destroyed and swept away by the crisis. “Enough is enough!” storms Mark Rutte in turn on the aid to Greece – which, seeing that his government has already gone along with all the bailouts submitted by the EU, has drawn more criticism than praise.

Unusually, employers, who are in the main liberal, have come up with a video clip in the defence of Europe, and so have thrown themselves into the campaign. In a video released on the major public television channels in early September, the Federation of Dutch Employers and Industrialists (VNO-NCW) presents heads of enterprises, big and small, who remind viewers of how the Netherlands benefits from being in the EU. “Without Europe, there would be no Schiphol Airport or Port of Rotterdam,” says one of them. Thanks to foreign trade and investments, the common market lets the country reap 180 billion euros a year. Against that stands the maximum commitment of 90 billion in emergency funds to the European Central Bank (ECB)...

For some analysts, the problem is not so much the pervasive Euro-scepticism as it is the decline of the country itself. It’s a paradox, given the integration of the kingdom into the world economy. Most parties have no ambitions when it comes to foreign policy, notes the Clingendael Institute.

Again, everything revolves around questions of money: cuts in the defence budget and in official development assistance, and in the contribution of the Netherlands to the EU as well. “What do we want to do with Greece, the euro, Serbia?” wonders Pieter Feith, senior Dutch diplomat and EU representative in Kosovo. “We can no longer count on a fully coherent policy from The Hague,” he writes in the NRC Handelsblad newspaper. “It does happen that countries occasionally change policy – but ours is heading down the track at full speed in all directions.” In the end, what do we want to do with Europe? This is the key question the Netherlands is asking.

From the Netherlands

Dutch euro-scepticism is not a new phenomenon.

The existence of doubters goes back to the 1950s, says historian Mathieu Segers in NRC Handelsblad. In 1951, the country joined the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) for purely commercial reasons and because of the "hard material realities" which made European integration a condition of benefitting from Marshall Plan aid —

The Netherlands wanted to trade in a major free-trade zone, in which it would not loose sovereignty [...] it was not a political issue, that was what NATO was for [...] As a result, the Netherlands was surprised by the ECSC, a political project: the countries had to cede power to a European "authority" [...] Instinctively, deep down, the Netherlands did not want to be part of that Europe.

With the current economic crisis, this scepticism appears to be making a comeback, notes the historian —

Today, the feeling that 'we do not belong here' is back. The eurozone crisis has put a political Europe back on the agenda. And what countries are not in the eurozone? The United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries – those with which we are very close.

Certainly, Europe has never dominated an electoral campaign as much. But the discussion remains superficial, notes Mathieu Segers —

The debate is a little held hostage by the fringes of the political spectrum [Geert Wilders' PVV populists and the radical left of the Socialist Party]. The Netherlands needs what sociologist Raymond Aron called a 'débat idéologique ' [ideological debate]: a fundamental discussion that goes beyond the principal parties. But the latter fear this deliberation.