On Dutch Polling day.

On my way to the polling booth this morning, I realized a visitor from Mars wouldn’t be aware that it was an important day. I noticed a total absence of placards on signs in the windows. (We don’t have front yards in this part of Amsterdam.) The Dutch don’t hold gigantic campaign rallies on election eve, so last night my stroll through Amsterdam was quiet with some bars showing the Dutch team play a meaningless game against Gibraltar. (I didn’t even bump into the small group of regular pro-Palestine protesters at the central station.) This morning the farmer’s market was setting up under grey skies with the late Fall Sun visible behind the clouds. Everyone is relieved by the lack of rain after weeks of downpour.

Even so, there was a long line at the polling station. In line there was an atmosphere of friendly banter; quite a few people spontaneously offered the information that they would make up their minds in the booth letting the red pencil guide their vote.

It’s an unusual election because nobody is trying to defend the status quo. (The outgoing government imploded due to lack of mutual trust among the politicians that composed it and absence of vision.) This has meant that, according to the last surveys, a whopping 63% has not decided on who to vote for the day before the election.

In fact, I wondered whether ‘letting the pencil guide their vote’ in the booth was code for voting for Wilders; I suspect that many still refuse to tell to a stranger that they will vote for Geert Wilders. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Wilders (PVV) will be the apparent victor of the election today, and that he will head the only party (well, he is the only member) that will gain above 20% of the votes in the fractured Dutch political landscape. He is by now a familiar face, whose views have been remarkably constant; the people voting for him know his nationalist, anti-immigrant, and antimuslim views. Because he follows democratic procedures and keeps his distance from conspiracy theories that the Dutch far right politician Baudet tends to indulge in, he is considered ‘normal’ now. However, if the PPV wins so many seats, it will be because of one of the great own-goals in campaign history one that will be used in text-books for quite some time to come.

Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, the current Minister of Justice and Security and the new leader of the right of center (pro-business) VVD, which has been in power under outgoing PM Mark Rutte (and in government nearly continuously for decades now), suggested in an interview that she was open to all coalitions, including with PVV. Until she did that, she (the daughter of Kurdish refugees) was on course to become the first female prime minister in Dutch history. She is articulate, smart, pragmatic, and a plausible candidate to rest hopes on for much needed renewal of Dutch coalition politics.

But her remark broke a taboo in Dutch politics. The tactical intent behind her comment was pretty obvious: to knee-cap the rise of Peter Omtzigt, the reformist culturally conservative, but economically centrist, head of a new party NCS. Omtzigt a former member of the once-powerful centrist Christian Democrats (CDA) had, when he was a backbencher, shown remarkable integrity, persistence, and courage to help unmask the Dutch benefits scandal (the scandal is the way the Dutch tax authorities, the civil servants, and judges covered up evidence free racism against poor people and still are slow to undo the damages). He is probably the most trusted person in politics today. Omtzigt himself ran a lackluster campaign, playing Hamlet about whether he would be willing to be prime minister and so wasting opportunities to remind voters why they liked him in the first place.

Yeşilgöz-Zegerius’ interview signaled to more Islamophobic voters that a vote for Wilders need not be wasted (and so they could safely switch from Omtzigt to Wilders). As everyone noticed: the effect was rather instant. Wilders started to rise in the polls and Omtzigt’s support (and some of the protest parties on the right) softened. Wilders received 15% of the votes back in 2010. But if I understand my colleagues in comparative politics correctly, his voter potential has always been double that. With no plausible right of center party to siphon of all his possible voters, the bandwagon effect in his direction may be huge. (In the polls, we are also seeing a late,smaller bandwagon effect toward D66 a centrist more cosmopolitan party that is happy to campaign directly against Wilders.)

While Holland has always been a center right country, we are likely to see the most right wing parliament in over a century even if Wilders’ surge stalls today. By this I mean one that is explicitly culturally conservative, anti-cosmopolitan, and, within the margins of the EU, economically collectivist. (There is no appetite to leave the EU.) One obvious victim close to home will be the decades long experiment in which Dutch universities recruited students and faculty from all over Europe (and the world). The only question is how abrupt and drastic the changes will be. (Foreign students and foreign immigrants are blamed for the housing crisis even by politicians and journalists that know better.)

Until a few weeks ago, it looked as if climate issues might dominate the election under pressure from extinction rebellion’s civil disobedience, which had attracted growing interest (not the least due to excessive use of force by the police). But the outgoing parliament instructed the government to study fossil fuel subsidies, and extinction rebellion ended their daily highway blockades. The effect was that ‘climate issues’ were depoliticized and that no party entering the next parliament truly owns it. (Our local greens fused with our local centrist social democrats, and jointly have stopped the free fall of the left, in large part by not being very left at all.)

With climate politics off the table, Dutch electoral politics returned to its provincial character that has been the norm during the last few decades. We have internalized being an American protectorate so much, that we have stopped bothering to think about how we should organize our foreign affairs or even European affairs; we are happy for the Germans to think on our behalf about such matters. Even the Ukraine war barely registers (although it has pushed up spending on defense and is feeding into refugee scapegoating). Our relatively inexperienced political class looks like a bunch of well meaning civil servants competent enough to run a midsized provincial capital.

Because of our system of pure proportional representation, and the pluralism and differentiation of modern society, we are becoming used to highly splintered parliaments that require complex coalition formation. (Unlike others, I don’t lament multiparty coalitions, but it takes real skill to hold them together.) In fact, we increasingly lack tribal politics. I have wondered whether the negligible influence of ideology and religion means that no party can even hope to unify a large percentage of the electorate into a vision of the common good ever again.

My more moralistic students have volunteered that they are inclined to vote for the animal rights party. In recent elections many of these students would have been tempted by BIJ1 an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, progressive party, but it has imploded. Yesterday a columnist in the Dutch Jacobin urged a vote for the centrist fusionist Greens/social Democrats. (With class enemies like these, who needs political friends?)

And yet there I was standing in this long line amidst a diversity of citizens that were clearly taking their opportunity to vote quite seriously. Ever since I teach a huge, mandatory survey introductory course to my political science students, I have carefully guarded my political party commitments and have become ever more Weberian in my general posture. After coloring my vote, I folded my ballot. But in my effort to guard my vote, I folded it too many times to fit the ballot through the ballot box. (I effectively stayed in character as an incompetent professor.) A volunteer lend me a hand and she forcefully stuffed my ballot in the box. While we laughed, I wondered whether such quiet civic aid is the essence of our democratic ethos.