NETHERLANDS How the right got back in PREMIER LUBBERS managed to look a lot more credible in the election campaign than he is in fact. Lubbers' Christian DemocraticLiberal coalition has ruled the government in the last four years with a rough hand, and in the election campaign it was not shy about lying. Never before has a cabinet been hit by so many personal scandals involving ministers.
Nonetheless, heading the slate of the Christen Demokraties Appel [CDA - Christian Democratic Appeal, a Christian conservative party ], Lubbers was able to score a decisive victory in the May 21 elections.
Lubbers' triumph was so great that the coalition government with the "free enterprise" liberal Volskpartij voor Vrijheid en Demokratie [VVD — People's Party for Freedom and Democracy] will be able to remain in office until 1990. The became a reality. RICHARD BASTIAANS
The left vote overall did not go down in these elections, but nonetheless the left took some hard blows. In comparison with four years ago, the relationship between the left and right vote remained the same. But the runner-up in the elections, the Partij van de Arbeid [PrdA, the social democrats], did not make its gains through attracting disillusioned former supporters of the government parties.
Rather, the PrdA made its gains at . the expense of the more radical smallleft parties. The Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) suffered an historic defeat. In one blow it lost all three of its seats, and for the first time since 1918 it is not represented in the parliament.
The PvdA will make an evaluation of its election defeat (since although they gained votes, they did not achieve their goal of getting into the government). The party leadership has already given an advance instalment on its post mortem. That is, it says that a change of course is not needed. The path that it marked out can still be followed, the path of not polarizing against the government but of building up the party's credibility as a potential party of government.
The PvdA has thus already come out with a preliminary conclusion while the negotiations over the formation of the cabinet are underway. So, it does not matter what the government goes ahead and does. 0308 - slogan "let Lubbers finish the job"
It is obvious that another Lubbers government is coming, Lubbers II. Undoubtedly it will carry out a new wave of austerity measures. The right's election campaign very much resembled the one conducted last year by the Belgian Christian Democratic head of government, Martens. Like his Belgian counterpart, Lubbers laid the groundwork for his election victory a year before.
Lubbers started the 1986 election campaign by handing out a number of presents. The lowest benefits were in-
KEER LUBBERS
DE RUG TOE 11
creased a bit. Last year, unemployment dropped, for the first time since 1979. Even youth unemployment went down. Lubbers promised to bring unemployment down to 500,000 in the coming year. The present total is still 730,000.
Both government parties, moreover, promised to maintain the buying power of the lowest-wage earners and those entitled to benefits.
Lying to get elected is nothing special for the right. There is no guarantee whatever that the promises will be kept. Everything indicates that Lubbers will step up his hardline rule. Without taking account of the economic decline, the CDA and the VVD had made at least 16,000 million guilders (about 8,000 million US dollars) in cutbacks over the last four years.
The disturbing thing is that Lubbers has succeeded, with his "no nonsense" government, in winning a base for the CDA for the first time among younger and nonreligious people. The CDA is not just a party that plays on Christian values but it has become a conservative party.
The CDA clearly predominates over its coalition partner, the VVD. Lubbers has been able to represent himself as a "statesman," as the man who got the country out of the slump. The "business-like" Lubbers has been able to seduce a lot of older and younger people alike to vote for the CDA.
The PvdA came in behind the CDA. In the official election programs for economic growth for the Netherlands, reducing unemployment, increasing buying power and so on, the differences between the government parties and the PdA were minimal.
The question of reversing the steps taken by the Lubbers government -cutting into the living standards of large groups of people in the last years - was not raised. The PvdA offered no alternative.
Not everyone might have noticed that there was little difference in the election programs. But in these elections, the TV played a clarifying role. The TV debates between the government parties and the PvdA worked to the disadvantage of the social demo-
The old man of the PdA, Den Uyl (who headed up their slate), could not arouse any enthusiasm with his watered down version of Lubbers' program.
Well before the elections, Lubbers removed one of the last pitfalls, the cruise missile question. On November 1, despite four million names on a petition opposing the missiles, the parliament "democratically" decided to go ahead and deploy 48 cruise missiles in 1988.
After that decision, a big part of the peace movement (including the 12
SAP campaign wins supporters
Anneke Meijsen
24
VOOR DE
VERANDERING
Sap socialistiese arbeiderspartil
SAP election poster (DR)
THE SOCIALISTIESE Arbeiderspartij [SAP - Socialist Workers
Party, Dutch section of the Fourth
International], waged a successful campaign for the May 21 parlia mentary elections.
The SAP polled 3,939 votes, three times as many as four years ago, the last time that it took part in a campaign for the parliamentary elections.
In the election campaign, the
SAP increased its contacts and its reputation enormously, despite the intense competition we faced.
There was a record number of
27 slates in these elections - nine of them put up by left parties.
The mass campaign that the
SAP waged provoked a good number of responses. Membership increased by over 15 per cent. The number of subscriptions to the
SAP's paper, Klassenstrijd, rose by nearly 20 per cent. And the party won new sympathizers. Some
100,000 election papers were PvdA) announced that the time for demonstrations was over, and that it was now up to the voters. But precisely because of this position, the cruise missile question was to play little role in the elections. The real reason the social democrats pushed the cruise missile question into the background was to prepare the ranks of the PvdA for a possible failure to postpone a decision on deployment.
The PrdA leaders' objective was certainly not helped by a longprepared mobilization held a few days before the election. The encirclement of the cruise missile base at Woensdrecht by about 10,000 people was a success, but no thanks to the social distributed plus another 100,000 leaflets. On top of this, 10,000 posters were put up.
The SAP's campaign was by no means limited to disseminating propaganda. The SAP conducted an offensive campaign in which such questions as the shorter working week, reversal of the austerity opposition to nuclear measures, power and cruise missiles, as well as support for a left government without the right, played a major role.
The success of this campaign has clearly strengthened the position of the SAP. The demonstration held just before the election against cruise missiles (see accompanying article) came about in particular because the SAP put its forces into it. The small-left parliamentary parties were too busy with their election campaign and played no role in building this demonstration.
In the actions that were carried out for a 36-hour week, the SAP had a strong presence in many factories. That won the SAP a lot of sympathy and aroused a lot of interest in the party, in particular because the SAP was the only party to do this.
The SAP also came to the fore as a party of action in the mobilizations against the US attack on Libya.
On June 1, the SAP held a meeting at which its whole election campaign was reviewed. The gathering radiated enthusiasm and confidence. Everyone was happy with the result, despite the fact that every one realized that this sort of work is a long-term thing. To get a socialist alternative off the ground takes more than just a few initiatives.
In any case, the SAP will now take an active part in the discussion of the reasons why the left suffered a defeat at the polls and how we can make sure that, four years from now, Lubbers will not get in again. democratic part of the movement.
Lubbers got his election victory by playing on the economic upturn. But in fact he also got a helping hand from the left. While the cruise missile issue was defused by the PvdA, the Chemobyl accident could have offered an opportunity to hit the right. Lubbers had just taken the decision to establish two new nuclear reactors. That was still fresh in everyone's memory. But nonetheless, the Chernobyl disaster did not spark off any reaction in the Netherlands. There was no mass demonstration. The left was too busy with the elections.
Lubbers' own fear that the Chernobyl catastrophe would cost him his International Viewpoint 14 July 1986
THE ELECTION RESULTS
1986
1982
Seats
Seats socialist alternative. Moreover, the small-left parties saw themselves as a sort of an appendage of the PdA, that is, that they had to fight against the right along with the PrdA and that the social democrats needed the radical noise they make in parliament.
There was no aggressive campaign against a CDA-PrdA government, which was what the social democrats were out for. And thus, as small-left parties, which in any case would not get into the government, they dug their own grave because they encouraged people to "make their votes count."
The third small-left party, the Politieke Partij Radikalen [PPR € the Political Party of Radicals] lost less votes, among other things because they focused a lot of criticism on the PrdA's wish to rule the country jointly with the CDA.
The day after the elections, the index on the Amsterdam stock market went up by 12,000 million guilders. So the right sees the election results as a shot in the arm. Lubbers wants to finish his job, and now he can go about doing that.
But that does not mean that Lubbers can do whatever he likes. In recent years, at every turn the right had to face actions and resistance. As soon as a new economic recession hits and Lubbers drops his election promises, we can expect sharper and tougher confrontations. Even after this election victory, Lubbers won't be able to please everybody. A strong alternative to the right and to the PvdA must be built in the coming struggle. e right The CDU has lost ground in eight of them. The SPD has gained in eight, and the Greens likewise.
So, it is likely that the CDUFDP coalition will lose in the elections at the national level also. But this perspective also frightens the SPD, because the social democrats have little chance of winning an absolute majority. They would then have to form a coalition with the Greens, which is a pretty frightening prospect for the intrepid German social democrats.
As for the Greens, they are no angels either. Some of them are already thinking about the oppor tunities for them in government, while others shrink from the idea of providing ministers for the world's second greatest imperialist power.
All of this offers the prospect of quite a poker game in January.
Guy Hendrikx 13
PvdA 33.3
CDA 34.6
VVD 17.4
D 66 6.1