Dutch Elections: Yet More Evidence for the End of Social Democracy in Europe?

The outcome of the Dutch election is being hailed by Europe’s left-of-center elites as signaling a resounding pushback to far-right race-focused populism. This analysis promises a false dawn.

True, the ethnonationalists are not yet taking over. But what we are seeing is the end of the political effectiveness of the promises of social democratic parties in the Netherlands and pretty much all of Europe, including Germany.

It is becoming ever clearer that, following the end of communism and the (temporary) triumph of liberal globalization after 1990, they are the big losers.

Not just Geert Wilders lost…

Even if working-class voters still hesitate to turn to the false prophets of racial purity and closed borders economics, they have given up hope on the promises of the social democratic parties.

One of Europe’s best social democratic politicians this century, Franz Timmermans, has just thrown in the towel at age 64 as his party opts for an uncertain, if not unknown future.

In past decades, his Dutch Labor Party (PvdA) had produced a raft of prime ministers.

The vanishing of the base

Europe’s white working class which formed the support base for democratic left-of-center politics between 1920 and 2000 has vanished. It was based on battalions of men who fought in two world wars and rebuilt Europe between 1950 and 1980.

The white working-class vote that emerged from two world wars and forced employers who needed their skills and hard work to concede good pay, time for family life, as well as old age care and treatment has disappeared. Trade union membership in Europe in the private sector has dropped to single figures. 

How public-sector workers are selling out the rest of the population

Trade unions today represent public sector workers. Those unions no longer confront capitalist bosses. Instead, they confront the public at large — hardly a proper anti-capitalist target.

These unions go on strike, disrupting the very public services that private-sector workers rely on and expect — and certainly pay high taxes and fees to cover the demands of those public-sector unions.

It does not help that public-sector workers are fully protected from the ravages of a global economy. Today, production is overwhelmingly based in China, which factually exports unemployment to Europe or North America, leading to lots of private-sector stresses.

No green option for the Social Democrats

Timmermans and his PvdA had tried to win votes by merging with the Green Party. That move was considered politically credible given Timmermans’ prominent role as the main European Commission official pushing the Green Deal during Ursula von der Leyen’s first term in Brussels.

It flopped. Green politics is largely a working-class voter turn-off. The members of the professional class can afford Teslas, use bikes or work from home. 

That is not true for working-class citizens who start their shifts at 5 a.m. and have to ferry their children around or bring home food from big supermarket shops. They need cars.

Low-income workers chained to automobiles for work and family viscerally resent being told they are destroying the environment while university graduate activists go off on planes to conferences in agreeable places or fly off on nice holidays.

No large base for a post-material, post-national culture society

In the Netherlands as elsewhere in Europe, the increase in volume and velocity of migrants arriving from nations with no cultural affinity with European norms, values or faiths represents a significant political problem.

It is telling that the nearly unlimited tolerance for low-skill immigration on the political left is accompanied by “progressives” not having a labor market policy for their traditional white working-class voter base.

In particular, there are no smart and effective programs for untrained youngsters not going to university.

The remarkable political silence of the progressives

Merely appearing (!) progressive by not even addressing the difficulties related to the absorption of such a volume of people from abroad does not substitute for the absence of credible labor market policies.

It is also definitely not progressive to turn it into a political doctrine to be consistently mum about very “anti-progressive” social norms and practices in one’s own Muslim communities.

Conclusion

That Rob Jetten, the Dutch election winner, now wants to focus more on expanding housing, is at least a first step toward dealing with challenging social and cultural realities.

But he is not a Social Democrat.