Dutch Political Scene: Why the Dutch need three months to form a government

Two weeks after the Dutch election, the politician leading talks to form a new coalition says it may take three months or more. But far-right leader Geert Wilders, whose party came second, is nowhere to be seen.

He may be the firebrand Dutch politician who dominated the country's most divisive election campaign in years, but Geert Wilders and his anti-immigration Party for Freedom (PVV) have no option but to watch from the sideline as four mainstream parties seek to build the Netherlands' next government.

Talks to form a new coalition, led by incumbent Prime Minister Mark Rutte, began immediately after the March 15 general election. But the main party leaders have refused to deal with the PVV, despite it winning the second-largest number of seats in parliament.

Since World War II, Dutch governments have taken an average of 72 days to be decided, compared to four to six weeks for a typical German coalition. The Dutch record is nearly seven months in 1977, but even that pales in comparison to its neighbor, Belgium, who after its 2010 election took 541 days to agree to a coalition.

Center-right politician Edith Schippers, whose job it is to achieve a new alliance to run the country, believes the new government won't be in place until July at the earliest. On Wednesday, she gave parliament a progress report on negotiations, warning that an agreement before Easter was "highly unlikely," Dutch public broadcaster NOS reported.

So why does coalition-building take so long in the Netherlands, especially when Wilders - the most divisive political player - is not participating?

"What makes it difficult is our truly multi-party parliament, with 13 parties now represented in the lower house," Professor Ruud Koole, a political scientist at Leiden University, told DW. He said Rutte's liberal People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) would not be content with a minority government.

"You don't really have big parties anymore that dominate a coalition. The VVD now needs three other parties to participate, and that takes a long time," Koole said.

Read more: Why the Dutch need three months to form a government | News | DW.COM | 30.03.2017

France: Marine Le Pen: Loans from Russia - Who's funding France's far right? - by Gabriel Gatehouse

Putin and LePen: Is LePen doing her banking in Russia ?

When Marine Le Pen appeared in the Kremlin on 24 March, it was Vladimir Putin himself who gave voice to the thought that was surely on many people's minds:

"I know that the presidential campaign is developing actively in France," the Russian president said, adding: "Of course, we do not want to influence events in any way."

The Russian president appeared to be suppressing a grin as he spoke those words. Marine Le Pen appeared unperturbed.

She repeated her support for Moscow's annexation of Crimea, and her opposition to the sanctions subsequently imposed by the EU. If elected to the Elysee Palace, she pledged: "I would envisage lifting the sanctions quite quickly."

So the meeting was a win for both. Madame Le Pen looked like a world-leader-in-waiting; Mr Putin received assurances from a woman who might become president of France, and who, like him, opposes the EU and Nato.

But there is more to the relationship between Mr Putin and Ms Le Pen than ideological convergence. Because of the National Front's racist and anti-Semitic past, French banks have declined to lend the party money.

So Marine Le Pen has been forced to look elsewhere for financing.

In 2014, the National Front took Russian loans worth €11m (£9.4m). One of the loans, for €9m, came from a small bank, First Czech Russian Bank, with links to the Kremlin.

The loan was brokered by Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, an energy consultant turned MEP, who has called himself "Mr Mission Impossible".

Read more: - by Gabriel GatehouseMarine Le Pen: Who's funding France's far right? - BBC News

Turkish Referendum: Turkish citizens living abroad have started voting at their Embassies and Consulates - by RM

Voting on referendum for Turks abroad  started March 27

Large numbers of Turks all over the world have started going  to the polls since March 27 to vote yes or no on a new Turkish Constitution,

This referendum which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is currently putting to vote around the world and in Turkey on April 16 will bring about a complete overhaul in the Turkish system of governance.

The change will abolish the office of the prime minister and concentrate dictatorial power in the president’s hands.

If the referendum is successful, Erdoğan could stay on as president not only for two terms, until 2029, but also uncontested.

Unfortunately, all opposition is just about wiped out, due to the systematic crackdown against any dissent in Turkey by President Erdogan.

Turks in Turkey today seem reluctant to protest this anti-democratic (Referendum) move.

In Turkey itself the Pew Research Center finds that on a number of issues, Turks are almost evenly split between those who are happy with Erdogan’s leadership and the state of the nation, and those who believe the former Istanbul mayor is leading the country down the wrong path. Overall, 44% are satisfied with the country’s direction, while 51% are dissatisfied. Half say the economy is doing well, while 46% think it is in bad shape. Forty-eight percent say Erdogan is having a good influence on the country, while  the same percentage believes he is having a negative impact.

Young and old taking their voting rights very serious

There are some 7 million Turks living outside Turkey, of which close to 5 million live in Europe, approximately half a million in the US, and about 44.000 in Canada. The rest are scattered  around the world

Given early exit polls, verified by EU-Digest, the yes vote in Europe is ahead by about 2 % , while in the US and Canada, which both have a larger number of higher educated and economically more prosperous Turks than in Europe, the no vote is ahead by close to 35 %

With Democracy seemingly  on the way out in Turkey it is remarkable, that when U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Turkey last week he failed to raise concerns that the country may be sliding toward a dictatorship and made no mention at all of mass arrests of protesters and the purge of opponents that followed last year’s failed coup attempt, or the crackdown on the news media.  Turkey now has more than half of the world’s journalists in jail.

Turkey is also  internally at war with the Kurds, which make up close to a quarter of its population,

As of today the Erdogan Government has dismissed over 130,000 people from their jobs and filled the prisons with them. Also some 6,300 academics were fired from their jobs, while fifteen universities were  closed.

Bottom-line, a win for NO in the referendum is probably the last chance for Turkey to reestablish a more positive image of the country abroad and the fact that Democracy there is not totally dead.  

EU-Digest

France- danger looms with LePen - Is Emmanuel Macron the new Napoleon Bonaparte of France? - "lets hope so" - by Dominique Moisi

Sixty years after the signing of the Treaty of Rome, France is poised to hold an election that could make or break the European Union.

A victory for the pro-EU independent centrist Emmanuel Macron could be a positive turning point, with France rejecting populism and deepening its connections with Germany. If, however, French voters hand the presidency to the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen – who was, tellingly, just warmly received by Vladimir Putin in Moscow – the long European project will be finished.

Clearly, this is no ordinary French election. With the EU’s survival on the line, the stakes are higher than in any election in the history of the Fifth Republic. So, does France’s nationalist, xenophobic right have a real chance of coming to power? 

Read the complete report View: Is Emmanuel Macron the new Napoleon Bonaparte of France?

World Soccer: The Netherlands isn't very good at soccer anymore — and for now, that's OK - by Leander Schaerlaeckens

If you had assumed that the Netherlands would just always be good at soccer, this was an understandable leap in logic to make. After all, the Dutch had been good for so long – pretty much continuously since the early 1970s – that it seemed a given, in spite of sourcing their national team from a population that only recently reached 17 million.

If you had assumed that the Netherlands would just always be good at soccer, this was an understandable leap in logic to make. After all, the Dutch had been good for so long – pretty much continuously since the early 1970s – that it seemed a given, in spite of sourcing their national team from a population that only recently reached 17 million.

But as the noted analytics maven Michael Caley points out, what’s actually noteworthy isn’t that the Dutch are now no longer good. What’s remarkable is that they didn’t turn bad sooner.

And for the record, they are now bad. While Oranje reached the semifinals of the World Cup for a second time in a row in 2014 – placing third in Brazil, four years after coming second in South Africa – things have spiraled hopelessly out of control since. Manager Louis van Gaal, the architect of the World Cup success with a tactical scheme that masked the issues of a lopsided team – brilliant in the attack; full of liabilities in defense – left for Manchester United and was succeeded by Guus Hiddink, an inspirational coach but famously a tactical lightweight.

Under Hiddink, the Dutch made a halting 3-2-1 (W-L-T) start to Euro 2016 qualifying before the veteran manager was fired. His successor, Danny Blind, has somehow had a 12-year run as either head coach or assistant manager of his old club and the national team, without ever demonstrating any particular aptitude for it. The Netherlands missed the Euros under him – even though it was expanded from 16 to 24 teams — coming fourth in a six-team group, behind Iceland, the Czech Republic and Turkey, respectively.

Blind was allowed to stay on, for some reason, and the side kept on stumbling, getting off to a 2-2-1 start to World Cup qualifying. The Dutch again sit in fourth place, below France, Sweden and Bulgaria – who comfortably won 2-0 at home against the three-time World Cup runners-up on Friday. Blind was fired on Sunday.

But while there are five more qualifiers to play, it already feels like it’s too late to recover and make it to Russia next summer. The play has been so poor that it simply seems unrealistic to climb above Sweden and even Bulgaria – which hasn’t been to a World Cup since 1998 – a sentiment only confirmed by the sad display in Tuesday’s 2-1 friendly loss to Italy, which isn’t exactly a world superpower at the moment either.

Just as problematically, there is no apparently good choice to replace Blind – who was appointed not just to assist Hiddink in 2014, but to succeed him after the Euros, a succession plan that looks ridiculously premature and hubristic in retrospect. The two best Dutch managers currently out there aren’t interested. Ronald Koeman wanted the job in 2014 but was only offered Blind’s assistant-successor arrangement. He turned it down and has since thrived with Southampton and Everton in the Premier League. Frank de Boer wants to make amends on the club level after flaming out with Inter Milan, following a wildly successful spell at Ajax.

Louis van Gaal has demurred on a return – he’d rather run the entire federation instead. Which leaves the 69-year-old Dick Advocaat as the least uninspired of the Dutch options, although neither of his two previous spells as Holland manager lived up to expectations – a quarterfinal finish at the ’94 World Cup and a semifinal berth at Euro ’04, when more was expected.

Alternatively, the country that once consistently produced some of the best managers in the sport would have to go with a foreigner – in itself an indictment on the state of the Dutch game.

Either way, the material at the new boss’s disposal is limited in every line. And this is the crux of the problem. The golden generation that played from Euro ’96 through the 2006 World Cup was succeeded by the foursome of Robin van Persie, Arjen Robben, Wesley Sneijder and Rafael van der Vaart, whose transcendent attacking talents compensated for the dearth of decent defenders.

The Netherlands isn't very good at soccer anymore — and for now, that's OK

The Netherlands: What to Expect from Right-Green Coalition in Netherlands – by Nick Ottens

The Green party in the Netherlands has agreed to start negotiations to form a government with the center-right
.
Coalition talks could take months. The four prospective ruling parties have many differences to bridge.

The Greens want to raise taxes on pollution; Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s liberals want to build more roads. The Greens want to shrink the income gap; the liberals want to cut high taxes and social insurance costs.

The Christian Democrats and liberal Democrats are close in terms of economic policy but miles apart on cultural issues. The former have called for a mandatory national service; the latter want to legalize certain drugs and expand euthanasia rights.

Nevertheless, there may be enough common ground for an accord.

The national broadcaster NOS compared the election manifestos of the four parties and found that they all favor comprehensive tax reform, including lower income tax rates.

They all want to invest in security. The Greens would prefer to spend more on developmental aid than defense, but, after decades of cuts and in light of (unfortunately) American pressure, higher military spending seems inevitable.

All four parties also want to spend more on elderly care and lower the health insurance deductible.

Read more: Nick Ottens What to Expect from Right-Green Coalition in Netherlands – Atlantic Sentinel

Trump Administration Is Threat To EU Survival-"The Man Who Has Ear Of US Presiden Wants EU To Fail"-by M. Crowley

Trump and Bannon: A major threat to the EU

Europeans are starting to worry that Steve Bannon has the EU in his cross hairs. - and they should be. Here’s how the White House could pull it apart.

Bannon emerged into the national spotlight as CEO of Donald Trump’s struggling presidential campaign. Bannon was an executive at Breitbart News, an activist-editor-gadfly known mostly on the far right, and the “Brexit” campaign was something of a pet project. He hitched onto the Tea Party movement early in Barack Obama’s presidency and noticed a similar right-populist wave rising across the Atlantic, where fed-up rural, white Britons were anxious about immigration and resentful of EU bureaucrats.

 The cause touched on some of Bannon’s deepest beliefs, including nationalism, Judeo-Christian identity and the evils of Big Government. In early 2014, Bannon launched a London outpost of Breitbart, opening what he called a new front “in our current cultural and political war.” The site promptly began pointing its knives at the EU, with headlines like “The EU Is Dead, It Just Refuses to Lie Down”; “The European Union’s Response to Terrorism Is a Massive Privacy Power Grab”; “Pressure on Member States to Embrace Trans Ideology.” One 2014 article invited readers to vote in a poll among “the most annoying European Union rules.”

Bannon’s site quickly became tightly entangled with the United Kingdom Independence Party, a fringe movement with the then-outlandish goal of Britain’s exit from the EU. In October 2014, UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, poached a Breitbart London editor to work for him. That September, Bannon hosted a dinner for Farage at his Capitol Hill townhouse. Standing under a large oil painting by the fireplace, Farage delivered a speech that left the dozens of conservative leaders in attendance “blown away,” as Bannon later recalled.

On June 23 of last year, Britons defied the pleas of Europe’s political elites and narrowly voted for Brexit. Many observers called it the most traumatic event in the history of a union whose origins date to the 1950s. Suddenly the future of all Europe, whose unity America had spent the decades since World War II cultivating, lay in doubt. It was the next day that Bannon hosted Farage for a triumphal edition of his daily radio show.

“The European Union project has failed,” Farage declared. “It is doomed, I’m pleased to say.”

“It’s a great accomplishment,” Bannon said. “Congratulations.”

Bannon now works in the West Wing as President Donald Trump’s top political adviser. He is, by all accounts, the brains of Trump’s operation—a history-obsessed global thinker whose vision extends far beyond Trump’s domestic agenda and Rust Belt base. Bannon co-wrote Trump’s “America First” inauguration speech, which hinted at a new world order, and will join the president’s National Security Council—apparently the first political adviser to get a permanent seat in the president’s Situation Room. And while commentators are focusing on Bannon’s views about nationalism here in the United States, his public comments and interviews with several people who know him make clear that, even as he helps Trump “make America great again,” he has his sights set on a bigger target across the Atlantic Ocean. IT IS THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EU HIS SIGHT IS SET ON

Donald Trump’s transition team denied scheduling the French nationalist Marine Le Pen’s visit to the Trump Tower café in January. But she met Guido Lombardi, an informal liaison between Trump and the European far-right, who claims Bannon gave his blessing.

Breitbart often sets Frauke Petry, the leader of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party, as a foil to Angela Merkel. “The achievements of the Reformation and Enlightenment are endangered,” Petry told Breitbart, arguing that defending immigrants has become a new religion in Europe—and echoing Bannon’s own defense of the Judeo-Christian West.

Geert Wilders—the leader of the Dutch far-right Party for Freedom, which increased his seats in the last Dutch parliamentary elections, has contributed articles to Breitbart—such as “Britain Is The Brexit Pioneer and Others Will Follow” and “Muslims, Leave Islam, Opt for Freedom!” He was also the keynote speaker at Breitbart’s “Gays for Trump” party at the Republican National Convention in July.

Breitbart has covered Italy’s Beppe Grillo and his nationalist movement with articles like “After Brexit and Trump, Italy’s Five-Star-Movement May Be The Next Surprise.” Grillo called Trump’s victory an “extraordinary turning point” for global populism, and he expects Italy will follow.

In 2012, Nigel Farage accepted Bannon’s invitation to meet in Washington, where Bannon introduced the U.K. Independence Party leader to like-minded individuals. Farage became a regular on Bannon’s radio show, and defended critics who called Bannon anti-Semitic, telling Breitbart that the attacks amounted to “demonization.”

 
“Bannon hates the EU,” says Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart writer who split with Bannon last year but who shares the sentiment. “He figures it’s mainly an instrument for globalism—as opposed to an instrument for the bettering of Western civilization.”

“What we understand from Bannon is that the EU is abhorrent,” one Western European government official told me.

The idea that one man could threaten the European project might sound extreme. And it would be an exaggeration to say that even the full-throated support of Breitbart London was what tipped the scales toward Brexit. But having the ear of the president of the United States is different—and the question of just what Bannon plans to do with his influence has become a huge preoccupation of diplomats, European government officials and experts on the venerable trans-Atlantic relationship. In more than a dozen interviews, they recounted a creeping sense of dread about the very specific ways Bannon could use American power like a crowbar to pull the EU apart.

“The European Union is under serious threat,” Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister and now a senior EU official, told a London audience in late January. Its enemies, he said, now include Trump—thanks in large part to “the enormous influence of his chief political adviser, Mr. Bannon.”

Since the election, European officials have been combing the internet, including Breitbart’s archives, for clues to Bannon’s worldview and how he might counsel Trump. And what they’re finding is stoking their deepest anxieties. “They have a deep well of psychological reliance on the American-led order,” says Jeremy Shapiro, a Hillary Clinton State Department official now at the European Council on Foreign Relations in London. Now they’re bracing for an American assault on that order.

Europe as we know it has never been more vulnerable to such an assault. Economic malaise and high debt are testing the EU’s financial structures and pitting its members against one another. So is the historic influx of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Nationalist parties and candidates hostile to the Union are ascendant in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands—all of which are set to hold elections this year. Russia, which may stand to gain the most from a disunited Europe, is gleefully aiding the process by disrupting Europe’s domestic politics with propaganda and hacking meant to discredit the pro-EU establishment.

The EU better be on high alert to this threat  and be prepared to react immediately when needed  

Read more:The Man Who Wants to Unmake the West: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the EU - POLITICO Magazine