2023-11-19 10:27:26
Election posters at the Binnenhof, the historic parliamentary center in The Hague. Image: Klaus Max Smolka
The Netherlands will vote on Wednesday: Germany’s third most important trading partner, the EU’s fifth largest economy. New parties are reorganizing the bourgeois camp.
The Binnenhof in The Hague currently presents a sad picture: construction fences and panels shield the centuries-old parliament complex. Anyone who looks at the construction site in front of the west entrance to the monument to William the Second will be rudely chased away. In 2021, members of the Second Chamber moved into “B67”, a brutalist office building just under a kilometer away. While the work on the Binnenhof will take more years than hoped, the legislative period has once again been shortened: the four-party coalition collapsed in July, and next Wednesday Dutch citizens will cast their vote for the Second Chamber, which is part of the German Bundestag corresponds.
A few days before the vote, the new political party “New Social Contract” (NSC) under the former Christian Democrat Pieter Omtzigt and the ruling right-wing liberal party of outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, which is now heading into the election under the leadership of top candidate Dilan Yeşilgöz, are leading in the polls. Both can currently count on just under a fifth of the votes. The Social Democrats and the Greens have formed an electoral alliance, but so far they have only come in third place. The left-wing alliance had pinned its hopes not only on pooling forces, but also on its leading candidate, former EU Commissioner Frans Timmermans.
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