Crise de régime °

J'ai lu dans le NRC un article vraiment intéressant sur la crise de régime que connaît les Pays-Bas.
Le lien du texte en anglais: http://www.nrc.nl/thema/artikel/1119590022899.html

Il y est dit que la préférence du peuple va plutôt vers un modèle de type scandinave, avec une répartition plus harmonieuse des richesses et un Etat protecteur (quite à payer beaucoup d'impôts). Et ne voilà-t-il pas que le gouvernement au pouvoir depuis 2003 fait l'exact contraire? Après avoir ignoré la tendance des urnes?
On se retrouve exactement comme en France, où un président incompétent a été réélu par erreur (alors que son score au premier tour était minable) s'appuyant sur une assemblée dont la majorité est artificielle (ah, ce système électoral!) et un Sénat ultra-conservateur ne représentant que lui-même, et vient de nommer un premier ministre qu'il n'a jamais affronté une seule élection et dont le ministre de l'intérieur surfe sur le populisme xénophobe pour asseoir son ambition personnelle...

Qu'on ne vienne pas s'étonner que les deux référendums se soient soldés par un "non" aussi massif (je rappelle que j'étais pour le "oui" et que l'ampleur du non et la défiance de la classe moyenne m'ont surpris).
Allez, en cadeau, le texte de van Eijk...

Happily ever after?
The massive support for Pim Fortuyn and the clear 'no' to the European Constitution are symptoms of Dutch discomfort.
Dick van Eijk

The Netherlands were only a few steps away from paradise in the second half of the nineties. The country in crisis of only a couple of years before had turned itself into one of the world's most competitive economies, with growth rates at the high end of the OECD countries. In six years 1.2 million new jobs were created, an increase of 20 percent. Prime minister Wim Kok was invited to explain the benefits of the Dutch system - the so-called polder model - all over the world, even in the White House. How hard to imagine these days.It was not only in economic statistics that the country deserved an A+. Its citizens were quite satisfied as well. In 1998 an astonishing 80 percent was satisfied about the government, and 67 percent thought government agencies did a good job, according to surveys by SCP, the Social and Cultural Planning Office. The Netherlands are being regarded a high-trust society in aninternational perspective, but even then thesefigures are exceptional.They did not last long, however. With hindsight, the slight loss of trust in the government measured in the year 2000 (from 80 to 77 percent) may be seen as an early warning for the landslide that was to come. But hardly anyone interpreted it this way. The next year saw therise of Pim Fortuyn who in 2002, a week after his assassination, got 1.6 million votes in the parliamentary elections. Never in history had thevested political interests been given such a tremendous blow. Consecutively trust in thegovernment plummeted to 35 percent in 2002 and to a mere 13 percent in 2005. What happened to this high-trust society?In December 2002, NRC Handelsblad reporters set out to interview one hundred citizens in depth about both their satisfactions and dis-satisfactions of the past year. Some interviewees were given more than two hours to make their points. The results were an eye-opener to many. Asked what made them happy, people generally recalled events in their private lives, like the birth of a child, a move to a new house or an exciting holiday. Sometimes they named their work. But practically everyone referred to matters that state or government could not influence directly. Government affairs did not please them.Government could, however, upset them.Asked about major disappointments, they mentioned personal events like losses of loved ones and job redundancies of course, but also many events and developments in the public sphere. Muslim immigrants did not want to adapt to Dutch culture, for instance. Plans existed to abolish pre-pension schemes and other changes had been announced affecting social security. Politicians were too stubborn or unwilling to listen or just generally upsetting. This makes it understandable that the large biannual survey of the state of the nation published by SCP in 2004showed that people were experiencing highlevels of satisfaction in their private lives but had severe complaints about society as a whole. They did not share the choices made by the cabinet and the political and business elite.The current Dutchgovernment, like its predecessor, supports a clear neo-liberal policy, as do governments of many other European countries. Competition is welcome in fields where it was previously absent,like health care, edu-cation, utilities and pub- lic transport. Citizens are expected to bear more responsibility for their own situations. Apart from the fact that these policies do not always work well, the population does not support the direction of these initiatives. A substantial majority desires a more compassionate society, a society with more solidarity and mutual support. It wants a government that takes responsibility instead of leaving so much to individual choice.Research by the Dutch economist Geert Hofstede may shed some light on this. Hofstede compared the cultural values of nations, based on extensive surveys all over the world. He clust-ered nations using their cultural values and put the Netherlands in the Scandinavian cluster.Like the Scandinavians, the Dutch have a relatively feminine - 'soft' - culture, with a smallpower distance.Even though culturally the Dutch may feel related to the Scandinavians, institutionally they have gone their own way. The Dutch model does not fit closely into models of welfare statesdescribed by the Danish political scientist Gøsta Esping-Andersen in Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. It combines aspects of the social-democratic model of the Scandinavians, the corporat-ism of the Germans and the liberalism of theAnglo-Saxons. Since about 1995, the political and business elite has been trying to drag the country towards the Anglo-Saxon model. There have been several clashes between the right-wing cabinets, both current and previous, and the unions and employers' organisations that prefer a more corporatist approach and arefighting to maintain their influence. The population at large prefers a Scandinavian model.It is easy to see how such fundamental differ-ences in outlook on the future of the welfare state and of society as a whole lead to political conflict. Such intrinsic principles of society have not been at stake in this way for decades. But these political clashes are not localised in parliament. Because none of the three majorpolitical parties - Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Liberal Conservatives - has advocated the approach preferred by citizens, they have been left feeling there is no way to get their views represented adequately in parliament. Supply and demand on the political market are clearly unbalanced.Apart from concerns for the future of the wel-fare state, something else has to be taken into account to understand the current state of affairs in the country: culture. In a survey on the day of the referendum, voters said that the most important motive for their 'no' had to do with Dutch identity. They felt the Dutch were losing power over their own country. The politics of identity does not have much recent history in the Netherlands. Some small, extreme right wing parties made Dutch identity an issue in the 1980s and early 1990s, but they never gained substantial popular support. Pim Fortuyn was the first to do this. But chaos rapidly overcame the party he had established, leaving the new identity-politics bereft. Since then, the question of what it means to be Dutch has occupied public debate in books, on op-ed pages, during interviews and in forum discussions in all sorts ofmedia. These debates have given rise to stricter obligations of immigrants to learn Dutch and acquire knowledge of Dutch society, but have not been translated further into politics. It may be possible to be and feel Dutch in European society or even in a European state, but no one so far has created a model for this.