The King’s Speech

I also don’t know enough about Dutch politics to comment intelligently, but I’d be surprised if having a king announce that everyone else has to have a lower standard of living is good politics. Maybe that’s my American bias…

England, anyway.

“King Willem-Alexander has made his first annual appearance before parliament one to remember, with a speech effectively announcing the end of the generous Dutch welfare state”

Hopefully he’ll start by cutting his own “welfare”. I’m not going to hold my breath, though

Which would you rather have as your populist alternative to traditional parties, UKIP or the SNP? They’re very different.

describing them as populist alternatives to the traditional Westminster parties doesn’t seem too wide of the mark.

Popular, yes. But “populist” really is wide of the mark. SNP isn’t particularly anti-elite or anti-EU or anti-immigrant or nativist or the product of mass disillusionment with politicians. It doesn’t market itself as somehow a “politician-free” party, in the way that UKIP does. It’s not talking about the need to destroy the welfare state in the name of reform. It’s not a new arrival on the political scene in Scotland and its rise to success has not been a consequence of the recession.

Isnt the problem in the Dutch party sytem that they dont have any established parties? The ones called established are somewhat older – but they have no roots in society, with many party members the way the CDU/CSU or SPD has in Germany.

To 4: Those linear population trends based on current birthrates are getting boring, no matter in which direction a catastroph is projected, be it overpopulation or no population at all.

It interests me that the first link takes me to a story about pot. As a failed link it supplies its own reason.

the King is really a red herring in this story — the real issue is what is happening with the Dutch welfare state. And from what we see and know, the signs are not good at all. There are cuts in many forms of care – including 15% in ‘Jeugdzorg’ which are the child protection agencies and child psychiatric care. The voters are widely disillusioned with the social-democrats, since they are not behaving like an equal partner in the coalition with the conservative-liberals and hence the latter are heavily dominating the policies. Two (I believe) MP of the Social Democrats have already quitted parliament after declaring that they cannot fight for the values and ideals for which they entered parliamentary politics. In the meantime the coalition is about to decide on buying a dozen or so (or even much more, I can’t recall and am in a rush) JSF military planes (which are hugely expensive) and is seriously investigating fracking as an ‘alternative’ source of energy. Most economists say the macropolicies should be focussing on investing, structural reforms and regaining consumer trust — and not on austerity measures, but that’s exactly what they do.

So, unfortunately, it is true: no good news from the Netherlands – at least not from Dutch politics.

Across a number of countries (Greece being another obvious example), it seems like there is a question of whether it is possible to salvage the traditional social democratic parties from the embrace of market liberalism, or whether it is better to try for a populist alternative (Syriza). I’d be interested in links, thoughts on this.

I’d appreciate a thumbnail sketch of what “populist” means in a Dutch (or other European) context, in contra-distinction to liberal or social democratic.

WEU@16 –
Yes, Liz occasionally struggled a bit to present those speeches written for her by Maggie. IIRC the body language of one in particular attracted some comment (Liz and Maggie, of course, famously did not like each other).

@22,21: so far populist generally referred to anti-immigration views, yes, but the other meaning that PvdA member Cuperus is relying on to ‘explain’ the SP with is populist as referring to pie-in-the-sky thinking. (It’s the same thing the PvdA was charged with for decades until they started to neoliberalize.) Having said that, I find the picture Cuperus draws of the dutch situation uninformative to the point of inanity, which I suspect it is either for political purposes, or because he really is blind.

First off, I would point out that a lot of the ‘experimentation’ that happened in the past happened during times in which the PvdA was not ruled by neoliberal technocrats.
Secondly, Cuperus’s refusal to say that a lot of the problems that we see now are being caused by the creation of the Eurozone (given that he complains about how hard it is to “sell a happy story about europe”) suggests he is suffering from extreme forms of myopia. A large driver of the housing price bubble/boom was the fact that, due to the privatization (and subsequent mismanagement) of the housing corporations, way too little building of additional affordable housing was happening. This forced a lot of people to buy who otherwise probably never would have, which of course made the banks very happy. The housing bubble was cheered on by a feckless (and even when they hadn’t been, powerless) Central Bank, in close coordination with the Finance ministry, under a succession of governments that often included the PvdA (with a labor finance minister, too). Other privatizations have of course also led to substantial cost-of-living increases. (One of the most visible examples here is probably the privatization of day care institutions, though in terms of cost increases the changes to the way our health insurance system works are probably the most important.)

An important driver of all of these changes has been the PvdA, which started being ruled by cheery neoliberals under Wim Kok, when he became vice-PM and minister of finance under Lubbers in 1986. It is not entirely clear to me to what extent the party has supported neoliberalization because it believed in them, and to what extent it did so because it no longer served as a counterweight to the VVD, but apart from the occasional, and largely consequence-free ‘i have seen the light’ speech (f.i. from Wouter Bos, when he ‘left politics’ to get rich consulting) about how the party should really ‘return to its social roots’, the party leadership has been remarkably successful in keeping discipline, as hardly any major figures have left the party for ideological reasons.

Cuperus also mentions how ‘well’ Germany is doing; for people who can read dutch I would recommend this article, which provides a much-needed antidote to the cheering of the German situation. To sum up, the Hartz reforms have mostly served to define away the problem of unemployment, but have not led to meaningful increases in quality of life (or internal demand). As such, I wonder how viable the German situation really is.

It should be noted (#1, #5) that the occasion was quite similar to the opening of parliament in the UK in that the speech (content wise) was written by the (right wing liberal) Prime minister, who said very similar things in a speech the week before. It was not the personal opinion of the King (though he may have agreed with it).

(Until I read this) I didn’t (even) think (it was (possible (to type (with a (LISP))))).

WEU@16,

It’s probably my Americanness–I’ve never seen one of these speeches–but I don’t get it. Surely a king has freedom of speech. Why on earth would they let a prime minister dictate a speech to them that they did not agree with? If the king hates the PM’s policies, why not just have the king open with generic platitudes and nationalist talk and then have the PM do a follow-up speech presenting his plans himself?

I guess it’s tradition but it doesn’t seem like PMs have any leverage to force fealty to that tradition. I guess a radical leftist government could threaten to revoke the monarch’s privileges but conservatives could never make that threat credibly. Are these monarchs trying to maintain the pretense that the government’s policy is dictated by the king, so the king will present it, and never admit that he disagrees with it in any way?

This is not an out of the blue speech by the king. It’s the yearly speech that accompanies the proposed new budget of the government. Having the king read it is purely ceremonial. Similar to how the US state of the union is a big event with spectators, even though they could just put the text on a website and be done with it.

Also, the king does not have simple freedom of speech. This is formally a tricky matter. The ministers are responsible for the king’s actions, so the king is in some abstracted sense above the law, but in the legal system is taken to mean that the king cannot do or say anything controversial. It’s a somewhat grey legal area, never pushed hard by the royal family.

In practice the king simply cannot go against the government’s wishes. Implicitly, the system assumes that the monarchy will be disbanded or reformed if the king would test the formal powers they still have left. Something like that actually happened in Belgium: the king refused to sign an abortion law, was removed, the law was signed, and the king reinstated. The dutch royal family has a lot stronger place in society than the Belgium royals, and it’s highly unlikely they would threaten that position with a similar action.

There’s a yearly Christmas speech where the king can give a personal view on the country. The previous queen would sometimes push the limits here on neutrality, but in a very roundabout way.

#32 I prefer to think my “incoherence” is born of my Republican (Spanish meaning) bias. It may be his job; I want his job to disappear from Earth.

@34: I just googled him a bit, and it seems he contributed to a recently released book with the ambitious critical title ‘de politiek vd Euro/the politics of the Euro’; so it seems likely that he is familiar with its flaws. I can’t access the book contents online though, so I don’t know what he thinks is the problem. None of the insights in the book are particularly new, though, so it seems to me that the WBS is a bit late to the party, regardless of how interesting the book may be. But better late than never, I suppose.
And from what little else I can find of his output, it doesn’t seem as though he was writing/preaching very hard about the whole eurozone/maastricht issue, given that most of the publications listed discuss party-political considerations and issues. His volkskrant output is equally bland and middle of the road.

Anyway, assuming for the moment that he indeed understands the flaws, I have two questions for him: 1, related to the article linked to above, is why does he choose for this style of argumentation, which strikes me as elitist, as well as counterproductive? It seems to allow him to seem in-the-know in the eyes of cognescenti, whilst keeping anyone who doesn’t already have access to the same information in the dark. Why on earth is it that the naming, and discussion of the specific flaws of the Maastricht treaty is being left to closed-doors discussions, where apparently not even a closed community such as ‘Policy Network’ isn’t sufficiently private that he feels free to explicitly identify problems? (In this light, consider his remarks in <a href=http://www.socialistenendemocraten.nl/nieuws/2012/10/Partijlid-over-Europa-Rene-Cuperusthis article, where he paints the same neat and wrong, straw-man dichotomy between eurosceptics and europhiles that I see every establishmentarian doing.)
#2: why doesn’t he seem to be talking anywhere about the role the PvdA played in all of this? Is loyalty to the party more important to him than making party members, as well as prospective members, understand what kind of party they are or will be voting for? Does he consider it too boring or too difficult for “ordinary people” to understand and weigh such information (see elitism), or did he just not want to lose his job at the WBS?

I haven’t voted in a Dutch election in a while and as such have not paid much attention to the politics. I did not expect anything to change for the foreseeable future and apparently nothing really did.

The political class still cares very well for its own, the difference between the traditional parties are symbolic at best, and the extremes do not offer a viable alternative. That and all parties are either for devolving more responsibility to the EU even though there exists little to no accountability at that level, or against devolving more responsibility to the EU but take an inhumane view on immigration.

I would very much like to see a liberal party in the Netherlands, but apparently there is no demand for it from the voters or it is difficult to find those voters. What I would also like to see is that if you voice criticism of the EU or on how immigration has gone in the Netherlands, that you’re not branded as “afraid” or “reactionary” or whatever ad hominem is in vogue nowadays to dismiss critics.

When you ‘liberal’, what do you have in mind? I am honestly wondering what style of liberalism is not yet covered somewhere between Vvd, d66 and the liberal wings of PvdA or GroenLinks.

You think Rutte would, personally, disagree much with anything on that list?

I don’t know him personally, so I don’t know whether he would. All I can see is what his party does and judge accordingly.

I don’t see the immigration policy of the VVD or this cabinet as particularly friendly towards immigrants. And as for the EU and the eurozone, the VVD seems to do systematically the opposite of what it promises. Do you remember when Rutte said during the election debate that no further penny would go to Greece? After the elections were over… well let’s say he was not completely honest about what he meant by that.

That said, there are more problems with the VVD than just those areas. It’s a liberal party in name only. For example, the mortgage interest deduction and all the policies associated with it are ridiculous. I don’t see what is so liberal about that. Neither do I see what is so liberal about our health insurance. It seems to finance mostly expenditure that people expect to make and when cuts need to be made, the proposals are such to make those at the expense of those people with the rarest of diseases (e.g. Ziekte van Pompe).

@36: it is explicit, yes, but it paints the picture as though the Euro is the only problem; which it isn’t. And he paints the problem as following from elite failure, which is a horribly misleading explanation of how and why the Euro was adopted, and why it was institutionalized the way it was.

Not having any feel for it, I wonder how much the creation of the Euro and the push for austerity was intended by at least some of the involved parties to have this effect. Or are they all just misguided?

Ajay @32: ” the monarch is supposed to be above party politics”

That’s what I mean though. It seems like the King here is doing just the opposite: taking an ideological stance with this participatory society crap.

I suspect he believes what he said. Probably he wouldn’t have said it without the PM’s support, and maybe he wouldn’t have come up with those words, but I bet in this guy’s head he’s thinking the same old “the rich deserve what they have, the poor should fend for themselves” bs the spoiled rich have always thought. If the PM had written him a speech saying, “Due to social developments such as globalisation and an ageing population, our labour market and public services are no longer suited to the demands of the times. We must forge a participatory society through the nationalization of all industry and confiscation of fortunes above 1 million euroes,” he wouldn’t have delivered it.

mpowell @ 47: . . . how much . . . was intended . . . ?

The political question of our times.

It seems like the King here is doing just the opposite: taking an ideological stance with this participatory society crap.

You are fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of a constitutional monarchy. They read what they are given to read – it’s not their words.

It’s the nature of the delicate balance between Monarch and government. Theoretically and ritually, the monarch has enormous power. Practically, they mustn’t ever wield it, since to do so would provoke a constitutional crisis, which would not end well for the monarch that broke the rules. They may be inbred leeches on society, but they’re not that stupid.

BW @ 51: It is an interesting question for sure Of course, if you talk to average euro citizens or read publications, they really don’t seem to have an appreciation for the difficulties with macro management that the single currency has created. On the intellectual side, a lot of it seems like defiance of all the US economists who told them the euro wasn’t an optimal currency area. On the populist front, it seems like people really think that aggressive monetary policy will deliver inflation and no more employment. So I think it’s hardly to rule out that ‘mostly just misguided’ is more or less correct.

Symbolically, European institutions have been associated with progress, and in the European south the Euro seemed like the ticket out of petty political corruption, and into the 1st world of institutions that worked. The politics of the euro is entangled with general institutional reform & probity in the public mind across Europe, and that association is a siamese twin to contempt for national politicians. In Greece, it is impossible to summon a nationalism to respond to the country’s travails without reviving the civil war. In Italy, the quicksand of Berlusconi sucks everything into the sink. In Spain, Catalonian independence comes to the fore.

NL is one of those 1st tier countries that the Med periphery hoped to emulate, but it is near the economic cliff. The technics of economics matter, but the megarich hired Olli Rehn (and Ben Bernanke) when no one was paying attention. C seemed like Maureen Dowd, but in some weird way he got the main thrust. Somewhere, maybe, there’s a new Marx to shred the ideological curtain.

The Left — any Left — needs a theory plus a devil. They lack a theory, I think.

The Left lacks a coherent theory of money, and that’s a particular problem with the Euro. The other day on Naked Capitalism, yves had some numbskull advocating a $60 trillion platinum coin for Obama’s debt ceiling debacle. 200+ years ago the French Revolution foundered on the unwillingness of the lawyers to distribute bread or institute a central bank.

@57: Bruce, the fact that you dislike PCS doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be legal; that aside, the issue isn’t that the left needs a theory, but that Obama wants those debt ceiling crises in order to be able to enact his grand bargaining away of social security for “prudence’s sake”.

Excellent discussion here. To Dutchie’s comment on the end of the Dutch progressive era, that certainly seems broadly right, but it is interesting to think about how much recent developments have been driven by unpredictable personal factors. Had Roemer done better in the debates in August 2012, had Samsom done worse, had Tofik Dibi not decided to destroy GroenLinks, etc. Of course these may be only symptoms of basic weaknesses in left-wing parties. It is notable that Geert Wilders, who seemed a year ago to have failed to take leadership on the anti-EU and anti-austerity issues away from the Socialists, now clearly seems to have done so.

While commenters above have mentioned i) current Eurozone politics and ii) the longer term trend of a social-democratic party embracing market liberalism, what I find most terrifying is the rise of the populist far-right. I thought I grew up in a sensible country: now vast sections of it seem to have been carted off into the Murdochverse, admiring and voting for a range of trolls and orcs. The speed and scope of the process has been utterly alienating.

Well, its not the Murdochverse precisely, it’s different in many ways, but in answer to Bruce Wilders question @21, I would say that NL right-wing “populism” reminds me of the UK Murdochverse, but having adapted to the local cultural characteristics. Left-wing “populism” is basically “Old Labour”, which got abandoned when the social democratic parties went “New Labour”. In PR voting systems, this means that another party took over that part of the vote. However, Labour, Old and New, has been structurally weakened and the Right is now structurally stronger, having captured much of Labour’s voting base.

Foppe @ 59 I don’t “dislike” the platinum coin solution, per se, and the legality is not an issue for me. Proposing a $60 trillion coin, and the elimination of the marketable national debt, seemed more like a cry for help from a lunatic than an economic theory.

I agree that Obama wants the political theatre of the debt ceiling fight, but that political theatre, for all sides, rests on vague premises about what constitutes good and responsible economic governance. Theatre is drama and drama is about the moral character of actors and actions, and our emotional reactions to them, reactions as rehearsed as the doings of the actors. The political theatre of the debt ceiling fight has been set up and prepared by years of propaganda, shaping the audience’s responses in ways that favor outcomes desired by one or another faction of the kleptocratic rich.

I think the platinum coin — a collection of coins totaling a modest $2 or $4 trillion — might actually be a sensible economic policy, one element of a pivot away from a policy of transforming fraudulent private debt into the full faith and credit of public debt. Aggressive extinction of bad debts, counterbalanced by aggressive fiscal spending on re-structuring the economy, and refurbishing its public goods, would make sense in our circumstances. (Hell on the mega-rich and their banksters, though.) My seeing that clearly, and the general public adopting that interpretation, however, are widely separated.

There’s a tiny faction of the blogospheric left, which likes the PCS as a deus ex machina to escape the debt ceiling drama, but such an artifice in politics as in theatre, tends to fall flat, because it is not emotionally satisfying or convincing. People — the general public — wouldn’t know what to make of it. It’s quite possible that its actual implementation, without preparation of the mind, would set off a general panic of a very destructive kind. And, it doesn’t address the core problem of who is in power — Obama would still be Obama, Bernanke would still be Bernanke (or Yellen, which might not be that different).

To bring this back to the topic of the OP, Europe is trapped by its institutional commitments to the Euro, in a similar sort of pathological political drama. The liberals, the conservatives and the authoritarian right are all empowered to push their most destructive agendas, with the cover story that they are pushing necessary institutional reforms, probity in budgeting, good government, accommodation and adjustment to emerging realities (aka unappeasable gods, like globalization and an aging population, as cited in the King’s Speech). They cannot be accused of “intending” anything, least of all stealing the future and robbing the poor to enrich parasitic rentiers. At worst, everyone is “misguided” in their responses, the centre-left, missing the complacent consensus of a generation ago, most of all.

The centre-left in Europe has a deus-ex-machina in exiting the currency union, and re-claiming national sovereignty in monetary policy and banking governance, but it doesn’t have a convincing story for why that would be good for Greece and Greeks, or Spain and Spaniards. Nor, in the opposite policy direction, does it have a program for making changes to the Euro, banking union, and the system of financing national government, work in ways that secure the welfare state against the depredations of the looters, banksters and Olli Rehn.

The lack of institutional imagination handicaps the left. They need a theory of the way the world works, which dis-empowers abstractions like “globalization” and makes the connection between policy and consequences in a morally potent way.

Although an older thread, perhaps someone might find interest in this: When looking at the last 10 to 15 years in Dutch politics all real critics but the superficial ones have been removed from the playing field. If you take “growth from recession” as a truth even in the worst depression (i.o.w. it will take at least a decade or even a generations worth of time), then what must take place is a stabilization of the situation and not a sale of all things of worth which limits the capacity of society to retain even a very limited growth (or limit negative growth). Looking at all the privatizations over the last 15 years and the willingness of the liberals (that are not real liberals but robber-barons holding out for corporate-welfare and like to “socialize” corporate risks) to sell off social rights/guarantees and national assets at below marked prices while these products and services are cost covering enterprises, have under European rules/regulations been not-for-profit, limited in scope to provided for the in-need and yet are “lean”-enterprises that could if privatized be a ground for a nice stable profit margin. The amount of debt that has been created at the state level to cover socialized risk is troublesome (bank-bailouts for example) and yet now the corporate lobbyists are pleading to the government to sell the Nationalized (and thereby saved) Abn-Amro bank under true marked value which is in effect thereby a transfer from wealth from the state (borrowed money’s even) to the corporate market since the day after de-nationalization the not-for-profit bank will be for-profit again and will increase in value overnight… This type of behavior is not a long term plan for “growth out of recession”, but putting a lean on future government policy by leading the taxpayer with debt for a generation (as Iceland has been) and thereby ensuring social policy can not be enacted but must be rooted out and destroyed because of costs. Adam Smiths invisible hand of marked forces at work one could say, but as misinterpreted on this as he has been he did worn us about… Corporate non-governmental transnational entities have become death, destroyers of worlds…

Matt, I take it you agree with the general thrust of my argument: there are no true Keynesians in Dutch politics.

As for Geert Wilders’ policy preferences: as he used to be a Liberal, I strongly suspect that his own preference is for a low-tax, small safety-net society. But at the moment my guess is that he’s just watching the poll numbers and seeing where his support is coming from. Old folks vote for him? Keep Social Security! VAT-hike? Lower taxes!

Akshary – It wasn’t always thus.

Colijn’s Finance Minister, Pieter Oud, leader of the Liberals, was asked a question in the Tweede Kamer in 1957:

Nederhost (Labour): “What about Keynes?”
Oud (Liberals): “I offer my apologies, Mister Speaker, I cannot help it. I am not an economist. You cannot blame us for not knowing then, what we know now.”</blockquote.

This is the Andrew Mellon of the Lowlands admitting, plain and simple, that he was wrong and Keynes was right. He is the direct predecessor of Prime Minister Rutte as leader of the Liberal Party.

Source: http://www.ftm.nl/exclusive/de-wederopstanding-van-colijn/

Akshay –

Of course you are right about the lack of Keynesians in Holland. But that doesn’t mean that the Dutch haven’t begun to notice that austerity does not work.

They liked it fine when it was applied to Spain and Greece. Now, not so much.

At the polls the coalition is at 43 seats, down from 79 (in a 150 seat House) at the 2012 election. SP and Wilders are winners, as well as D66, who are austerians, but who lost a lot of votes to Liberals and Labour in 2012 because the elections hinged on who got to be biggest—Labour or Liberals—and get to form the new coalition.

Source: http://www.ipsos-nederland.nl/content.asp?targetid=621

@62: I am afraid I enjoy such unargued-for one-liners rather less than you do, especially since I have no clue which ‘the’ left BW is referring to, why he disapproves of the theories that are out there already, and which theories he is aware of.. YMMV, of course.

@66: I love drive-by-putdowns such as your casting the SP as ‘old maoists’, presented as though it’s a relevant consideration for foreigners trying to understand what the contemporary SP is about, as much as anyone with a functioning brain who is aware of the history of ‘left demonization’, so I would humbly suggest you to look into what the party stands for, f.i. by reading their ‘passport’.. It might surprise you. (Also, I find it quite tiresome how even on sites such as this one, these knee-jerk characterizations can still be sold. But I guess everything is allowed when the object is to prevent oneself from having to even consider the idea they might need to reassess decades-old stigmas that were largely irrelevant even when they *were* accurate, because of how little influence the study-chamber love of Mao had for actual party positions. But whatever.)

Having said that, I must say that the reasons you provide for why you (still) think US politics are more seem to me the wrong ones, of the ‘I am looking in the direction the officer told me to’ variety.. What passes for US politics is horribly boring, except if you want to train your taboo sensor. (Though you could do this just as easily by following Dutch politics, which is almost as bad ever since the neoliberalization of the PvdA.) To insert a nice quote by Brecht that was recently brought to my attention: “Was sind das für Zeiten, wo ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist – Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt?” So please remember, political boredom varies inversely with the formation of political taboos, and with the maintenance of message discipline by parties and media.

I find parties labeling themselves the ‘responsible party’ (the dems/PvdA/D’66) much scarier than parties like the GOP…

@Foppe

“I find parties labeling themselves the ‘responsible party’ (the dems/PvdA/D’66) much scarier than parties like the GOP…”

In Holland, yes. In the US…… the GOP is home to election-stealers, young-earthers and war-criminals. And they are austerians. Hard to top.

Just to continue my character exposure effort wrt Cuperus a bit, here’s some proof that that he either can’t, or doesn’t care about, the distinguish between being successful at the political game (in this case, by depoliticizing the German elections by turning them into a ‘do you trust Angela Merkel, no questions asked about policy’ referendum), and making the right policy and/or political choices. (These remarks come the morning after the German elections):

‘Ik ben een beetje verliefd op Merkel. Merkel is de kurk op de fles als het gaat om spanningen en populistische krachten in Europa. In een tijd dat Nederland de weg een beetje kwijt is, de stabiliteit in de politiek zoek is, straalt Merkel rust uit. Ze is een natuurkundige – de moeilijkste studie die er is – en zo pakt ze problemen ook aan, stapje voor stapje. Ze laat zich niet gek maken. Een goede mix tussen hippe trends en traditie. Laptop und lederhosen, wordt dat ook wel genoemd. Merkel is daarvan de verpersoonlijking.

‘Merkel voelt heel goed aan wat de Duitse bevolking aankan en wat niet.

Translation:

I am a little bit in love with Merkel. She is the cork in the bottle when it comes to tensions and populist forces in Europe. Whereas the Netherlands seems a bit lost — that is, lacking political stability — Merkel exudes quiet. She is a physicist — the hardest study there is — and approaches problems in that way, step by step. She is impossible to lead around by the nose. A good mix between traditions and hipness. Laptop und Lederhosen, they call it. Merkel personifies that.

Merkel knows very well what the German population can and cannot handle.

Now, these remarks come after an election season in which Merkel’s propaganda team took every effort to make sure that no substantive discussion could take hold, by ignoring every attempt to start a discussion, and by constantly hammering on the message ‘trust [mutti] Merkel’. (Cuperus is quite into that, you might notice..) No discussion about the role German politicians (and the secret service) played in aiding and abetting GCHQ/NSA spying on German citizens and corporations, no discussion of the inviability of the ‘solution’ to the Greek crisis, etc. Cuperus doesn’t seem bothered by this, or perhaps he prefers it when such difficult issues are only discussed by ‘respectable’ people, without there being any politicians who successfully politicize those discussions (that would be populist, after all), as evidenced by his paternalistic suggestion that there are things that “the german population‘ cannot handle”. How is that in any way reconcilable with being a democrat, rather than a technocratic anti-democrat?
It seems to me quite clear, in any case, that his main worry is not that the EU is being run into the ground (or however you want to put what’s going on) by incompetent and corrupt technocrats, but that this might allow ‘populists’ to take hold. And thus, that he is quite unwilling to see that his own party, and ‘third way thinking’ in general, that’s largely to blame for the problems that we are now faced with. Therefore, assuming Henry is still reading the thread he created (;)), I would suggest that he take Cuperus’s article with a kilo or two of salt, and that he bring tweezers to remove the beam that is stuck in Cuperus’s eye whenever he reads another piece by him.