Category Archives: The Netherlands

Balkenende IV Falls

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Our country is once again without a government. After a 15 hour crisis meeting to shore up the ramshackle remains of a coalition at the end of its collective tether, the cabinet fell at about 04:00 in the night of Friday to Saturday.

Not coincidentally, I’ve regained some respect for Wouter Bos in the last 12 hours.

Bos wanted to stick to an agreement made by this cabinet in 2007 when it first took office, that Dutch troops would be pulled out of Afghanistan at the end of 2010. Significantly, the majority of the population of this country still support the withdrawal of troops, as do an overwhelming number of politicians in the Dutch parliament. So, what could possibly be the problem?

Well, that agreement was made three whole years ago and you know what politicians are like. Bos’s CDA and CU colleagues felt that the cabinet should continue to discuss all options, which, of course, is not very well veiled political twaddle for wanting to ram their own will down the voters’ throat. Who cares about the will of the people or their elected representatives in Dutch parliament?

NATO recently issued a formal request for the Dutch to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2010, no doubt assuming that those in power would do the usual cowardly thing and bend to the will of their American masters. Not this time, though.

I don’t often find myself agreeing with the PvdA these days, but, to his credit, Bos wasn’t having any of it. An agreement is an agreement, he said, and the will of the people isn’t there to support other options, so why discuss them? No, Dutch troops must be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2010 and I’m not willing to discuss alternatives.

And, with neither side prepared to back down and lose face either towards the other coalition partners or, indeed, within their own party faction, the last drops of goodwill at the bottom of a barrel already more than vigorously scraped evaporated, leaving Bos no other choice but to resign from the cabinet. With that, he took the support of the PvdA with him, leaving the cabinet unable to continue to govern.

For Balkenende, our Harry Potter lookalike prime-minister, it’s the latest of four dissolved cabinets that he has led. Not once in the history of his four terms in office has he managed to see the job through to the end. Either the man is very unlucky or it’s time to draw an increasingly unavoidable conclusion. Time to write your memoires, perhaps, Jan Peter?

The government splintering into pieces is becoming business as usual in this country. Things could be a lot worse, though. Looking around, one could be forgiven for indulging in the wishful thinking that some other countries’ governments would throw in the towel. Seemingly, no scandal is large enough to bring about the demise of the government in many countries, notably the more powerful ones. The politicians themselves have no honour, so they remain in office long after they’ve been exposed and discredited as idiots and liars, and the public who put them there are too jaded to demand their resignation. Democracy in action, people.

At least the coalition system here ensures that the politicians ultimately end up trusting one another as little as we trust all of them. You have to at least be grateful that our forefathers built that little bit of amusing poetic justice into the system, don’t you?

Anyway, not much is going to get done here in the next few months. The queen will appoint a demissionary government, whose bums will serve to warm the seats of the next elected government of this land. By its very nature, though, this cabinet won’t be empowered to do much. One has to wonder how the current economic crisis will be navigated. What, for example, would happen if a Dutch bank appeared likely to keel over on Monday? It’s not clear that it could be prevented, even if the political will to do so were there.

Perhaps the hardest question of all is who to vote for in the summer, which is when the next general election will probably happen. No-one’s looking even remotely appealing.

There’s ample material there for another blog entry, though.

The Winter That Won’t End

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I wouldn’t normally blog about the weather. Even by my standards, it doesn’t get much mundaner than that. How old and farty can you get?

Today, though, I feel compelled to remark on the winter we’re having. I can’t recall a winter in Amsterdam that was this cold and during which snow fell on so many separate occasions.

Not only has the temperature seldom crept above zero since early December — it’s -3°C as I write this — but snow is an almost weekly occurrence. That may not sound very impressive if you live in a part of the world used to cold winters, but it’s quite unusual here. Here, an entire winter can pass without a single snowflake falling. We don’t usually get many days under zero, either, never mind the -10°C we’ve felt this winter.

The children love it, of course, but biking Eloïse to school through the snow is getting tedious, particularly on days that it has melted and refrozen. There are few things more treacherous than frozen slush. I’ve had a few skids this winter, but haven’t yet fallen off. Touch wood.

Our car hasn’t been so lucky. There was an occasion in mid-December that I had to take the car out and it happened to be the morning after the first snowfall. At the forefront of my mind was the thought that I should drive cautiously and deliberately. Applying such commendably wise circumspection, I pulled away, drove slowly around the corner and skidded out of the first bend, barely 100m from our house. I trashed a bike rack, but somehow managed to spare the bikes parked in it.

As I got out to inspect the damage to the car, I nearly fell on my arse. As I regained my footing and rose above the level of the car door, a cyclist who had passed me was now lying in the road, having fallen off her bike. It was really, really slippery.

Anyway, I had managed to catch that bike rack really unfortunately and one of the curved, steel wheel holders had punctured the front of the car body. I feared that this had caused more damage than was immediately obvious and it soon turned out that I wasn’t wrong. Once on the motorway, it became apparent that the adaptive cruise control no longer worked. More specifically, the radar could no longer detect cars in front of mine, causing my car to try to accelerate through the vehicles in front of me as if they weren’t there.

The only positive element to this story, if you can call it that, is that I managed to prang the car so soon after the very first snowfall. This meant that I was able to book the car in for repair in late January.

Since that day, snow has fallen many times and there have been a huge number of accidents across the country. We’re not used to this kind of weather, you see. If I were to prang the car today, it wouldn’t be up for repair until April.

The damage also had the unfortunate consequence of short-circuiting some part of the car’s electrical system, which caused its battery to completely drain within a few days. I had to drive it every few days, just to keep the battery alive.

On precisely the day that I had to take the car to the garage to be repaired, the battery was stone dead and I had to make use of my Audi mobility guarantee to call a mechanic out to come and start it for me with jumper leads.

The car is repaired now and I’m several grand worse off, but at least no-one was hurt in the accident. The battery also no longer drains, which the garage thought was unrelated to the damage I’d incurred, but in view of the fact that the problem hasn’t reoccurred since they fixed the adaptive cruise control, it must have been related.

Last night, snow fell yet again and, proving Sod’s Law, today was, of course, another day that I had to drive. The car had to go to the garage again, this time for periodic service and to undergo its first APK, which is akin to the British MOT, in other words a road worthiness test. New cars don’t have to have an APK until they’re four years old, so this is our first.

I made it there in one piece, but I’ve already seen a couple of accidents today. And as I write this sentence, it’s starting to snow again outside my window.

The snow certainly is beautiful and bestows on the world outside a pristine quality otherwise sadly lacking, but I’ve had enough of it now. I’m ready for the spring.

You Know You’re Not In America When…

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Ian just informed me that he got a bill from the health insurance company.  Apparently his recent operation and hospital stay weren’t paid for by the insurance because he has a deductible.  I immediately thought that it was unfortunate that he’s got the lower plan instead of the higher one that the children and I have and that maybe our reasonably-priced insurance wasn’t so reasonable after all.  He has one of the lowest coverage options because he knows that he’s very unlikely to go to the various voodoo doctors that I favor.

Anyway, I cringed and braced myself for the damage.  The amount?  €146.97.  That’s the entire cost of the laproscopic hernia operation and anesthesiologist (it was a general anesthetic), prep time in the hospital beforehand and about four hours in a bed afterwards.

It makes the €550 that my midwife billed for pre- and post-natal care and Lukie’s birth seem downright expensive.