So before it falls, let’s quickly describe the Rutte government now that it’s been in power for about a year and a half. The most important take-away for foreigners is that Geert Wilders does not sit in government. Instead he promised ... gedoogsteun.

We’ve run into a serious translation problem. I have found no directly equivalent English term for gedoogsteun. Still, some help from my Twitter followers unearthed the fact that both Canada and New Zealand have had a similar construct, but no specific name for it. Denmark, too, has made extensive use of gedoogsteun, but I don’t speak Danish and I doubt they translated their name for it into English.

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Peil.nl released another poll together with the regular one. They asked about a possible fall of government, and what should happen next.

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Peil.nl has released a new poll. Very boring; only two seats change hands. And Peil.nl continues to give the left far too many seats.

Still, take a look at the polls page. It has changed considerably, especially the coalition table. I now generate coalitions automatically since the curated list of the previous version got too big and unwieldy. I hope I found the right rules to keep the number of coalitions in check, and I’ll probably tweak them a little in future weeks.

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Last week NRC ran a story about how Maxime Verhagen, economics minister and de-facto CDA leader, almost never showed up for crucial meetings in his party. This story is emblematic of the severe trouble the CDA is in right now.

(Unfortunately NRC has decided that a digital archive of news stories is not necessary, even though this particular story did appear online. Therefore I can’t link to it.)

So what exactly are the problems the CDA is facing? First of all it sank like a stone in the polls. Both pollsters now agree that it’s the sixth party in the country, after VVD, PVV, SP, PvdA, and D66, with 11 or 13 seats. That’s not good for the “natural” party of government.

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A few weeks back I promised to start keeping track of the polls again. When I entered the poll after that, my polling script broke for reasons still unknown, and it took me until today to fix it.

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