Posts in the Asscher category.
Part of Politicians.
This morming Lodewijk Asscher resigned as PvdA leader due to the evolving childcare benefit scandal. It is as yet unclear who will succeed him. The (online) PvdA party congress, slated for Thursday and Friday, has been postponed.
Yesterday featured the first major TV debate between five party leaders. Rutte and Wilders had withdrawn, so only Buma (CDA), Pechtold (D66), Klaver (GL), Asscher (PvdA), and Roemer (SP) participated.
The two main questions were whether one of the left-wing leaders would take a decisive lead over the others, and thus become Rutte’s main opponent in the elections; and whether Rutte and Wilders were right or wrong in abstaining from the debate.
23 January 2017
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Artikel 1, Asscher, D66, DENK, GL, Klaver, NW, Pechtold, PvdA, Roemer, SP
The Dutch elections are on 15th of March, and in the current international political climate they could take on an importance that goes well beyond our national parliament. Pundits and commentators might (ab)use the results to make predictions on the upcoming French and German elections (which will take place in April/May and September, respectively). So let’s take a look at the current situation. Last week we looked at the right; today we’ll look at the left.
An hour ago it became official: vice-prime-minister and Social Affairs minister Asscher has entered the race for the PvdA leadership. In itself this is the least-surprising political announcement of the year; everybody expected Asscher to challenge current party leader Samsom, and now the battle can finally begin.
So now the PvdA has to choose a new leader. An unusual amount of names have been mentioned, which means there is no obvious candidate.
This weekend social-democratic PvdA is holding its party congress. With most eyes on the CDA’s problems, attention for the PvdA is less than it should be, also on this blog. The PvdA is suffering from most of the same problems as the CDA, and it’s doing even worse in the polls — relatively speaking.
Like the CDA, the PvdA is a former mass party that’s slowly bleeding to death because its voters don’t trust it any more or are looking elsewhere for some old-fashioned ideological standpoints. It didn’t lose as much as the CDA in the 2010 elections, but the current polls are dramatic: 19 seats, a loss of 11.
This is the political blog of Peter-Paul Koch, mobile platform strategist, consultant, and trainer, in Amsterdam. It’s a hobby blog where he follows Dutch politics for the benefit of those twelve foreigners that are interested in such matters, as well as his Dutch readers.
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