Health Minister Hugo de Jonge has won an unexpectedly close election for the leadership of the Netherlands’ ruling Christian Democratic party.
De Jonge, a centrist who was backed by the party establishment, won 50.7 percent support against 49.3 for backbencher Pieter Omtzigt, a difference of 258 votes.
The Christian Democrats are the second-largest party in Mark Rutte’s government with nineteen out of 150 seats in parliament. Recent surveys give them 9 to 11 percent support, not enough to become the largest party but enough to play a role in the formation of the next government.
The Christian Democrats have been in all but three of the last fifteen Dutch governments. (more…)
Dutch health minister Hugo de Jonge faces unexpected competition from parliamentary backbencher Pieter Omtzigt in his bid for the leadership of the ruling Christian Democratic party.
Omtzigt won nearly 40 percent support from the party’s 40,000 members in a first voting round against 49 percent for De Jonge.
Monica Keijzer, the undersecretary for economic affairs and climate policy, and the only woman in the race, was eliminated after winning 11 percent.
A second voting round concludes on Wednesday. (more…)
Henry Olsen writes in The Washington Post that Republicans are at risk of losing their majority in the Senate. Polls put Democratic challengers ahead in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Montana and North Carolina. In Georgia, Democrat Jon Ossoff is neck and neck with Republican incumbent David Perdue. Republicans currently have 53 seats in the upper chamber against 47 for Democrats.
Republicans are unlikely to do better in the House of Representatives. Democrats have held an 11-point lead in generic polls this year so far, 3 points above their lead in 2018, when they took control of the lower chamber from Republicans.
National Republican defeats could reverberate at the state level. Republicans gained 680 state legislative seats in 2010. Democrats picked up 309 seats in 2018. Another Democratic landslide could hand them control of a number of key legislative chambers, writes Olsen — including Texas! (more…)
Cruise ships moored in Willemstad, Curaçao (Shutterstock/Galina Savina)
The prime ministers of Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten have turned down conditions to qualify for as much as €1 billion in coronavirus aid from the European Netherlands. A cabinet meeting in The Hague on Friday, which the leaders of the three islands attended, failed to produce a compromise.
The Dutch have proposed appointing a three-person panel to oversee reforms to which the aid is tied. The Caribbean islands consider this an infringement of their autonomy.
Eugene Rhuggenaath, the prime minister of Curaçao, went so far as to accuse The Hague of having “an agenda for the takeover and control” of the islands, echoing the rhetoric of pro-independence parties that supported violent protests against spending cuts two weeks ago, which prompted the Dutch to deploy troops to support the local police. (more…)
Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte makes a speech in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, June 13, 2018 (European Parliament/Fred Marvaux)
Parliamentary elections aren’t due in the Netherlands until March 2021, but now that the worst of the coronavirus pandemic appears to be behind the country, parties are starting to jockey for advantage.
Inside the ruling coalition, the three smaller parties are struggling to emerge from Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s shadow, whose liberal VVD is up from 33 to a projected 42-46 out of 150 seats. Rutte is drawing support from both the center-right and the far right.
Left-wing parties can barely get one in three voters between them. The far right has yet to top 20 percent support. The more interesting developments are in the center, where two parties could nominate female candidates for prime minister. (more…)
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez makes a speech in Congress in Madrid, July 17, 2018 (La Moncloa)
Support for maintaining the coronavirus quarantine is weakening in Spain. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has partly lifted a two-month lockdown, allowing small stores to reopen and restaurants to serve takeaway, but the opposition is calling for a quicker return to normalcy.
Deaths from coronavirus disease have stabilized at under 200 per day. The infection rate is also slowing.
But Spain still has more known cases of COVID-19 than any country except the United States.
The government fears that without strict controls, the virus could rebound in the next six to eight weeks. (more…)
Aerial view of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, Spain (Unsplash/Carles Rabada)
I haven’t blogged much recently. What little news there is other than the coronavirus outbreak seems rather less important. Since I’m by no means an expert on pandemics, I don’t have a lot to write.
I can tell you what’s happening here in Barcelona. (more…)
Joe Biden has become the clear frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in the United States.
Delegates: Biden has won 642 pledged delegates against 566 for Bernie Sanders so far. 1,991 are needed to win the nomination outright.
States: Biden won ten of the fourteen states that held primaries on “Super Tuesday” and he is polling in first place in Michigan, Mississippi and Missouri, which vote next Tuesday. Sanders is ahead in Washington state.
Popular support: Biden’s national support has shot up from under 20 percent to an average of 34 percent since he won the South Carolina primary a week ago.
Party support: Sixty more prominent Democrats have endorsed Biden in the wake of his South Carolina victory.
Competitors: All other major candidates have quit, most recently Michael Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren. (more…)
Joe Biden has risen in the South Carolina polls seemingly at the expense of the other center-left candidates.
Biden has also taken a commanding lead in the endorsement primary, most recently winning the support of South Carolina’s most prominent Democrat: Congressman James Clyburn.
Bernie Sanders has far less support from party officials, but he has won the endorsement of New York mayor Bill de Blasio, himself briefly a 2020 hopeful.
Biden needs a win in South Carolina, where one in six Democratic voters are black, to breathe new life into his campaign.
Sanders is wildly popular in California, the largest state to vote on Super Tuesday, March 3, but Biden leads in the few polls that have been conducted in Florida and Georgia. In North Carolina, Texas and Virginia, Biden, Michael Bloomberg and Sanders are neck and neck.
Bloomberg won’t be on the ballot in South Carolina. (more…)
Minister President Armin Laschet of North Rhine-Westphalia makes a speech in the German Federal Council in Berlin, December 14, 2018 (Bundesrat/Sascha Radke)
Three middle-aged Catholic men from North-Rhine Westphalia are running to succeed Angela Merkel, postwar Germany’s first female and Eastern-born chancellor and the ruling Christian Democratic Union’s (CDU) first Lutheran leader.
The CDU, which has governed Germany for fifty of the last seventy years, is holding a leadership election in April, triggered by the resignation of Merkel’s handpicked successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.
Kramp-Karrenbauer, a former premier of Saarland, failed to match Merkel’s authority in the party. She stepped down after the CDU in Thuringia defied her instructions and made common cause with the far right. (more…)
Bernie Sanders is now faraway the frontrunner with recent polls giving him 27 to 32 percent support nationally. Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg are vying for second place with an average of 16-18 percent support each.
Sanders also leads in the few polls that have been taken in Nevada, where Democrats caucus on Saturday.
Biden is still ahead in the endorsement primary, winning nine more endorsements from prominent Democrats this month, but Bloomberg is catching up fast, with twenty endorsements in February.
Bloomberg is also making inroads with black voters. He has been endorsed by three members of the Congressional Black Caucus. A Quinnipiac University poll (PDF) gives the former New York mayor 22 percent support from African Americans, trailing only Biden, who has 27 percent.
Bloomberg is spending more money on television commercials than all the other candidates combined.
Michael Bennet, Deval Patrick and Andrew Yang have ended their presidential bids after failing to qualify for delegates in New Hampshire. (more…)
