There’s good news and bad news from the drugs front in Amsterdam.
The good news is that a new coalition government of Labor, liberal Democrats and Greens want to pilot the legal sale of MDMA, also known as ecstasy. The three parties won the municipal elections in March.
The national government, in which the liberal Democrats rule with three center-right parties (including my own), has agreed to study the decriminalization of MDMA, although for medicinal use. A majority in the Amsterdam city council want to regulate recreational use as well.
The bad news is that Mayor Femke Halsema is still trying to convince the council to ban the sale of cannabis to tourists. I wrote an op-ed against her proposal in the NRC newspaper in April and have another story about it in Het Parool, the newspaper of Amsterdam.
The arguments used by both sides in Amsterdam will sound familiar to Americans. Proponents of decriminalization want to reduce harm. Opponents fear it would lead to more drug use. (more…)
Skyline of Paris, France at night, February 9, 2019 (Unsplash/Sabina Fratila)
My hunch was correct after all. Before the French elections, I argued the most likely outcome was Emmanuel Macron winning a second term as president but losing his majority in the National Assembly and being forced into a coalition with the center-right.
After the presidential election, Macron’s liberals moved up in the polls. They also did reasonably well in the opening round of the legislative elections a week ago. It gave this Macronist hope that the president might defend his majority after all.
But no. His alliance, Together, is projected to fall to 234 seats, down from the 350 it won in 2017 and 55 short of a majority.
One in three Dutch farms may need to close. It’s the most painful consequence of the government’s plan to cut nitrogen emissions in half by 2030.
The farmers’ lobby is furious, calling the plan “unrealistic” and an attack on the countryside. Pro-farmer parties have gained in the polls at the expense of the ruling Christian Democrats and liberals.
Provincial deputies, who would need to decide on a case-by-case basis which farms can stay and which need to go, fear a backlash in regional elections in March. That would also put Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s majority at risk. Provincial deputies elect the Senate in May.
Rutte’s center-right VVD (of which I am a member), is split down the middle. 51 percent of members who attended the annual party congress on Saturday voted for a motion to soften the farm policy.
The cabinet minister responsible for it, Christianne van der Wal — who is of our party, but who answers to parliament, not the party — told a reporter on Sunday she has little wiggle room. “I’m always open to good ideas,” she said. “But the targets are crystal clear.”
Before the coronavirus pandemic, Rutte — who has been in power for twelve years — called the nitrogen crisis the biggest of his political career. Yet there has been little coverage of it internationally. I suspect the reason is that Dutch media tend to emphasize reduction targets that are the result of judicial rulings, which gives foreign correspondents the impression that this is a Netherlands-only problem. But when you take a step back from nitrogen pollution and look at the impact of agriculture altogether, the Dutch is not an isolated case at all. It looks more like a preview of the future of intensive animal farming globally, if intensive animal farming has a future at all.
I’ll do my best to explain both the narrow issue of nitrogen pollution and the broader story of animal farming. Along the way, I’ll review the arguments farmers have made against reductions and I’ll end with the political implications for Rutte’s coalition. (more…)
Spanish People’s Party leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo attends the European People’s Party congress in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, May 30 (PP)
Alberto Núñez Feijóo took over Spain’s conservative People’s Party two months ago. The hope was that the relatively moderate Feijóo would put an end to fruitless purity contests and return the once-dominant Christian democratic party to the center-right.
He may have achieved the first, but he seems less interested in the second. (more…)
Aerial view of Boston, Massachusetts, October 22, 2010 (Thomas Hawk)
Joe Biden has unveiled five new policies to alleviate America’s housing shortage.
Two are related to financing, which I’m not qualified to assess. The goal is to make it easier for low-income Americans to build and buy homes. I just hope that doesn’t lead to a repeat of the subprime mortgage crisis, which was at least partly caused by the federal government underwriting mortgage loans homeowners could not afford.
A third seeks to make it more difficult for investors to buy family homes. I don’t know if that’s worth the tradeoff, but there is one. The left-wing city government of Amsterdam has done the same, arguing all investors do is buy properties, renovate them and raise rents. But that renovation part is important! Maintaining buildings that are centuries old is expensive. Investors raise rents to recuperate the costs, but at least they can spread out those costs over multiple renters and multiple years. Banning property investment could cause monumental buildings to either become unaffordable to all but the wealthy or fall into disrepair, which happened in Amsterdam during the 1930s and 40s, and is why entire neighborhoods, like the Jewish Quarter, were demolished after the Second World War.
Biden’s last two policies are the most interesting to me: ending discrimination against prefabricated and modular homes and encouraging local zoning reform. (more…)
View of the Palau Nacional from downtown Barcelona, Spain, December 29, 2013 (CucombreLibre)
There are parallels between Vladimir Putin’s need to dominate Ukraine and right-wing Spain’s intolerance of Catalan nationalism.
Modern Spain wouldn’t bomb Barcelona. Putin’s aggression is in a league of its own. But the last conservative government of Spain did send riot police into Catalonia when it organized an independence referendum in defiance of Spanish courts. It did depose the regional government, arrest its leaders and sentence them to between nine and thirteen years in prison for inciting “sedition” and participating in a “rebellion”. It did hack the phones of dozens of Catalan separatists, including non-politicians, to read their messages and listen to their conversations.
Putin uses tanks, conservative Spain the law, but their motivation is the same: neither can accept the independent aspirations of a people they refuse to recognize as separate from themselves. (more…)
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez speaks at a meeting of his Socialist Workers’ Party in Madrid, April 9 (PSOE/Eva Ercolanese)
The revelation that dozens of Catalonia’s separatist leaders were hacked should compel Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez to finally make good on his promises to the region.
The Citizen Lab, based in the University of Toronto, Canada, discovered that at least 65 Catalans, ranging from the president of the region to its members of the European Parliament, were targeted or infected with an Israeli spyware that is only sold to governments. Spain’s National Intelligence Center hasn’t confirmed it was behind the hacks, but who else would be interested in spying on Catalan leaders?
Catalans didn’t have much faith in the Spanish government to begin with. This news threatens to shatter what little hope there was of negotiating a way out of the impasse that has lasted for five years.
“It is really hard to trust anyone when everything points to the fact that they’ve been spying on you,” Catalan president Pere Aragonès told reporters.
Imagine if the British government had been listening in on the conversations of Nicola Sturgeon and her cabinet. Would Scots still trust London to negotiate in good faith?
The difference, of course, is that the United Kingdom recognizes Scotland’s right to self-determination and allowed the country to hold an independence referendum in 2014 whereas Spain sent riot police into Catalonia and suspended the region’s autonomy when it voted to break away in 2017. (more…)
Dutch government offices and parliament buildings in The Hague (iStock/Fotolupa)
Germany is primarily to blame for Europe’s dependence on Russian gas. As I wrote here two weeks ago, it simultaneously phased out coal and nuclear, couldn’t possibly replace both with renewables, relied on natural gas and hid behind the excuse that buying gas from Russia was just business. If there were political implications at all, successive German governments argued they would be positive. Trading with the Soviet Union had paved the way for détente, and at the time Americans had also opposed Ostpolitik. Why listen to them now?
But this time the Americans were right. And Eastern Europeans. And the many Western experts who tried to warn their governments that they were relying on an unreliable regime and funding Vladimir Putin’s war machine.
My country is no exception. When I was doing research for Wynia’s Week about Gazprom’s sprawling business interests in the Netherlands, I discovered that the Dutch government had been repeatedly warned through the years against relying on Russian gas imports.
Hubert Smeets, the co-founder of Raam op Rusland, which publishes in Dutch and English, told me the Netherlands should have looked for alternatives to Russian gas, especially after the annexation of Crimea and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in which 193 Dutch nationals were killed. “It is unbelievable that the opposite happened under Prime Minister Mark Rutte.”
Only now that Russia has dramatically escalated its war in Ukraine do most Dutch political parties want to stop buying Russian gas. (And are they willing to raise defense spending.)
They should have paid more attention in the past. The warning signs were there. (more…)
Spanish People’s Party leader Pablo Casado makes a speech in Congress in Madrid, April 14, 2021 (PP)
A power struggle has broken out in Spain’s opposition People’s Party.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the popular president of the region Madrid, has accused national party leader Pablo Casado of trying to “destroy” her by hiring private detectives to investigate allegations of corruption.
Casado’s right-hand man and party secretary, Teodoro García Egea, has accused Ayuso in turn of making “almost criminal” insinuations.
Other conservatives are taking sides. Esperanza Aguirre, who governed Madrid from 2003 to 2012, has defended Ayuso. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the president of Galicia and leader of the moderate faction, has called the investigation into her “unforgivable”. Casado has the support of the mayor of Madrid as well as the party’s group leaders in Congress and the Senate. (more…)
Quim Torra enters the parliament of Catalonia to be sworn in as regional president, May 14, 2018 (Parlament de Catalunya/Miguel González de la Fuente)
Catalan nationalists, up to and including the deposed regional president Carles Puigdemont, see the Spanish judiciary as part of a “deep state” that frustrates Catalan ambitions at every turn.
It does have judges who are more political, and more reactionary, than the rest of Western Europe. I saw the consequences after more than two million Catalans defied a Constitutional Court ban to vote in an independence referendum in 2017. (I lived in Barcelona at the time.) Politicians and protest leaders were arrested and imprisoned. Spanish courts overturned a Catalan presidential election. As recently as last week, judges ordered a Catalan lawmaker to give up his seat in the regional parliament. Spanish “lawfare” against the Catalan independence movement has entered its fifth year. (more…)
German chancellor Olaf Scholz arrives in Rome, Italy, December 20, 2021 (Bundesregierung)
The Netherlands is forced to drill for almost twice as much natural gas this year as it intended to, partly as a result of higher-than-expected demand from Germany.
Germany requires an additional 1.1 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas, and the Netherlands is contractually obliged to provide it.
The Dutch need 2 bcm more for their own consumption plus 1.6 bcm to fill depleted stores for next winter.
Altogether production must rise from 3.9 to 7.6 bcm — still a fraction of the 72 bcm of gas the Netherlands produced as recently as 2013.
The Netherlands has small gas fields in the North Sea. The bulk of its gas is extracted from the northeastern region of Groningen. Or was, because the government had promised to shut down production there entirely.
Years of drilling have caused increasingly violent earthquakes. The government has so far paid €220 million in compensation to owners of damaged homes. Another €250 million may be needed. A parliamentary inquiry into the government’s handling of the damage is due to begin next week.
Which makes Germany’s request especially awkward for the Netherlands’ prime minister, Mark Rutte. He has asked the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, for alternatives. (more…)
American president Joe Biden boards a helicopter at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, October 7, 2021 (White House)
One year into Joe Biden’s presidency, the media consensus is that he is failing.
The Financial Times reports that the Democrat is trying to “reboot” his “faltering” presidency. The Washington Post believes he is “stumbling”. The Wall Street Journal calls it “flailing”.
Foreign journalists agree. Britain’s The Guardian newspaper writes that Biden is historically unpopular and “much of his domestic agenda is stalled on Capitol Hill.” Here in the Netherlands, EW Magazine wonders if anyone is still happy with the president while RTL reports that he has “blundered” abroad and “broken” his election promises. (more…)
French president Emmanuel Macron speaks with Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte during a European Council summit in Brussels, June 24, 2018 (Elysée/Philippe Servent)
The European Commission has sided with the Netherlands and smaller nations against a Franco-German proposal for industrial policy.
The decision is a victory for Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, who has formed a loose alliance of likeminded Central and Northern European member states to prevent a lurch to protectionism in a Europe without the UK. (more…)
Capitol Cinema in Madrid, Spain, October 5, 2018 (Unsplash/Jose Cruz)
Spain’s ruling left-wing parties have agreed to reverse the labor market liberalizations of the previous, conservative government, which made it easier for firms to hire and fire workers.
The decision is hard to justify even by the standards set by proponents of repeal. The reforms did not create more precarious jobs, they did not cause higher structural unemployment, and they barely made a dent in wages. (more…)
Debate in the plenary chamber of the German parliament in Berlin, July 1, 2020 (Pixabay)
When Germany’s Christian Democrats and Social Democrats — who frequently split up to 90 percent of the votes between them during the Cold War era — fell to a combined 50 percent support in the federal election in September, alarm bells went off across the Atlantic.
The New York Times saw “messier politics” and “weaker leadership” ahead. The Washington Post feared a period of “limbo” as a result of Germany’s “Dutchification”. Harold James, a professor at Princeton University, lamented that Germany had acquired “the most destructive features of politics in neighboring countries.” The consequences, he argued, would be “complexity,” “endless negotiations” and “inevitably complicated coalition agreements.” Damon Linker, a columnist for The Week, predicted forming a “stable” government would be “challenging” and “decisive action” more difficult.
Some people never learn. We saw the same reaction after the European elections in 2019, and again when Stefan Löfven lost his parliamentary majority in Sweden this summer. Yet Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and liberals were able to quickly form a working majority in the European Parliament and Löfven remains prime minister.
Germany’s liberals and Greens — who can help either the Christian Democrats or Social Democrats to a majority — have already done a deal between them, clearing the biggest hurdle to a three-party coalition. Negotiations are now underway. Olaf Scholz, the Social Democratic Party leader, could become chancellor in a few weeks. So much for the “limbo” we were told to expect. (more…)
