The Netherlands ’ parliament is empty for the summer recess, but on Thursday the country’s powerful labour unions staged at its doors a noisy rally, featuring hundreds of angry workers, an accordion band and a wall of shoes.
The footwear represented the “walk a mile in our shoes” campaign the unions have organised in an attempt to block €6bn in austerity measures the government is planning for 2014 to be unveiled by early September. Those cuts are needed to keep the Netherlands’ budget deficit under the 3 per cent limit established by EU rules, but it is not clear whether the government can push them through.
The growing protest marks a slow but significant shift, as this prosperous Calvinist country, once strongly committed to austerity, has gradually turned against it. The Dutch government was among the strongest advocates of tough European budget deficit rules and enforcement powers from the start of the euro crisis in 2010. Now that the EU is forcing the Dutch to slash their deficits, public support for Europe in this once strongly pro-European country has plunged.
Indeed, with the economy in a deep and prolonged recession, austerity measures have sent popular support for the government plummeting to just 28 per cent in the latest polls. Meanwhile, support for the two parties firmly opposed to austerity, the far-right Freedom Party of Geert Wilders and the far-left Socialist Party, has soared; some polls put the Freedom Party in the lead.
The latest demands for further cuts, made by Olli Rehn, the European budget commissioner, in a visit here in June, are testing the limits of popular support for the EU. A Gallup poll in early June showed the Dutch public evenly split over whether to exit the EU, and the unions have shown little interest in whether their demands will be acceptable to Mr Rehn.
“With all due respect, Brussels is not my problem,” said Corrie van Brenk, head of the Abvakabo government and health workers’ union, which led Thursday’s rally.
The resistance to EU-driven austerity comes not just from the unions, but from business leaders. Bernard Wientjes, the head of the Netherlands’ VNO-NCW business group who is one of the most influential lobbyists in the country, called in June for the government to drop the €6bn austerity plan if it meant raising taxes further.
In an interview on Thursday in Het Financieele Dagblad, the Dutch daily, Mr Wientjes said raising taxes further to cut the deficit would “smother [economic] growth in the crib”, though he pointedly declined to rule out cuts in social benefits. The head of the country’s small-business organisation has attacked austerity measures as well.
The unions, meanwhile, demand that any new austerity measures should rely on raising taxes. They say they will withdraw from a so-called “social accord” reached between business, labour and the government in April if the government extends pay freezes for healthcare and government employees, which have already persisted for three years.
If the unions abandon the social accord, it would deal a severe blow to the government’s efforts to push the new austerity measures through. The cabinet, a coalition between the centre-right Liberals of prime minister Mark Rutte and the centre-left Labour party, lacks a majority in the upper house of the Dutch parliament, and will need backing from opposition parties for any cuts.
In an environment where voters are rewarding opposition to austerity, that support will be hard to find. The left-liberal D66 party is demanding higher education spending as the price of their vote, while the centre-right Christian Democrats want to rule out higher taxes.
The fight over the austerity measures will come to a head later this month when the cabinet reconvenes to work out where the cuts will fall. Both parties have declared they are firmly committed to hitting the €6bn target, regardless of the opposition.
Meanwhile, the debate continues to eat away at their support bases. Voters who backed Mr Rutte in last September’s elections have been shifting to the far-right populist Mr Wilders, who attacks the prime minister for “following Brussels’ orders”.
The Labour party has lost up to half of its support since the elections, mainly to the Socialists, who were strongly represented at Thursday’s labour rally. Ms van Brenk called the growing gap between Labour and the unions a “very hurtful point”.
But John Kerstens, a Labour MP at the rally, said that despite the tough talk, the parties were likely to close a deal to push the new round of austerity through. As for the social accord, he said, the groups who signed it in April were well aware that new cuts might be coming.
“There are a lot of people trying to lay a bomb under the social accord, but they’re not the people who negotiated the social accord,” Mr Kerstens said.