In his essay After the dichotomy (1985) former Prime Minister Joop den Uyl (PvdA) coined ‘keeping things together’ as an ideal. Numerous politicians later adopted this, from Cohen to Rutte: in the first place, the government must prevent society from falling apart. Corona is therefore a painful self-confrontation. In deprived areas, the suspicion of vaccination is self-evident, Lotfi El Hamidi described in NRC: too often people have experienced that the government cannot be trusted. Elsewhere in society, the idea that people also adjust their behavior to protect others has clearly not sunk in. The mobility figures last week showed that hardly anyone complied with the work from home advice. The idea that we can ‘only get corona under control together’ is therefore passé: apparently ‘others’ should do that.
A complication is that some parties play off the division, fueling dissatisfaction and aggressiveness. On Friday, a local FVD party leader in Brabant said on an FVD podium: “We have made history: the undermining of democracy, we were there.” Baudet was next to it and acted very enthusiastic.
This slide has been going on for years – the misbehavior of FVD members in the House last week fit the pattern. You do sometimes look up to ‘experts’ who explain how difficult it would be to beat FVD. Apparently for some it is especially difficult to defeat FVD bravely.
An example. When Gökmen T. stabbed three people to death in a Utrecht tram two days before Baudet’s biggest victory (Provincial elections, 2019), FVD was the only party that refused to suspend the campaign. hiddema declared crestfallen that they would no longer let the victory “dirty” slip away. The fact that the party behaved fundamentally indecently towards relatives and other parties clearly did not concern him and Baudet.
And the interesting thing was: after FVD became the largest that week, and Baudet gave his infamous boreal speech, you hardly heard a journalist about this. However, reporters on television did complain that winner Baudet had previously been criticized for his indecency. It is the ambiguity in which so many reporters are trapped: since Fortuyn no one dares to miss or criticize an election victory of the New Right, and so the media at the time missed that there were already piles of indications that an accident for democracy could happen here.
Now it appears almost weekly, during a tough crisis, and the real question seems to me how it could become so difficult for the media to explicitly defend the democratic legal order. Because if that doesn’t work anymore, keeping everything together has become an illusion anyway.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of November 23, 2021
#foreseen #disaster #democracy
source https://pledgetimes.com/the-foreseen-disaster-for-democracy/
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