European Union Countries More Reluctant to Cut Off Russian Energy Imports (VIDEO)

Well, deal with the devil, you know?

Look how that's turning out. Under Moscow's thumb.

At Deutsche Welle, "European leaders wary of cutting off Russian oil and gas":

Quickly cutting off energy revenues with oil and gas embargoes would hit Moscow where it hurts. But European leaders have argued for a phased approach, openly admitting their dependency on Russian energy supplies.

The leaders of Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands on Monday said Europe was too dependent on Russian energy supplies to stop imports overnight as part of any eventual sanctions package in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Energy exports are a key source of income for Russia, and there are growing calls for oil and gas embargoes to increase pressure on the Kremlin.

However, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that although Berlin supported tough measures against Moscow, Russian energy supplies remained "essential" for daily life in Europe.

"Europe's supply with energy for heating, for mobility, power supply and for industry cannot at the moment be secured otherwise," Scholz said in a statement.

Russia is the largest supplier of natural gas to Germany, currently accounting for more than half of imports, according to the government. Gas accounts for around a fifth of German power production.

A 'step-by-step' process

On Monday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said cutting dependency on Russian oil and gas was "the right thing to do," however it must be done in a "step by step" process.

"We have got to make sure we have substitute supply. One of the things we are looking at is the possibility of using more of our own hydrocarbons," Johnson told a press conference following talks with his Dutch and Canadian counterparts in London.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a halt to Russian oil imports last week. However, Canada is the world's fourth-largest oil producer and its imports from Russia were comparatively negligible.

Although the UK relies much less on Russian gas than other countries in Europe, Johnson said it was important that "everyone moves in the same direction."

"There are different dependencies in different countries, and we have to mindful of that," he said. "You can't simply close down the use of oil and gas overnight, even from Russia."

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told the press conference that weaning Europe off Russian energy would "take time" and it was a "painful reality" that Europeans were still "very much dependent" on Russian gas and oil...

 

Colonial-Era Royal Carriage Stirs Up Modern Backlash in Netherlands

So lame. *Eye-roll.*

At the New York Times, "The “Golden Coach,” built for Queen Wilhelmina of Holland in 1896, is emerging as a new focus of debate over slavery, colonialist oppression and history":

AMSTERDAM — In 1896, the city of Amsterdam decided to build Queen Wilhelmina a very special gift: a carriage covered in gold. The “Golden Coach” was designed to represent the entire kingdom and its resources, with leather from Brabant, cushions filled with flax from Zeeland and teak from the Dutch colony of Java.

A prominent Dutch artist of the era, Nicolaas van der Waay, was commissioned to make panel paintings on all four sides. One of them, “Tribute from the Colonies,” depicts a virgin on a throne. On the left, Africans in loin cloths bow down before her. On the right, Southeast Asians in colorful batiks present her with gifts, as representations of the Dutch East Indies colony.

All of these component parts glorifying the empire would have been appreciated by most Dutch people in that era. But it is precisely these elements — reminders of slavery and colonial oppression — that make the carriage a source of pain in the Netherlands, particularly for descendants of formerly colonized people.

In the context of the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, the coach has become a focus of anti-colonialist and antifascist protest. The controversy is an echo of similar debates in the United States over Confederate statues and other monuments, and in Europe over monuments honoring colonialists and slave traders.

An online petition to retire the Golden Coach has received more than 9,000 signatures.

The coach was first used in 1898 to carry Queen Wilhelmina to what the Dutch call her “inauguration,” eight years after she became queen at age 10. In recent years, the Golden Coach has been used primarily for the ceremonial opening of the Dutch Parliament in The Hague, and occasionally for weddings and coronations. Since the 1960s, royal trips in the carriage have often been met with street protests.

It was last used in 2015, without incident, after which it underwent a five-year, $1.4 million renovation before it was put on display at the Amsterdam Museum, where it will remain through Feb. 27, 2022.

“We must finally end this practice of parading colonial images as displays of power,” Sylvana Simons, a member of Parliament and the founder and leader of an anti-racist political party, BIJ1, said in June.

Gideon van Meijeren, a lawmaker with the Forum for Democracy, a right-wing populist party, had no patience with that. “We must not allow ourselves to be emotionally blackmailed by a small group of pushy extremists who see racism under every stone,” he said.

His comment echoed the 2020 Twitter sentiments of a populist Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, who characterized efforts to decommission the coach, known in Dutch as the Gouden Koets, as “left-wing, antiracism terror.” He continued, using a slang term for drop dead: “I say: Don’t bow, don’t kneel, let them all get the rambam!”

Last month, Emile Schrijver, director of the Jewish Cultural Quarter, wrote an opinion piece in the Amsterdam daily Het Parool, calling the coach “an outdated and unacceptable glorification of a colonial sense of superiority,” which should be decommissioned and permanently housed in a museum.

On July 16, King Willem-Alexander addressed the subject at a news conference, saying he was “listening” to public forums on the matter organized by the museum. “The discussion is ongoing,” he added. The carriage is scheduled to return to The Hague after the exhibition. “You will hear from us then,” he said.

The Golden Coach was hoisted over the top of the museum by crane in June for the grand opening of the exhibition, attended by the king, and is now displayed in a large glass box in the inner courtyard. The exhibition exploring its history from its 19th-century conception fills six rooms within the museum, with another room devoted to visual responses to the coach by 15 contemporary artists.

What will happen to it thereafter — whether to put it back in service to the king and queen; or keep it in the museum with lots of explanatory content; or store it somewhere out of sight; or destroy it — has become a matter of intense public debate. Ultimately, the decision will be made by the royal family...

Nine-thousand signatures, c'mon!

"Rambam" is right, sheesh.

 

Alternative for Germany (AfD) Surges in Popularity

Hey, Merkel's almost single-handedly bringing the new "hard-right" to power in Germany.

At Blazing Cat Fur, "Germany: Anti-Immigration Party Surges in Popularity."

Europe Struggles with the Rise of Populist Nationalism

The tide of national populism doesn't seem to be ebbing.

At WaPo, "Italy election results highlight struggle to govern in Europe as populist forces rise":

Italy election results highlight struggle to govern in Europe as populist forces rise https://t.co/qiBctn6YWS

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 5, 2018

BERLIN — After voters from the snowy peaks of the Alps to the sunny shores of Sicily delivered a verdict so fractured and mysterious it could take months to sort out, the banner headline Monday in the venerable daily La Stampa captured the state of a nation that’s left no one in charge: “Ungovernable Italy.”

The same can increasingly be said for vast stretches of Europe.

Across the continent, a once-durable dichotomy is dissolving. Fueled by anger over immigration, a backlash against the European Union and resentment of an out-of-touch elite, anti-establishment parties are taking votes left, right and center from the traditional power players.

They generally aren’t winning enough support to govern. But they are claiming such a substantial share of the electorate that it has become all but impossible for the establishment to govern on its own. The result is a continent caught in a netherworld between a dying political order and a new one still taking root.

“This has been a post-ideological result, beyond the traditional left-right divide,” said Luigi Di Maio, whose populist Five Star Movement trounced its opponents to become Italy’s largest party on Monday.

Now the country has plunged into uncertainty.

“The traditional structures of political alignment in Europe are breaking down,” said Josef Janning, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “It started in the smaller countries. But now we see that it’s happening everywhere.”

Even in Germany, the ultimate postwar symbol of staid political stability.

As Italians were voting Sunday, Germans were learning they would finally have a government, a record five months after they went to the polls.

The establishment had hung on. But just barely, and with no evident enthusiasm, either from the voters or from the centrist politicians who will continue to lead the country even as the public increasingly gravitates to the margins.

A similar phenomenon can be seen in countries from east to west, north to south. It took the Dutch 208 days to form an ideologically messy four-way coalition last year after an election in which 13 parties won seats in the parliament.

The Czechs still do not have a functioning government after voting in October yielded an unwieldy parliament populated by anti-immigrant hard-liners, pro-market liberals, communists, and loose alliance of libertarians, anarchists and coders known as the Pirates.

The fragmentation of European politics takes what had been seen as one of the continent’s great strengths and turns it on its head. Unlike the United States and Britain, where winners take all, continental Europe primarily use proportional systems in which the full spectrum of popular opinion is represented in office.

That worked fairly well when the major parties captured some 80 or 90 percent of the vote, as they did in countries across Europe for decades after World War II.

But lately, the major parties have been downsized.

In Germany, the so-called “grand coalition” won just 53 percent of the vote — hardly grand. In Italy, neither of the two traditionally dominant centrist parties cracked 20 percent. A grand coalition is not even mathematically possible.

The trend has become self-reinforcing.

And the authors haven't even mentioned Austria yet, which has a "far-right" coalition now in power.

But keep reading.

'Dying together was their deepest wish...'

Maybe if it truly was "their deepest wish"? Maybe if there were young, legally-informed family members around to guard against malicious state "health" officials. Then maybe, just maybe, I could accept this. I'm still skeptical, though. I just am.

At Althouse, "'Nic and Trees Elderhorst, both 91, died [together, by euthanasia] in their hometown of Didam, in the Netherlands, after 65 years of marriage'."

It's the Netherlands. I'm not at all confident the Netherlands is all that different from Iceland when it comes to protecting life. Did you see this? "Monstrous: 'Iceland is on pace to virtually eliminate Down syndrome through abortion'."

I'm for life. I don't like the European, or Nordic or whatever, approach to "human compassion." It's evil.

ICYMI: Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe

At Amazon, Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe.

Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe

A quite timely book, at Amazon, Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe.

In Europe today, staunchly nationalist parties such as France’s National Front and the Austrian Freedom Party are identified as far-right movements, though supporters seldom embrace that label. More often, “far right” is pejorative, used by liberals to tar these groups with the taint of Fascism, Nazism, and other discredited ideologies. Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg’s critical look at the far right throughout Europe―from the United Kingdom to France, Germany, Poland, Italy, and elsewhere―reveals a prehistory and politics more complex than the stereotypes suggest and warns of the challenges these movements pose to the EU’s liberal-democratic order.

The European far right represents a confluence of many ideologies: nationalism, socialism, anti-Semitism, authoritarianism. In the first half of the twentieth century, the radical far right achieved its apotheosis in the regimes of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. But these movements have evolved significantly since 1945, as Far-Right Politics in Europe makes clear. The 1980s marked a turning point in political fortunes, as national-populist parties began winning seats in European parliaments. Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the United States, a new wave has unfurled, one that is explicitly anti-immigrant and Islamophobic in outlook.

Though Europe’s far-right parties differ in important respects, they are motivated by a common sense of mission: to save their homelands from what they view as the corrosive effects of multiculturalism and globalization by creating a closed-off, ethnically homogeneous society. Members of these movements are increasingly determined to gain power through legitimate electoral means. In democracies across Europe, they are succeeding.

Geert Wilders and the Real Story of the Election

Following-up, "The Dutch Coalition Government."

From Daniel Greenfield, at FrontPage Magazine:

Geert Wilders and the Real Story of the Election https://t.co/Jx82X5jiwG

— Geert Wilders (@geertwilderspvv) March 16, 2017

The Dutch Coalition Government

Following-up, "Dutch Election Sows (Shows) Extreme Political Fragmentation."

From, Matthew E. Bergman, a lecturer at University of California at San Diego, at the Monkey Cage, "The Dutch pushed back against Geert Wilders’s ‘Patriotic Spring.’ Here’s what you need to know":

Has the “Patriotic Spring” sprung? What’s next for #Netherlands after elections, now @monkeycageblog https://t.co/KC0Cpre7Qg

— Joshua Tucker (@j_a_tucker) March 16, 2017

What does a coalition look like?

In multiparty countries, the absence of a clear majority winner means parties bargain over policy and government positions until a coalition emerges that can earn the support of a majority in parliament. In the Netherlands, once that bargaining is done, a more formal coalition agreement then names the prime minister and cabinet, which then draws up the Government’s Statement of policy priorities.

This coalition bargaining process in the Netherlands generally takes about three months. Large parties hold a bargaining advantage because they require fewer partners to form a majority.

Since World War II, the largest Dutch party has been either the centrist Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), the social democratic Labor Party (PvdA), or the conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). Coalitions form around the leader of one of these three to be the prime minister.

As noted in Figure 1, the Labor Party (PvdA) suffered a loss of 26 seats. There are numerous parties of the left and center, along with smaller parties. But adding together the seats claimed by the PvdA, Green Left (GL), Socialist (SP), Christian Union (CU), Party for the Animals (PvdD), pensioners’ (50 Plus) and multiculturalism (DENK) parties falls far short of the necessary majority.

All the major parties during the campaign pledged not to work with Wilders, even though the PPV holds a sizable number of seats. In 2012, Wilders backed out of his governing arrangement with the VVD and CDA. That episode and his further radicalization and controversial statements may leave PPV out of the final coalition.

Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism

Following-up, "Dutch Election Sows (Shows) Extreme Political Fragmentation."

At Amazon, Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction.

Dutch Election Sows (Shows) Extreme Political Fragmentation

From Cas Muddle, an excellent scholar, at NYT:

MY take on Dutch elections. Headline by @nytimes doesn't really summarize different points made in it. #TK17 🇳🇱 https://t.co/9ZmoHAC936

— Cas Mudde (@CasMudde) March 16, 2017

The parliamentary election in the Netherlands on Wednesday was predicted to be the next populist show of strength after the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election. The Dutch would be the first of a number of European countries to succumb to the right-wing populists’ siren songs in 2017, with the French not far behind.

It didn’t work out that way.

Geert Wilders, who is all too often described as a bleach blond or referred to as “the Dutch Trump,” did not defeat the conservative prime minister, Mark Rutte. In fact, he didn’t come close.

With more than 95 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, or V.V.D., came first with 21.2 percent of the vote, compared to Mr. Wilders’s Party for Freedom, which took only 13.1 percent. Mr. Wilders barely improved on his margin in the 2012 election (where he took 10.1 percent) and failed to do as well as he did in 2010 (where he got 15.5 percent of the vote).

The real story in Dutch politics isn’t Mr. Wilders’s rise, it is the unprecedented fragmentation of the political system. Together, Mr. Rutte’s and Mr. Wilders’s parties look set to make up only 33 percent of the Parliament, with 11 more political parties constituting the rest. This splintering of Dutch politics is making effective governance of the country increasingly impossible.

While previous Parliaments have counted 14 or more factions, what has changed is the relative size of the parties. In 1986, the top three parties together won 85 percent of the vote. In 2003, it was down to 74 percent. Today it is just around 45 percent.

Because of its proportional representation system of voting, the Netherlands is an extreme case. But the trends are similar across Western Europe: The main center-right and center-left parties are shrinking, smaller parties are growing and unstable coalition politics are becoming the norm. There are many reasons for this — from secularization to deindustrialization to the emergence of new political issues, like the environment or immigration.

The consequences have been painfully visible across Europe for some time. It took Belgium 541 days to form a government after its 2010 election. Both Greece and Spain were in recent years forced to hold second elections after the first Parliaments failed to form coalitions. In the Netherlands, forming a government is not quite as difficult, but the next one will most likely be a coalition of four to six parties.

If the Party for Freedom is excluded — and almost all parties have pledged that they will refuse to serve in a coalition with Mr. Wilders — the government will probably consist of five or six medium-size parties that span almost the entire political spectrum. Given that the conservative V.V.D. and the Christian Democratic Appeal are ideologically closer to the Party for Freedom than they are to, for example, the Green Left party with which they will be governing, the government will be rightly perceived as an anti-Wilders coalition.

This will play right into Mr. Wilders’s hands. He has long argued that the Netherlands’ political parties are all the same. Being the leader of the largest opposition party against an internally divided, weak “anti-Wilders” coalition is undoubtedly his second most desired outcome of the elections — after, of course, winning an outright majority of the votes.

The only way to break this vicious circle is for the parties in government to come together to support a positive program, one that justifies their cooperation and their decision to exclude Mr. Wilders...

Far-Right Surge in the Far-Left Netherlands

As you know, I don't think populist nationalist parties are "far-right," but WaPo insists on the terminology, despite the support for Geert Wilders' insurgent parliamentary campaign among people we'd normally call center-left.

A great piece, surprisingly.

At the Washington Post:

Anti-immigrant anger threatens to remake the liberal Netherlands https://t.co/5OvIlBfutY

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 12, 2017

Dafne Schippers, the Great White Hope

This woman is seriously bad-ass.

She beats all the black-African runners, which is mind-boggling to me.

Well, she almost beat Elaine Thompson last night, but she stumbled out of the blocks, then stumbled and rolled over the finish line after pushing enormous exertion to finish just a 10th of a second behind the winning time, taking the silver in the 200 meters. It was astonishing.

Either she's amped up on 'roids or the black chicks now have slower times because effective PED regulations and enforcement.

Either way, Schippers is the new Great White Hope of humanity.

At the Netherlands Times, "DUTCH SPRINTER DAFNE SCHIPPERS DISPLEASED WITH 200-METER SILVER MEDAL":

Dafne Schippers
Netherlands 🇳🇱
Sprinter
Twitter: @dafneschippers
Insta: dafne_schippers#Rio2016 #OnesToWatch pic.twitter.com/aTGCp8lLnP

— Telly Lad (@TellyLad) August 5, 2016

The Dutch athlete is disappointed in second place. “I hate this very much. I came here to get gold, and I didn’t do that”, she said to broadcaster NOS after the race. “I can’t enjoy this. Horrible.”

Thompson finished with a time of 21.78 seconds, Schippers finished at 21.88 seconds. Third place went to American Tori Bowie.

Also, from last week, at USA Today, "New kid in blocks: Dutch sprinter Dafne Schippers eyes gold."

Geert Wilders Hands Out Self-Defense Sprays Against 'Islamic Testosterone Bombs' (VIDEO)

He's been sounding the tocsin for years.

Via Euronews: