Richard de Mos, leader of Hart for The Hague, had a short, clear message when he finally took the stage late on Wednesday evening in café-restaurant Luden after 93 percent of the votes had been counted: ‘We have simply become the biggest again. Don’t rule out the tens of thousands of voters of Hart voor The Hague!’
However, there is a very high chance of that. It is true that Hart voor den Haag is going from 8 to 9 seats, but the current coalition – D66, VVD, GroenLinks, PvdA and CDA – is also growing. So they don’t need De Mos for a majority. Apart from the ideological differences, the suspicions against De Mos are especially bothering him: the judiciary has been investigating him for two and a half years.
‘Nothing undemocratic about it’
“We have always said that cooperation with Hart voor Den Haag is very complicated for us as long as the lawsuit against De Mos has not been completed,” says Mariëlle Vavier, party leader of GroenLinks. “The allegations are very serious. Corruption, breach of professional secrecy, membership of a criminal organization. We first want clarity about this.’
But don’t you just make a party bigger by excluding it? And what are the rules for that?
‘There is no law that prescribes that the largest party is entitled to a place in the coalition’, says Peter van Heemst, who was a councilor for the PvdA in Rotterdam from 2006 to 2010. ‘There is nothing undemocratic about excluding in advance of cooperation with a party. In fact, that creates clarity for voters. I think that’s fairer than the opposite: that you say you want to talk to everyone in advance, but after the elections certain parties turn out to be written off.’
In 2006, the PvdA in Rotterdam became the largest with 18 seats. Van Heemst was the party leader at the time. ‘The next day I sent an email to Leefbaar Rotterdam, the second party, asking if we could talk about cooperation. Within three minutes I received a two-line note back, the meaning of which was: just look it up.’
Four years later, the PvdA again ruled out collaboration with Leefbaar. “We got a lot of criticism for that. But our party leader kept his word. That’s worth something too.’
High-profile cases
In the 2018 municipal elections, there were eighteen local parties that were the largest and did not come into the coalition. This is shown by a recent study by Julien van Ostaijen, public administration expert at Tilburg University. “Whether they were really excluded is difficult to determine,” he says. ‘We concluded that nine parties had already decided to exclude them before the elections.’
A number of high-profile cases have created the impression that exclusion often occurs, says Van Ostaijen. In addition to the issue with Liveable Rotterdam, the win of the List Smolders Tilburg in 2018 – the party of Hans Smolders, former driver of Pim Fortuyn. He doubled his number of seats, but remained in opposition. The case of Echt for Barendrecht also appealed to the imagination. The party almost achieved an absolute majority in 2018, but did not come into the coalition.
Ultimately, in only 10 percent of cases, the largest party does not make it into the city council, according to Van Ostaijen’s research. ‘This also involves new, local parties that vigorously oppose, in which tone and style are distasteful to the others. That appeals to voters, but other parties are mainly looking for a reliable coalition partner.’
Exclusion can also be an advantage
Excluded parties often try to use that information to their advantage. ‘You can turn it into a kind of victim role,’ says Van Ostaijen. ‘It is often already parties that criticize the established order a lot. They can then say: you see, in the elite they keep each other’s hands over their heads.’
Exclusion often, but certainly not always, leads to a larger number of seats in the next elections. ‘List Smolders Tilburg is now losing more than half of the seats’, says Van Ostaijen. ‘But Echt voor Barendrecht does have an absolute majority this time.’
And Hart voor The Hague also grew. De Mos had said beforehand that he would win 15 seats – the number other parties would no longer be able to win. The signs with ’15 seats’ were ready on Wednesday evening in Luden. They didn’t go up in the air.
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