Sunday 30. June 2019
The Scandonian debt crisis will almost certainly punt incumbent PM Ferdinand Brouwer from office after eight years
Scandonians on "a knife's edge" as votes counted in national election
It has been clear for months that deeply unpopular incumbent PM Ferdinand Brouwer's
Moderate Party is on its way out. The question is who will take over? Will the Social
Democrats swing voter sentiment back to the centre-left, or will an upstart party
on the far-right manage to hold its lead in opinion polls and form government?
KORENDAM — Scandonia goes to the polls today to elect 190 MPs to the country's parliament, the Staten-Generaal.
However it turns out, it will be a nervous next few days and weeks for Scandonians as they wait to see which parties form government — and who becomes the country's next Prime Minister.
Scandonia has been beset since mid-2017 by a debt crisis. A commercial real estate bubble burst, resulting in knock-on effects on an already lethargic economy. The national unemployment rate soared to a record 16.3% in May, with youth unemployment at 46%. Thousands of households have walked away from their mortgages. The government was forced to create a bad bank to absorb toxic commercial property loans and then had to inject roughly 620 billion new guilder into the money supply.
That quantitative easing further compounded the guilder's sharp devaluing in the last 18 months versus the Pacitalian douro and the dollar. The devaluation of the guilder has led the incumbent prime minister, Ferdinand Brouwer, to call for an accelerated path for the country to adopt the douro. Scandonia and Pacitalia have been in exploratory talks since 2015 to adopt the douro as early as 2024 — but that was before the burst property bubble.
Petty crime, by several measures, is up. With their money not going as far, Scandonians' consumer confidence is at historic lows and nearly three-quarters of those surveyed in an April poll said they could not afford to take a vacation and probably would not be able to for at least three to five years.
The far-right New Progress for Scandonia (NVS) had led opinion polls for several weeks prior to the official start of the campaign, putting the country of 52 million on tenterhooks. A clause in Scandonia's election law prohibits polls to be released during the campaign; it was meant to avoid survey results manipulating voter decisions and artificially altering the results. However, the opaqueness of the campaign has left the opposition to NVS scrambling, not knowing whether they are on track for victory or defeat.
Indeed, the NVS' charismatic leader, Casper Bakker, has campaigned all election like the frontrunner. Anecdotally, it appears his support has not faltered, putting his party on course for a strong finish, if not a plurality of seats that would catapult Mr Bakker into the role of formateur.
Mr Bakker has tapped into voter discontent around the state of the economy, promising to invest heavily in restoring industrial capacity and creating jobs. He has scapegoated minorities and immigrants as the source of the country's social and economic woes, even when it has been abundantly clear that the economy is on skids thanks to an overly liberalized real estate industry. He has said several times he will implement a zero-tolerance policy on crime and reverse decades-old immigration policies, going as far as to promise he would deport anyone who came to Scandonia, be it through naturalization or asylum, in the last ten years.
After initially suggesting Scandonia should bring back conscription — and being roundly criticized — he managed to pivot, controversially offering every unemployed young person a job in the military, an idea that has generated plaudits from conservatives but further criticism from the left.
The Social Democrats, led by former prime minister Theo van Kaap, have said that the government needs to invest in badly underfunded public services. They argue the negative effects of the debt crisis have been exacerbated because people who find themselves out of work have little to no resources available to them to try to get back into the job market — whether it be skills training, going back to school, changing careers, or simply being connected to employers in their field who are hiring despite the gloom.
The Social Democrats say the Moderate Party-led coalition government has reduced employment and advanced education funding by nearly two-thirds in the eight years it has been in power. Mr Brouwer has rejected those numbers, saying the centre-left party has "engaged in creative accounting to tell a story". Despite the more positive and hopeful messaging, especially when compared to NVS, the Social Democrats were firmly in second place in opinion polls before the campaign.
The prime minister has spent the entire election desperately trying to overcome his government's deep unpopularity. He has worked feverishly to sell Scandonians on the idea that economic recovery is just around the corner and that his government's policies are working to turn things around. Instead, it appears likelier than ever that he will be replaced on Monday, not just as prime minister but as leader of the Moderate Party. A strong enough defeat could also affect the Moderates' two coalition partners, the Christian Democracy and Reform (CDV) party, and Scandonia's Future (TS), who have been at the Moderate Party's side since 2011.
Mr Brouwer is 62 years old and Mr van Kaap turns 66 next month. It's no coincidence they are the two longest-serving party leaders. Mr Bakker, by contrast, is 43, and has only been in politics for four years. He was first elected as an NVS MP in 2015, serving under his predecessor, Con van Beek. Scandonia has a long history of electing centre-left or centrist governments, but it seems poised to turn the levers of power over to a new generation — even if that means a lurch to the right.
No party has won more than 27 percent of the vote in the last two elections and the polls prior to the election campaign embargo suggest that this will continue for a third straight election. Even if NVS wins a plurality of votes, they will likely need to find at least two coalition partners to form a government — and none of the other parties have expressed any willingness to work with them. The only party that has even hinted they'd be open to such a partnership is CDV.
The wild card in negotiations is the Rassemblement des francophones (RF) party. The collapse in support for the Moderate Party has driven many voters in the French Community in southern Scandonia to the RF. The party could end up with control of most of the region's 53 seats when the dust settles.
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