Cabinet fall damaged trust of 50% of voters; Parties urged to avoid unrealistic promises
PVV leader Geert Wilders’ decision to topple the Schoof I Cabinet damaged half of the Dutch voters’ trust in politics, according to a survey by Kieskompas and ANP among nearly 20,000 people. The Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP) urged political parties to stop making promises they can’t keep to avoid further deteriorating the already-low confidence even further.
According to Mariken van der Velden, an associate professor of political communication at VU University Amsterdam, unfulfilled promises played a big role in voters’ declining confidence. “The Dutch right-wing was promised policies that were finger-licking good, but ultimately they saw them fail to materialize,” she told the news wire. “Voters also witnessed constant infighting among politicians in the Cabinet, which undermines their trust.”
The Cabinet collapse hit NSC voters the hardest. Nearly two-thirds of NSC voters said their confidence in politics declined. For the other three coalition parties - PVV, VVD, and BBB - approximately 55 percent now have less trust in politics.
The government’s fall had less of an impact on voters of D66, Volt, and GroenLinks-PvdA, with about 40 percent of these voters saying their confidence declined.
On Wednesday, the SCP published a memorandum for parties to use when drafting their election manifestos and campaigns for the parliamentary elections in October, NOS reported. The advisory body believes it’s tempting for politicians to promise more than they can deliver when campaigning, but it urged parties to avoid unrealistic promises because they risk further eroding the already low level of trust in politics.
The SCP specifically mentioned asylum and migration policy, the platform on which the PVV achieved its massive win in the previous elections in November 2023. According to the SCP, here politicians tend to pretend that everything can be dealt with in one fell swoop - limiting immigration, while respecting international agreements like the UN Refugee Convention, and taking in the migrant workers the economy needs. But reality is much more complicated.
“Overpromising by politicians about the extent to which the government can manage migration fuels cynicism and puts pressure on the relationship between government and citizens,” SCP researcher Willem Huijnk said.
The SCP urged politicians to make sharp, realistic political choices and to clearly explain to voters what is feasible and what is not. Broken promises and politicians’ tendency to “reduce complex problems to a single cause and therefore a single solution” result in long-term distrust once it becomes clear that those solutions are not simple after all.
