EUROPEAN DIARY:NO ONE IN Brussels these days can afford to revel in the woes of others. Still, there were more than a few wry smiles when budget trouble led to the collapse of the Dutch government.
How could this be so? Alongside their German neighbours, the Dutch are in the vanguard of Europe’s righteous fiscal disciplinarians and apt to talk down to the weaklings whenever they lose their way on the hard road to rectitude.
It is acutely resonant, therefore, that prime minister Mark Rutte has not been able to secure a deal to trim his own deficit.
It’s not that anyone disagrees with the necessity of applying political pressure on the more wayward members of the currency club. There is a sense, however, that the Dutch comrades have been a little too strident at times and a mite too keen on flashing the baton.
Where there is delay or doubt, they shout.
Finance minister Jan Kees de Jager is an affable but pugnacious fellow, never shy of a reporter’s microphone. He casts himself as jolly boot boy of the euro group and the elite triple-A camp within it, never afraid to kick the enemies of stability nor to kick them a second time as well.
There is no small irony here. Again and again, de Jager struck out at the hapless Greeks as they slouched their languid way to a second EU-IMF bailout.
“In the spirit of ‘trust and verify’ the Greek political parties have to make a clear and unequivocal choice in writing: are they with us, or not? We don’t have the luxury of patience any longer,” he said at one particularly grim moment last November.
When Ireland scraped the rocks in 2010, de Jager said it would not be a good idea to “throw” the country out of the euro because that “would provoke a chain of unwanted effects”. The impression, though, was that he had given the notion some considerable thought before ruling it out. Yikes.
Indeed, it was de Jager and Rutte who first publicly proposed that countries which persistently break euro zone budget rules should face the ultimate sanction of expulsion from the currency. This was months before Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy raised a similar prospect for Greece.
With all of that in the background, it was no surprise that the failure to agree a budget in The Hague was met with a good many sniggers.
No one is delighted at this grave turn of events, which has potential to worsen the turmoil in the euro zone appreciably. In a certain way, however, Rutte et al have been hoist on their own high moral tone. It is as if the teacher’s pet was caught smoking fags and reading racy magazines with the nasty chaps from the back of the class.
In this context, it is an irrelevance that the country’s financial problems are small in comparison with Europe’s poorest member-states.
The bad boy in this tale, of course, is Rutte’s uncompromising, far-right, anti-EU ally Geert Wilders. It was he who pulled out of the budget talks last Saturday, triggering their failure.
In doing so, Wilders said it would be wrong to accept what he described as hard-line fiscal diktats from the EU. The budget plan meant the Dutch people would have to “pay out of their pockets for the senseless demands of Brussels”, he declared. “We don’t want to follow Brussels’ orders.”
Is there a lesson in all this? Siding with the opportunistic Wilders was always going to be risky for Rutte – and so it proved. With the country’s triple-A credit rating already on the line, he stayed on in the negotiation for weeks before rubbishing the entire process on his exit.
Pure populism this may well be, but the ripples could yet spread beyond the borders of the Netherlands.
Following the loss of the French and Austrian triple-A ratings, a similar move on the Netherlands could compromise the power of the European Financial Stability Facility to raise money at preferential rates for Ireland, Portugal and Greece.
In the ranks of Europe’s federalist intelligentsia there is a tendency to downplay the rise of Wilders and his sort as a minority phenomenon with little real significance in the wider political scheme. Yet Wilders’s Freedom Party is the third largest in the Dutch parliament and gave Rutte’s coalition its majority.
His budget demarche set in train an election which will not be held for five months, opening potential for prolonged uncertainty and strife in a “core” euro country which proudly likes to show the way for others.
In France meanwhile, Marine Le Pen from the far right and hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon swept up 29 per cent of the vote between them in the first round the presidential election. Albeit with different emphases, each targeted Europe in their campaigns.
There is a message here somewhere.
EU leaders are still not winning the debt crisis. As they squabble endlessly over the ancient tension between austerity and growth, the radicals are playing to the gallery and gaining traction for it. This is not to be dismissed lightly.
