The Netherlands are being governed by a 'demissionary' government for half a year already. The last official government was voted away by the parliament in June after yet another crisis around our probably most controversial minister ever, the minister of immigration and integration. Awaiting the results of new elections and the cabinet formation resulting from this, the demissoinary government is taking care of business, but not allowed to develop new policies or take politically sensitive decisions. Strangely enough (?) our country seems to be doing pretty well without an official government...

In November the ruling coalition (christian democrats, liberals and liberal democrats) lost a lot of votes, and its majority in parliament. But the biggest oppostion party (social democrats) lost even more. The political extremes have won: the socialists on the left side, the 'party for freedom' on the (extreme?) right. Strange to call a party restricting immigrant rights to the minimum, a 'part for freedom'...

The socialists almost increased threefold (from 9 to 25 parliament seats), so they clearly were the biggest winner of them all. But apparently they were not willing to make any compromises and left the coalition negotiations within a week. Or were they scared of taking government responsibility instead of their so far very successful strategy of saying no to most of what the government proposes?

So, now it looks like we will get a coalition of two of the losing, but still biggest parties (christian democrats and social democrats), together with the small christian union to grant them a majority. Despite their pretty big political differences, they seem to like each other enough to govern the country. We are very curious what programme they will come up with. Sustainability was already mentioned as one of their key missions for the next four years. Is environment back on the agenda in the Netherlands? That would be great news! It has been totally neglected in the last few years: the minister for environment became a deputy minister and subsidies for green energy were cancelled, to name just two of many anti-sustainability decisions since 2002. And quite some politicians proposed nuclear energy as THE sustainable alternative for oil and gas...Oops!!! Let's wait and see if sustainability really reaches a prominent place in the policy programme for 2007-2011, and how the new govrnment defines this (hopefully without nuclear energy, it can't get les sustainable than that can it?).

And let's also wait and see if this new government will be sustainable in another way. Will it be the first Dutch government to complete its four-year term since 1998? And will it be the first Balkenende-led government to do so? No noe knows how this guy does it, but somehow, he gets his fourth chance to lead the country after three very problematic governments under his failing leadership! It can't be true that we really have no better leaders...even though every country is supposed to get the leader it deserves...I hope we deserve better...