Opinion: The re-emergence of the municipality as the main political community

By Caspar van den Berg

As the dust of the municipal elections settles a strong message is emerging: the municipality matters again, and the local community is making a comeback as the most important political community. For a long time municipal elections were seen as no more than general elections on a smaller scale. The same parties on the voting slip, the same key issues. That view is changing fast, and the writing has been on the wall since the municipal elections in 2010.

We are no longer looking at the traditional left-right divide but instead can distinguish between the classic centrist parties (CDA, PvdA and VVD), cosmopolitan parties (D66, GL, PvdD), nationalist parties (SP, SGP, PVV, FvD) and local parties. The results of the last three municipal elections show that the classic centrist parties have lost ground in both the big cities and the countryside, but there is a significant difference between who has benefited from the drop in support for the centrist parties. In the big cities this has mainly been the cosmopolitan parties. In the countryside it’s a different story: here local parties have gained most, with support for local and nationalist parties together reaching 50% in many places.

However, developments in the Netherlands do not completely follow the international trend. In countries that have held elections or referendums in the last year and a half (the UK, the US, Austria, France, Germany and Italy) the picture is consistent: in the polling booth ‘regions that don’t matter anymore’ have taken revenge on the bustling metropolis. The periphery is protesting the economic and cultural domination of the big cities. This is thus about not just the people who do not benefit from globalization, the left-behinds, but also the regions that have been left behind by globalization, as is claimed by, among others, political scientist David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere (2017) and economic geographer Andres Rodriguez-Pose in The Revenge of the Places that Don’t Matter (2018).

What about the Netherlands? The elections on Wednesday do indeed show that the classic centrist parties have lost out to the cosmopolitan parties in the big cities and mainly to local parties in rural areas. This indicates a growing political and cultural gap between growth and decline areas: people in the big cities have different ideas from people in the rural provinces about, for instance, Zwarte Piet (e.g. the blockades on the road to Dokkum), the history of slave-trading (in Rotterdam and The Hague the discussion is about the role of leading figures in the Dutch East India Company in public spaces, whereas in Urk new streets are being named after them) and topics such as gender neutrality.

Thus far the Netherlands fits in the picture that can be seen in its neighbouring countries. However, the essence of these election results is not the contrast between city and countryside but rather that local elections no longer seem to be the barometer of national politics. Indeed, the opposite appears to be true: political preference is increasingly determined by whether people are cosmopolitan or local in their outlook, and this affects how they view national politics.

This can be seen at both ends of the political spectrum. First, the gains for the PVV in the smaller municipalities in which they were taking part for the first time were below expectations. Large numbers of voters there remained faithful to local parties, despite being PVV voters in general elections. Second, it can be seen in the growing cosmopolitan dominance in the big cities, and increasing protest against this in the form of gains for DENK and local parties in big and medium-sized cities as well as in the countryside.

If the local community is making a comeback as the most important political community in the state, this is in line with the organic idea of the state as envisioned by Thorbecke round 1850 in his Constitution and accompanying Municipalities Act: the political community begins locally, is nested in the province, which in turn is nested in the national community. This nested structure was lost in the 20th century but appears to be making a comeback.

In many municipalities a new, more fragmented and identity-focused political reality has emerged. For the municipalities themselves this makes forming stable majorities more of a challenge, because (a) more parties are needed to form a majority and (b) reaching compromises is more difficult for identity parties. Furthermore, the collaboration between municipalities and central government will require more attention as short lines of communication between municipal authorities and the Cabinet become scarce.

Caspar van den Berg, Professor of Global and Local Governance, University of Groningen – Campus Fryslân