HAGUE LETTER:Fondness and derision for the monarchy vie for upper hand as public assess a far-right Bill that would oust queen as head of government, writes PETER CLUSKEY
NEVER ONE to sidestep a controversy, Holland’s most high-profile right-wing politician, Geert Wilders, is to table draft legislation in parliament before the summer recess aimed at removing the queen as head of the Dutch government.
If the Wilders Bill is carried, it would reduce the role of Queen Beatrix to a ceremonial one, and end the traditional mediation by monarchs and their political advisers during the sometimes tortuous formation of the country’s coalition governments.
This would leave Beatrix largely as a cut-glass meeter-and-greeter of foreign heads of state – such as President Mary McAleese, with whom she will have an hour-long audience followed by lunch during the President’s visit to the Netherlands next week.
Privately, royal advisers at Noordeinde palace in The Hague – where Beatrix will receive the President – know there are two separate questions to be answered. Firstly, what sort of political traction does this proposal have? And secondly, will the public wear it?
Given the image of the Dutch royals as “a bicycling monarchy”, an English term originally intended to refer disparagingly to the more modest and informal style of the Dutch compared to the pomp and ceremony of their British counterparts, they might appear to be relatively safe.
But there are few certainties in politics. While the prime minister and leader of the centre-right Liberal Party, Mark Rutte, has already said he will not support the proposal because it would create “a dummy monarchy with no flavour”, a number of smaller parties are not as wholehearted in their support.
Already lining up, some with more glee than others, in favour of a purely ceremonial monarchy are, predictably, the Socialists; the left-wing green party, GroenLinks; and D66, the socially liberal party founded by former journalist Hans van Mierlo.
As to the public reaction, despite their bicycling habits, support for the monarchy can be quite ambivalent here, usually depending on the degree to which they’ve been in the news, and what sort of news it’s been.
“We like them to behave themselves,” says one forthright Amsterdammer.
“We like to see them on special occasions, but most people do not like the idea that they can sometimes have too much power. They are not elected.”
As it happens, if Noordeinde palace were ever to take a popular poll, then this, the week of the queen’s birthday on April 30th (the biggest public holiday in the Dutch calendar) is undoubtedly the week they would do it, confident of a positive result.
Not alone that, but April 30th is now synonymous in the Dutch mind with the attack on the bus carrying the royals during the same birthday celebrations two years ago in Apeldoorn, when Queen Beatrix and her family gathered at the palace of Het Loo.
Five onlookers were killed when a man who’d fallen on hard economic times drove his car into the side of the royals’ open-topped bus. The attacker was also killed.
The assault generated huge support for the royal family, and will lead to significantly increased security at public events again this weekend.
However, you only had to look a matter of weeks ago at Sotheby’s auction for charity of thousands of possessions of the late queen Juliana, to see the two sides of the public response – fondness and derision.
While thousands of the curious turned up to see the 1,725 royal lots, the event also revived less-wholesome memories of Juliana’s late husband, prince Bernhard, a decorated war hero who’s now regarded as having had Nazi sympathies, and who was alleged in 1976 to have accepted a $1.1 million (€742,000) payment from the Lockheed Corporation to influence the government’s purchase of fighter aircraft.
Asked at the time to answer the allegations, which became known as the Lockheed scandal, Bernhard famously replied: “I am above such things.”
This month, apart from the Wilders attempt to remove her remaining political clout, there’s been good news and bad news for Queen Beatrix.
The bad news has been the controversy over a multimillion euro luxury holiday home built for Crown Prince Willem-Alexander and Princess Maxima in Mozambique and alleged to have involved corruption and serious environmental damage. The prince promised to sell it 18 months ago but it remains unsold.
Much more positive was the first day at school for little Princess Ariane, fourth in line to the throne, who was taken by the hand by the same Willem-Alexander and Maxima to the gates of Bloemcamp school in Wassenaar, their local state school, already attended by her sisters, Amalia and Alexia.
Now there’s a photo opportunity even Geert Wilders couldn’t trump.