The Dutch political season in readiness for the November 22nd elections continues apace with the launch of StemWijzer (Dutch). StemWijzer is an online voters’ advisory that poses questions to the participant to help them determine if they are conservative, liberal, libertarian, socialist, communist or whatever political shade you might be, it now has a more European outlook called VoteMatch.
Then it advises on which of the 26 or so parties the participant should vote for at election, offering second and third choices depending on how the questions are answered.
As I have lamented before, our Western democracies are failing because of the failure of education and the lack of understanding of how to read party policies and ideologies and how to match that with personal political slant and thinking.
People think they are liberal and end up being classified as intolerant and right-wing, some who are right-wing end up in another political spectrum, how does one begin to appreciate ones political temperament and convert that into an effective democratic voice?
Bad system or lacking an ideology
Worse still is when StemWijzer cannot offer an opinion as what party you can vote for, when this happens to the person who has been Prime Minister of the Netherlands for the past four years, questions should be asked.
The Prime Minister is leader of the right of centre CDA, which would be nominally conservative, could it be that Stemwijzer is seriously flawed or we have a leadership without an ideology?
I do not have to answer that question because the Prime Minister himself says and I quote, “StemWijzer provided good support for people in making a well-motivated choice”. But for some reason, StemWijzer could not even find a neutral or nonchalant choice for our Dear Leader.
Other leaders like the leader of the Liberal party (VVD) was advised to vote for the progressive-liberal D66. The leader of the Labour Party (PVDA) however, was true to his party and ideology – he probably should be the next Prime Minister of the Netherlands.
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