Sweet Caroline

I had promised not to vote. I kept it, despite the frequent flare-ups of conscience. My vote could not stop the political landslide. At least that is what the newspaper called it. Instead of a dancing Kaag on the table now a dancing Caroline on the stage.

The wounds are now being licked in many parties. Thierry will not think for a moment that the big loss is due to his narcissistic performance. Kaag does not feel like a loser, Rutte does not feel like a loser. The CDA is on the ropes, any path they take now is political suicide. The Christian Union is proud of its new leader.

Mr de Groot of D66 sees it otherwise very simply. The coalition agreement must be implemented and nature cannot wait. In other words, the election result is not important to him. The D of D66 stands for Democrats, but that only applies when it suits, otherwise it is the D of Dictatorship: even if BBB is the largest in all provinces, we of The Hague oblige them to implement the nitrogen measures. Rutte is silent, Hoekstra is silent. So nothing changes.

Hey is seldom good
I don't see the landslide. Caroline will adapt quickly in The Hague. The plushness is too tempting to distance herself from it quickly. Maybe slacking off will lead to defeat at the next election, but then she'll just follow Thierry's message that it's a long-term story. She now talks to Timmermans as if she has the status of Scholz or Macron. She ignores Rutte as if she has already replaced him.

It seems like everything is about nitrogen, but there are many policy areas of concern. The solutions are not at hand, so we go back to arguing about nitrogen. Looking at tax regulations, for instance, we see Box 3 of income tax completely on the back burner. In a recent letter from the secretary of state, he unfolds an alternative scenario, namely a finely tuned set of flat-rate returns. After all, it does not seem to be possible to tax actual capital income in our highly developed country. I would like to hear Caroline's views on that. And also on the knives being sharpened to still compensate non-objectors for the losses in the years 2017-2020. They will be proven right and then we as a society will have multiple costs as we sink even further into the trust swamp, as we put many civil servants to work litigating and as we will soon have to foot the bill of the aggrieved anyway.

Read again what the Supreme Court said in the Christmas judgment and you will know that you were wrong from the start with this system. The motto then is to sit on the blisters, pay damages and quickly move to a system that practically all countries in the world have: tax real returns.

So what has changed after 15 March?
After a week, we see no concrete signs yet. What we do see are some evasive reactions, showing the hope that it will blow over, that we will forget again. That was my fear, which is why I did not participate in the democratic process. There are people who then feel that I have no right to have a say. I am happy to leave that to them. I found it strange that people were so jubilant about the turnout, 58.3%. More than 40 per cent of voters are not participating! Nobody cares about this group. Nobody gauges what they would have voted had they participated. Where is the concern for this large group that drops out? If I were from D(emocrats)66, I wouldn't sleep for a week because of that.