AMSTERDAM – Dutch troops are likely to leave Afghanistan this year as planned, prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende said yesterday, as early polls showed his rivals benefiting from the government’s collapse over the mission.
Mr Balkenende’s fourth cabinet in the last eight years fell apart on Saturday morning after the Labour Party pulled out of government, insisting it could not support a Nato request to extend the Dutch mission past this year.
Nato had asked the Netherlands to look into the possibility of a longer stay. "If nothing else will take its place, then it ends," Mr Balkenende told Dutch current affairs TV programme Buitenhofin an interview yesterday.
The 2,000-strong Dutch contingent is due to start leaving the Afghan province Uruzgan in August, and Mr Balkenende bemoaned the impact of the pull-out on the Dutch standing internationally. “The image of the Netherlands is far from flourishing abroad. They do not understand what we are doing,” he said.
The first poll to emerge following the cabinet’s fall indicated that the public supported Labour’s move to end the mission and to pull out of government.
The Maurice de Hond poll showed Labour gaining four seats in the next parliament to 19, compared with a week ago. Mr Balkenende’s Christian Democrats (CDA) lost one seat, to 26. However, the CDA still leads the poll, with Labour a firm fifth.
Mr Balkenende’s personal support, however, is much less than that of his party. The poll showed only 16 per cent support for Mr Balkenende as the next prime minister.
More clarity on the next government is expected after the leaders of the fallen cabinet and other top officials meet Queen Beatrix today to discuss the next steps.
A general election is widely expected to be held in May or June. In the meantime, the parties will be campaigning aggressively for municipal elections on March 3rd.
Mr Balkenende said there was a constitutional possibility that elections will not be held until the originally scheduled May 2011 date, but added that this was a matter for the queen’s advisers and the political leaders in parliament.
“We will get elections, a new government will come, and then it will be a question of making the Netherlands stronger, and let’s put our energy into that,” Mr Balkenende said.
Labour leader Wouter Bos, the incumbent finance minister, is making the budget, not Afghanistan, the main issue for those elections.
“I think this will be the big theme in the next few months,” Mr Bos said in an interview on Dutch TV current affairs show Nova on Saturday. – (Reuters)