Dutch government collapse

[moot]

So apparently something big happened the other night and I haven't heard about it anywhere, till wikinews told me an hour ago.

The Dutch coalition government has collapsed over "irreconcilable differences" between the two largest parties over Afghanistan troop deployments.
According to prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende, the Labour Party, the second largest party in the government after the ruling Christian Democratic party, was resigning from the government, effective immediately. Balkenende said, "You could see from the last few days that we couldn’t come up with an agreement." He added, "Where there is no trust, it is difficult to work together. There is no good path to allow this cabinet to go further."
The split occurred after 16 hours of talks over the future of the Dutch presence in the Afghanistan War, which ended early Saturday. While the Christian Democratic Party supported keeping a reduced military presence in the Uruzgan Province, the Labour Party demanded the immediate return of all Dutch troops in August.
With the resignation of the Labour Party, the Christian Democratic Party is left with an unworkable majority in the government. While Prime Minister Balkenende made little mention of the future of the government, saying only that the remaining two parties would continue in office, with the Labour Party's seats being "made available."
According to the leader of the Labour party, Wouter Bos, the third party in the Dutch government, the Christian Union Party, would also resign its seats along with the Labour Party's seats when he offered the resignation of the party to Queen Beatrix later on Saturday. Despite Balkenede's statements, political analysts said that early elections seemed inevitable, despite a year remaining in the current term.
Dutch troops were deployed to Afghanistan in 2006, and were originally intended to return in 2008, but were forced to remain as no other nation was willing to provide replacement troops. Under the new commitment signed in 2008, Dutch troops were to return in August, a stance reinforced by a Dutch courts' ruling in October 2009 requiring that all troops return by that time, although that ruling has yet to be ratified by the government.

So... what does this mean for the world? I'm still a little unclear on a few things - does this mean the total collapse of the Dutch government, or just until they elect a new cabinet? If it's the latter, 'collapse' seems like a big word for something so... seemingly-routine.

 

[Altmer]

Ok, considering I'm Dutch, I'll explain this to you folks. Basically, what happened is the coalition got into a fight. We always have a coalition because Dutch parties generally are not big enough to get a majority on their own, so they form ruling coalition (the current one was Labour Party, Christian Democratic Party and Christian Union). They disagreed over Uruzgan, and Labour Party stepped out of the government.

This means that within 2 or 3 months new elections will be held to form a new cabinet, and until that date a sort of "interim-government" will be formed to keep daily things running, but no big decisions will be made. As soon as possible, they will hold new elections to determine whoever gets to rule the country next.

The election polls currently show that we need at least four parties of any sort to get a majority. There are very little possible cabinets in such a government, mostly because there aren't enough like-minded people on either side to form a majority.

Left-wing has Socialists, Greens, Animal Party, Labour Party - and most people consider Democrats 66 (a left-leaning liberal party) left-wing, but D66 can also rule with a right-wing cabinet.

To the right there exists Christian-Democrats, People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (right wing liberals), PVV (Party for Freedom), which is basically anti-Muslim, and some splintered extremist Christian groups. ChristianUnion is a reformed Christian party which is extremely conservative on issues such as abortion and gay marriage but left-wing on social politics.

Basically it means that the country is effectively without a government that can make major decisions at this point, but a new government will be reinstated after elections are held. However elections at this point will turn out to be a nightmare, as it will lead to the formation of a cabinet that is instable because a) it involves the PVV, which is pretty much a one issue party and inept at ruling, and will collapse quickly (see also the collapse after the Lijst Pim Fortuyn got into the government), or b) it will require too many parties with too many different opinions to work together, and the same will happen as with the current cabinet - either the parties will refuse to shake hands due to different ideologies, or hard decisions will be postponed until there is a cabinet that is either a left-wing majority or a right-wing majority, who will then take the necessary decisions.

The government is likely to be unstable for a while because voters here are likely to be just frustrated about immigrants and vote PVV en masse - equivalent to voting BNP in England, or for Le Pen in France.