Party Responses to Social Movements: Challenges and Opportunities by Daniela R. Piccio

Author:Daniela R. Piccio [Piccio, Daniela R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Advocacy, Comparative Politics, Political Parties, Political Science, Political Process
ISBN: 9781789201543
Google: b1NtDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 43404604
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2019-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

Nuclear Factories Must Close! Who Decides?

Faced with the radicalization of the anti-nuclear actions in Dodewaard, whose slogan and stated goal was the immediate closure of the nuclear power station (‘Dodewaard must close’), the PvdA decided not to give its support to either the first or the second demonstration. Here is the statement by the PvdA secretary Max van Den Berg, a New Left member and one of the strongest supporters of the party’s ‘Action Party’ strategy during the 1970s, before the 1980 Dodewaard demonstration:

We all agree that Dodewaard should close. However, there are great concerns on the modes of action of the activists. . . . Many of them no longer trust political parties, even the left-wing ones. Now blockades are being prepared in Dodewaard, . . . and we have to be clear on the fact that we are against the use of violence. . . . We have many [PvdA] members in the police forces and the army, who would eventually have to confront activists who act beyond the laws of our parliamentary democracy.98

The same position was shared by Kees Zijlstra, the spokesperson of the PvdA on environmental matters in the early 1980s: ‘Actions can have a good function in order to correct parliamentary democracy. But one thing should be clear: the decisions need to be taken within the parliament. Otherwise, it will be chaos’.99

For the second Dodewaard action, which not only promised to be more radical but also took place during the short-lived PvdA, CDA and D’66 government (where the minister of internal affairs, with responsibility for public order and police forces, was held by PvdA member van Thijn), the Party Executive made a clear statement against the party’s participation in the demonstration.100 Moreover, when the party journal published a call for participation in the Dodewaard blockade, as a clear demonstration that a large number of PvdA members intended to take part, the party leadership intervened, criticizing the publisher for not having taken sufficient distance from the means of protest that activists in Dodewaard might have engaged in.101 The more it became clear that a number of members intended to take part in the blockade, the greater the intervention by the party leadership. Some days before the demonstration, the party secretary warned party members who intended to participate that some participants might use violence during the protest, and announced that the PvdA would not take part, precisely for this reason: ‘Blockades as such have been interpreted by the party as a symbolic means – but the actual closure of the factory needs to be decided in parliament’.102

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