Tough economic times forecast for the next government; caretaker Prime Minister Balkenende in trouble with his own party as fresh calls come for him to step aside as Christian Democrat leader, and a macabre twist in the case of murdered schoolgirl Milly.
 
There’s some good news and some bad news on the economy for the next government, the broadsheets report. Admittedly, it’s mostly bad news, according to the Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis’ (CPB) report on the economic prospects for the next five years.
 
The good news, says NRC Handelsblad is that the next cabinet won’t have to economise as much as expected – a paltry 29 billion euros instead of the whacking 35 billion euros the government anticipated up to now. The bad news, says de Volkskrant, is that there are “four years of hard times for the next cabinet” ahead, as it pays the bill for the economic crisis and deals with the soaring cost of pensions and healthcare. “Whatever cabinet it is, it probably won’t be popular,” the paper concludes. And it will need to make “painful choices”, De Telegraaf chips in, with “cutbacks like the 1980s”.
 
According to de Volkskrant the CPB hints that what’s needed is a new ‘Wassenaar agreement’ – the historic 1982 deal whereby the government introduced swingeing public spending cuts and the unions agreed on pay restraint. But in 2010, the paper concludes regretfully, a deal like that looks to be wishful thinking.
 
Schoolgirl Milly murder - policeman neighbour arrested
Again the face of murdered 12-year-old schoolgirl Milly Boele dominates the front pages of the popular dailies, but this time the circumstances have turned macabre. The girl’s neighbour turned himself in to the police, De Telegraaf reports. And he’s actually a policeman himself.
 
Detectives spent hours on Wednesday searching the house next door but one, and found the girl’s body buried in the garden. De Telegraaf goes to town with the biggest front-page photo of Milly, while AD has diagrams detailing the police search. The papers relate how Milly ended a phone call with her mother to answer the door, and was lured away by the new policeman neighbour. “The girl was mad about animals,” says De Telegraaf, “and the neighbour probably persuaded her with a story about his two Labradors.”
 
PM under fire as party leader
“Leader under pressure” – the position of caretaker Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende as head of the Christian Democrat party is again looking shaky, says de Volkskrant. MP Annie Schreijer-Pierik is the latest Christian Democrat to put the boot in, NRC Handelsblad reports. She says it’s time for the party leader to make way for someone new.
 
When the government fell, the Christian Democrats promptly rallied round Mr Balkenende. There was a quick announcement that he would be staying on as leader, “in an attempt to nip a leadership discussion in the bud”, says de Volkskrant. But now it looks like the move had quite the opposite effect. “The fact is that a party of government like the Christian Democrats knows how unwise it is to enter a campaign with a damaged leader,” concludes AD. “If this mood continues, his position will be untenable.”
 
Criminal Moroccans are Dutch
NRC Handelsblad’s editorial takes issue with a national police report on “Moroccan criminal populations”. The paper is sceptical about the way the report juggles crime statistics and weighs up levels of “Moroccan pressure” in different towns.
 
For one thing, says NRC, while the report says Moroccans are over-represented in the crime figures, it doesn’t provide any comparison with other ethnic groups. The paper suspects that all the uproar in the media about Moroccan criminals probably means that Moroccans are more likely to get arrested. And it points out that the statistics are viewed through “police spectacles” – they aren’t actually based on numbers of convicted criminals, but on the number of people the police “believe to have committed a crime”.
 
What’s more, NRC points out, these Moroccan criminals aren’t really Moroccan, but Dutch – albeit with parents born in Morocco. “The most paradoxical result of the report is that, in particular, Moroccans who are strongly oriented towards the Netherlands become criminals,” the paper concludes. “Criminal Moroccans is a term that conceals more than it explains.”
 
‘Fusion architecture’ or ‘pure kitsch’?
Trouw features a photo of what looks like a stack of picture-postcard Dutch wooden houses jumbled one on top of the other – 70 of them, to be precise. It’s “fusion architecture”, according to architect Wilfried van Winden.
 
The outside of the new 12-storey hotel in the centre of Zaandam, just north of Amsterdam, is made up of the frontages of five types of traditional green houses. Except they’re not actually made of wood, but cement, plastic and aluminium.
 
The residents of Zaandam apparently love the new 15-million-euro building with its tangle of ornate facades. But in architectural circles the reactions are mixed. “Pure kitsch”, is the verdict, says Wilfried van Winden. But the architect doesn’t let it bother him: “Ah, you always hear that sort of remark if you don’t make a clean, modern building.”