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close-run thing, and there was certainly a revival in PVDA fortunes, but a rightist alliance – consisting of the VVD, the CDA and the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (formerly Leefbaar Neederlands) – still managed to cobble together an administration under the leadership of Jan Peter Balkenende. In the event, this coalition proved most unstable, but Balkenende soldiered on (with different partners) until the national election of November 2006. This saw modest gains for the far right and left, but not enough to unseat Balkenende, who is now at the head of a majority CDA, PVDA and Christian Union (CU) administration. Superficially, therefore, and with Leefbaar Neederlands dead and gone (the party dissolved itself), it seemed that normal political service had been resumed, but although the CDA and the PVDA were once again the largest parties, there was an uneasy undertow. In truth, Fortuyn’s popularity pushed certain sorts of social debate, particularly on immigration, to the right. The situation got much worse – and race relations much more tense – when, in late 2004, filmmaker Theo van Gogh was shot dead on an Amsterdam street by a Moroccan who objected to a film he had made – Submission – about Islamic violence against women. Shown on Dutch TV, the film was scripted by a politician, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee and Dutch citizen, whose pronouncements on this same subject have been hard-hitting and headline-grabbing in equal measure. In an interview with the UK’s Daily Telegraph in December 2004, she is reported to have said: “But tell me why any Muslim man would want Islamic women to be educated and emancipated? Would a Roman voluntarily have given up his slaves?” Unfortunately for Ali, she was engulfed by controversy of a different kind in 2006, when it turned out that her application for asylum had not been entirely truthful – and the ensuing furore created parliamentary panic.

To its credit, the Amsterdam city council, and especially the mayor, Job Cohen, handled the racial tension with aplomb and, largely as a result, he was mandated for a second term as mayor in 2006. Also in 2006, municipal elections saw the PVDA runaway winners in terms of the popular vote, but still needing the support of another party – in this case, the leftist GroenLinks (“GreenLeft”) – to form a majority administration. This coalition remains in power at the time of writing.

History |

The present

In the 1970s, many Amsterdammers may have had their misgivings, but the vast majority came to accept that their country’s liberal attitude to soft drugs and prostitution was sane and pragmatic. They couldn’t have foreseen that almost nobody else in Europe would follow in their slipstream and that, as a result, Amsterdam would become a target for thousands of tourists after the city’s indulgences. By the 1990s, a solid bloc of Amsterdammers was appalled by this state of affairs and this played into the hands of a new breed of city politician, who wanted to cast Amsterdam as a dynamic metropolis. To this new breed, the Red Light District was unpleasant, if not downright offensive, and in recent years there have been political rumblings about closing the “window brothels” down. The mayor himself railed against people trafficking, gangsterism and money laundering, and others proposed to have the whole lot moved to the polders east of the city, though the only result so far has been a reduction in the number of window brothel licences. But really it was redevelopment that became the name of the game with the first major target being the old docklands bordering the River IJ. The initial phases of this colossal project went down well and Amsterdammers did indeed begin to think that their city could become an ultra-modern metropolis – but then came the Noord-Zuidlijn. Begun in 2003, the plan was to construct a 10km-long metro running north–south underneath Amsterdam. It has been little short of a disaster: costs have ballooned, there have been endless problems keeping the tunnels dry, several houses have actually collapsed as a result of the diggings and finally,