wed 04 feb 2009 19:42:19 — witte de withstraat
balkenende gets yelled at
it seemed to me premier balkenende was getting his ass kicked in parliament today.
the big discussion was whether there should be an immediate parliamentary investigation into who/why/how NL supported the US invasion of iraq in 2003, or should they let an independent commission report on it, and then pick up the subject again in november.
and i guess the really big news was that the old cabinet-forming agreement between CDA (christian democrats) and PvdA (labor), that there would be *no* investigation into dutch involvement in iraq, has been nullified. now everybody including balkenende says that a parliamentary investigation is no longer ruled out.
then the lady from socialist party was pretty adamant that any private handshake between labor and christian democrats just to form a cabinet would have been total bullshit anyway -- that the cabinetmakers aren't allowed to limit what parliament may decide to investigate. she seemed pretty irritated about it, i think maybe the SP was feeling kinda patronized.
lots of parliamentarians were talking like they really don't trust the government, especially the balkenende bit.
that's the best i could get out of it, but sometimes they talk really fast and really legalese in that place. i dunno if they ended up voting on anything or not.