Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands has announced her intention to abdicate on April 30th, Koninginnedag (her official birthday & the Dutch national day). Willem-Alexander, the Prince of Orange, will become the Netherland’s first male monarch since 1890.
I wonder if Queen Elizabeth will do the same. Charles has been waiting 40 years and he is getting kind of old. Hard to believe he’s 64. I remember him as a 25 year old military pilot when I was in junior high.
I don’t think Queen Elizabeth will abdicate. It’s tradition in the Netherlands to do so, but not in Great Britain. If she becomes incapacitated, Charles is likely to be Regent, but not King till she dies.
Huh. I’m dutch, and where do i hear this news first? On an us messageboard.
Oh well. Alexander has had a lot of training and he’ll do well enough. He’s exactly my age; 46 this year. His wife is the one with the charisma. He is nice enough, but a bit too much of a jetsetter .
Nope. She’s queen until the day she dies (& her mother lived to be 101). British monarchs don’t abdicate unless forced to by a grave constitutional crisis. If she can’t do the job anymore then Charles will be appointed Prince Regent just like when George III went crazy.
Maastricht, do you ever wish that Napoleon hadn’t come in and ruined that whole Dutch Republic thing you’d had going for a few hundred years?
In one of the great ironies, in the Dutch Republic power was concentrated in a hereditary Stadtholder from the House of Orange. When the Netherlands became a kingdom, though, it turned into a democratic constitutional monarchy.
Well - we did not become a democracy for another 100 years, or a constitutional monarchy for another 35. It’s not like The Netherlands becoming a kingdom can really be connected to that much political change.
Anyway, this was a long time coming and it’s obviously a big deal in The Netherlands. There’s some talk that Beatrix postponed her abdication to wait for the country to be in slightly less turbulent waters politically (ie when there was a right wing minority government relying on the support of Wilders’s Freedom Party). I’d say Willem Alexander has some pretty big shoes to fill, both in terms of playing the constitutional role set aside for the King and in terms of becoming quite as popular as his mother is. Like **Maastricht **said, his wife is quite a bit more popular than he is.
I’m Dutch, and I would love to get rid of them. I amazes me that people in so many countries not only put up with monarchy, but actually fawn over the over-privileged bores. What on earth is interesting about a bunch of random people with too much money?
I’m not particularly familiar with the Dutch political system. Does the monarch actually play an active role in politics aside from ceremonially assenting to legislation, giving a throne speech written by the government, and doing what the Prime Minister “advises” him/her to do?
Princess Maxima? Sounds like a porn star.
Well, we don’t know. Up until recently, the queen played a role in the formation of new governments. This role (appointing and guiding chief negotiators to lead talks and eventually form a government) has recently been taken over by parliament, which oversaw the formation of our current government. Until then, however, the queen played a role in that process. The thing is, we don’t know the full extent of her involvement and the influence she exerted, because it’s all kept a secret, which I feel is a problem in and of itself. That said, while the queen herself was guided by a number of advisers, she has been alleged to have steered towards the formation of certain governments over others, excluding some potential coalition partners. This was one of Wilders’ big complaints after the 2010 elections, but such allegations also surfaced in 1994 when the first government not to include Christian-Democrats was formed.
In addition to the role in government formation, there is the more informal influence in day-to-day politics that the queen has exerted. The queen is an assertive woman who meets with MPs and cabinet ministers on a regular basis. She’s extremely well-informed and obviously vastly more experienced than just about anyone in Dutch politics. This reflects in part on the Dutch political system, in my view, as it has a high turnover rate (for instance, MPs often only serve one term, also as a result of high electoral volatility), but still, precious few politicians serve for more than a decade or two. That has placed the queen in a strong position vis-a-vis the MPs, PMs, and cabinet ministers that she meets with, and it would appear that the queen has taken an activist approach to filling this position.
These are the ‘big shoes’ that Willem Alexander now has to fill, and it’ll be interesting to see how he as a new, inexperienced king shapes the kingship. Still, while it is not clear exactly how far the queen’s influence stretches, I for one am uncomfortable with putting someone in a position where she can conceivably exert such influence, without there being even the most nominal of democratic oversights - the queen is neither selected nor scrutinized by parliament or by the population at large. This, as well as the royal family being on the national payroll to the tune of several millions of euros annually in spite of the fact that the queen is one of the richest women on earth, makes me favor a system in which the head of state is democratically elected or appointed. Hopefully Willem Alexander will mess it up so that we’ll decide to get rid of them 
This doesn’t sound like a woman looking to retire in the near future:
I agree.
It also kind of sticks in my throat that Maxima’s father got/maintained the family’s wealth by working for General Videla. Sure, Maxima seems a nice lady and all, but to me it seems grossly unjust that her family has remained privileged enough for her to be able to move in the kind of circles where one gets to meet royalty, whereas all the people who lost relatives and loved ones in the regime got nothing, presumably.