Yesterday, or by now two days ago, the Netherlands voted No against the EU Constitution. 62% percent or so voted against it in a national referendum. Why?

Some commercials claim that a "Yes" would've been a "Yes" that waved away many animal's rights or so. Something the constitution is not about at all. So a "No" against the constitution is just as much a Yes against the animal's rights.

The Euro has supposedly made life more expensive. Not entirely true really - the shops, bars, restaurants, etc all raised their prices. Not because of the Euro, but because inflation has been fairly high until the Euro was introduced. Sure, some prices were definitely raised far too much, but by voting a No yesterday you wouldn't get the Guilder back or anything.

Others claim the Yes campaign was nothing but propaganda. The No campaign was exactly that, if not worse.

A "referendumwijzer", which is supposed to give advice about what to vote according to your opinion, by asking a few questions, was quite unreliable. The "official" one seemed fairly OK to me although I didn't test it specifically - but at least it tells me I'm somewhere in the middle when I have no opinion at all. It's probably biased too, but not as badly as the one by "Stichting Europese Grondwet NEE" (or something like that, some group against the constitution anyway). That one even gave you the result that you're completely against the constitution if you voted "don't care" for everything. Even at 50-55 or so out of 60 points, you got the advice to vote No ("you're somewhere in the middle, but if in doubt vote NO"). Everything below that would be a big fat NO for you. So you had to agree almost 100% with everything, and you'd be told to vote Yes.

In both campaigns several rubbish arguments were given. IMO, that was worse with the NO-campaign than the YES-campaign.

People love to complain about the government. Ever since Pim Fortuyn got some attention it started to get bad. But coming up with a solution on their own? Forget it.

I voted Yes. I'm a minority. Maybe no referendum next time? People are generally too stupid to know about all this (or just don't want to know the details), politicians are supposed to and should know about this. They almost all were pro-constitution.

(Not a great post, I know... forget about it whenever you can)