For the locals, staying up late in the Netherlands to watch the Vancouver Winter Olympics has mostly involved waiting for Sven Kramer to win his three speed-skating events — one down two to go.

Kramer is a rolled-gold superstar who declares “Bread — There’s something in it!”  at almost every tram stop. (The accompanying picture, skater with sandwich in hand, indicates that Kramer means the comestible, not the soft-rock group.)

The rest of the Dutch team in Vancouver has disappointed slightly, and with very non-Dutch events such as the skeleton, curling and the snowboarders in action, most locals would have gone to bed early on Friday night.

Of course, for an Australian, the chance to watch a snowboarding gold, was enough reason to stay up late.

After watching Torah’s Bright’s win, shown after midnight, I started channel-surfing and, after wading through the ads on station after station for Dutch sex lines, I noticed that two channels were filming a collection of men and women with microphones waiting outside a building.

It turned out these warriors of the press had been waiting since noon to hear the results of the Dutch cabinet meeting in The Hague. The meeting dragged on, past 1am, past 2am and the live crosses were interposed with interviews with “experts” who knew precisely nothing. (My favourite was an interview with the chairman of the CDJA — the equivalent of the Young Liberals — who, after giving a considered view on the likely outcome confessed that the CDJA’s opinion was usually ignored by the senior section of his party, the Christian Democrats.)

Finally at 4am, after a 16-hour meeting in the Binnenhof — the ancient Parliament House — it was announced that the Christian Democrat Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende was going to interrupt Queen Beatrix’s skiing trip and ask her to remove the ministerial commissions of the CDA’s main coalition partner, the PvDA (equivalent to Australia’s Labor Party).

Balkenende emerged 15 minutes later to explain that trust between the parties was gone and that there was no resolving the deadlock over whether or not Dutch soldiers should stay in Uruzgan Province alongside the Australians in Afghanistan. The Dutch arrived in Afghanistan for a two-year mission, which was then extended for another two years — “the last extension” said the PvDA at the time.

At 4.45 PvDA head Wouter Bos held his own press conference and told the exhausted press corps a similar but differently spun story; he said that the government had promised to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2010 and that he would keep that promise. (The third coalition partner, the Christen Unie, supports Balkenende and will stay with him in a minority government.)

CDA and PvDA believe the other has acted in bad faith.

The CDA accuses Bos of taking a populist line and not allowing the government to leave all options on the table.

The PvDA believe that Balkenende orchestrated an invitation from NATO for the Dutch troops to stay longer; an invitation that would normally not be issued unless it was almost certain to be accepted.

The Christian Democrats are the natural party of government in the Netherlands. Apart from the period from 1994-2002 when the left and right parties tag-teamed in a so-called Purple Coalition, the CDA has been part of the ruling team since WWI.

For Balkenende, who has held the Prime Ministership through a variety of majority and minority governments for the past eight years, this could be the end of the road. Balkenende had already fought tooth and nail to prevent an inquiry being held into the Netherlands government’s decisions before the Iraq war but lost the fight; as expected, the ensuing report was not good news for him.

Bos also has a lot at stake; he hopes this will be a circuit-breaker that will return recent defectors to the Green-Left and the Socialist Party but there is a real risk that the PvDA will not be in government at all after the inevitable national elections, likely to be held in May or June. (In a national election Balkenende would also have to look to his right flank with the anti-immigration fire-brand Geert Wilder’s Freedom Party gaining ground. Fortunately for Balkenende, the Freedom Party is largely skipping the municipal elections to be held in just over a week.)

The Afghanistan argument has pushed aside almost all other election topics, although the debt question is being linked by the PvDA to their money-saving troop withdrawal.

Social questions, such as a proposal to relax the euthanasia laws slightly will now receive very little air time. (A debate about the merits of increasing the age at which employees must compulsorily retire from 65 to 67 looked very strange to these Australian eyes. The idea of retaining the retirement age at 65 but allowing employees the option of voluntarily working past 65 is apparently off the table.)

So the Netherlands is about to enter another Afghanistan-centred election campaign, unless Balkenende’s skeleton government can stop the downhill slide and find new coalition partners — lots of them. With only 47 seats out of 150, it’s an Olympian task.