2023-07-11 10:55:41
Outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte (right) speaks with Mirjam Bikker (left), member of the House of Representatives and member of the Christian Union, during a debate on the fall of the government in the House of Representatives in The Hague, July 10, 2023. REMKO DE WAAL / AFP
From left to far right, they suddenly all hailed the action of Mark Rutte, thanking him for his commitment to the Netherlands. By giving up his post as Prime Minister, while his party is leading in the polls four months before the next election, and by ending his political career, the Liberal Prime Minister took everyone by surprise on Monday 10 July, in The Hague. His withdrawal plunges the country, which he has led since 2010, into deep questioning: who will be able, after the next election, to take the helm of this very fragmented country, whose Chamber of Deputies has twenty political groups?
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Skillful strategist, eternal survivor of the many crises that Dutch democracy has gone through since his first term in 2010, “Mister Teflon”, as he is nicknamed, ended up asking himself: what was the use of the fourteen hours a day that he devoted to his mandate? “There has been a lot of speculation in recent days about what was driving me. My only answer: the Netherlandshe said, on Monday. I’ve decided that I’m no longer fit to be top of the list again (…). On the occasion of the investiture of a new government, after the elections, I will leave politics. »
The leader of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy therefore ended up being won over, in turn, to the “temptation of Venice”, this desire for something else which is now shared by the current Minister for Foreign Affairs, his ally Wopke Hoekstra. The number one of the Christian Democratic Appeal will also give up bringing his party’s list.
Halftone balance sheet
The two leaders, in reality, measured the difficulties that their respective parties were going to encounter, during the November consultation, after a government episode of only eighteen months. Mr. Rutte, the man of solutions, the one who governed with four different parties – and, on one occasion, with the support of the extreme right – had become an obstacle: neither the socialists, nor the ecologists, nor Caroline Van der Plas, leader of the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), the newcomer who shook up the political landscape last May and is emerging as a possible winner in November, did not want to negotiate with him in the future. The BBB, which has already won over many Christian Democrat voters, may now attract disgruntled liberals.
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Greens and Socialists criticize Mr. Rutte for not having been able to cope with the influx of asylum seekers and for having slashed the health and justice budgets. Ms. Van der Plas, who now dreams of investing in the “Torentje”, the office of the head of government in The Hague, accuses him of having given in to European and environmental demands by penalizing the intensive agriculture sector, the one of the engines of the national economy.
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