CU leader Mirjam Bikker meets Jan Struijs from 50Plus on Tuesday morning in the hallway of the House of Representatives. “Best wishes, Jan.” And also: “Are you on your way to the informateur? Sell your skin dearly, eh.”
Struijs is the first to visit informateur Rianne Letschert since D66, VVD and CDA decided that the three of them will form a minority cabinet. That requires something “from all of us,” Struijs says of himself, just before he enters Letschert’s office. “We will all have to compromise.” Although he also points to his inside pocket. His party has “lines in the sand”, and he has taken them on paper for Letschert and the party leaders of D66, VVD and CDA: the AOW must remain intact and cuts in elderly care are a “very deep line in the sand” for 50Plus.
VVD leader Dilan Yesilgöz walks past him and squeezes his arm. “Hello!” Struijs looks aside for a moment: “Hello Dilan.” Her first name is pronounced Die-lan. Struijs, new in The Hague, doesn’t seem to know that yet.
He wants to be “cooperative,” he tells reporters at the entrance. His party is not like “others”, who “say in advance: we do not want to participate”. Struijs means the PVV. Geert Wilders had already stated in a press release: “So I am not going to drink coffee with Jetten, Yesilgoz and Bontenbal.” Wilders did not seem to have bothered to spell Yesilgöz’s name correctly. The press release also stated that if the other party leaders did go out for coffee, they “had to decide for themselves”. “But the PVV does not contribute in any way to the destruction of the Netherlands. The shorter Jetten is Prime Minister, the better!”
The press release was therefore mainly intended for the far-right parties, JA21, FVD and BBB, which do visit the formation. Wilders wants to portray them as followers.
Red lines
With the upcoming Jetten minority cabinet, with only 66 seats in the House of Representatives, the opposition parties have the opportunity to continuously show themselves: they participate in plans that suit them and show their cooperative side. Or they don’t participate and show their voters where the line is for them. Their seats matter, they can demand a lot.
Parties such as the Christian Union and the SGP usually cooperate constructively with almost all cabinets. They do have clear red lines in this formation: they do not want anything to change in terms of educational freedom. And they do not want medical-ethical reform, while D66 and VVD take a liberal view of the cultivation of embryos for science, euthanasia and abortion. If the cabinet does come up with such plans, the ChristenUnie and SGP will not support other proposals.
At least, that is the negotiating position they currently choose. Because behind the scenes, the small parties already know that an overly rigid attitude can cost them dearly. Anyone who does not move along at all with the incoming cabinet runs the risk of being dismissed as unconstructive. The upcoming minority cabinet is complicated for the opposition: they do not yet know what balance between cooperation and resistance their voters will appreciate.
The coalition parties hope that they can already lay the foundation for cooperation. That basis is still shaky: because Yesilgöz excluded GroenLinks-PvdA, party leader Jesse Klaver is very angry. He waited for days to respond to the news that there will be a minority cabinet. Jetten and Bontenbal are thinking about how they can get things right again with GroenLinks-PvdA, but this seems to be much less of an issue with the VVD: they hear that Klaver will have to get over it himself.
JA21 leader Joost Eerdmans is “disappointed”, he said on Tuesday just before his conversation with the informant and the leaders of D66, VVD and CDA. His party would have liked to participate in a cabinet, and no, he says, no one had yet asked him: “Joost, what would you like to hand in?” But it is also as if Eerdmans has already gotten over his disappointment. He goes in, he says, “with a open mindHe also says: “They should not immediately expect a vote of no confidence from JA21.” The country “must move on”. “We are not saying: just look at it.”
According to Eerdmans, there is a chance that the opposition will “unite”, and this is already clear in the corridors of the House of Representatives: parties are making coffee dates with each other. They smell opportunities. Although they don’t know exactly which one yet. In the upcoming coalition, MPs and employees are also busy with it: what does the opposition want? What does the opposition not want?
Arguing
Jetten, Yesilgöz and Bontenbal hope that most parties will think of ‘the national interest’, although they also realize that this requires a different political culture than that of recent years. During the Christmas recess, Bontenbal had studied minority cabinets and wrote on the CDA website: “A minority cabinet forces cooperation and that leads to different relationships.” That already sounds like a certainty. It’s still a long way off.
Jan Struijs of 50Plus believes: “We don’t want this to be a fight again.” He believes in “a new impetus” and after his conversation he says he is “happy”. He expects that there will be a “main agreement” “with a lot of room in it”. He said that he had received “in-depth questions” from the party leaders, which makes him think that they have already gone a long way with their plans.
After his conversation, Eerdmans says that he doesn’t know what will happen next, or whether he can come by again. What he does know: “This will be a middle cabinet, with a left-wing signature.”
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