Geert Wilders is threatening to leave the cabinet, just before the Christmas recess. If someone wants to change the asylum plans of Asylum Minister Marjolein Faber of the PVV “even by a millimeter”, he says, he has “no point anymore”. “Then they will continue without us.” These are heavy words. Not so long ago, these would have led to commotion, chaos and crisis consultations in The Hague politics until late at night.
But now? No one is surprised anymore in this coalition of PVV, VVD, NSC and BBB.
It is also not Wilders’ first threat. At the beginning of October it was about the emergency asylum law that he wanted to have, but that the NSC did not want. Wilders then said: “I don’t know whether we would otherwise continue happily for very long.” Even then he said he didn’t want to admit anything. Otherwise he would have “the backbone of a banana.” The emergency law was not passed, the PVV remained in the cabinet. According to those involved, the most recent threat was, as before, intended for NSC, which is said to have already expressed doubts in the cabinet.
You would think: if you threaten a few times and always back down, you will lose your credibility. So far this has not been the case for Wilders. His party is still the largest in the polls, so Wilders shows self-confidence. It does not seem to matter to his voters that his ministers have not yet been able to fulfill the PVV promises from the election campaign, on asylum and healthcare.
Weak ministers
What Wilders has achieved seemed unthinkable a year ago. Parties such as D66, CDA and the Christian Union are prepared to negotiate with him about money and plans. They first helped the cabinet with a deal on the VAT increase, then they spent weeks in Wilders’ room talking about money for education and how to cut back on it.
What it brought to those opposition parties: the social service period will be maintained, there will be no cuts in teacher salaries and fewer cuts in foreign students. But what it brings to Wilders may be much more. Parties have shown that they are willing to put aside their resistance to his party’s anti-rule of law ideas, as long as they get enough in return. Which of those parties can then say after the elections that they want nothing to do with Wilders?
Wilders was grateful, he had “great appreciation” for the help.
But he cannot be carefree. His most important ministers, Fleur Agema of Health and Marjolein Faber of Asylum, are regarded as weak throughout the House of Representatives. In the coalition, Wilders is told that Faber is unreachable and makes no effort to gain support for her plans. She is already assured of this in the House of Representatives, but not yet in the Senate. The coalition parties PVV, VVD and BBB do not have a majority there, and NSC has no seats at all. In the Senate there are also VVD members and BBB members who appear to have doubts about parts of the new asylum policy. And Faber has so far done nothing to dispel those doubts. Which raises the question for more and more parties: do they want to come up with solutions? Or does she mainly want to show that others are holding them back?
Irritation
VVD leader Dilan Yesilgöz is the only one from the coalition who expresses out loud her irritation about Faber who just doesn’t hurry up. VVD members have long been accused of not being able to reduce the number of asylum seekers with their own ministers and state secretaries at the Ministry of Justice, cabinet after cabinet. Now it seems to have been proven that the PVV cannot do it either.
Yesilgöz did not want to participate in a cabinet, she said immediately after last year’s elections, because she had lost ten seats (from 34 to 24). The VVD would at most be willing to tolerate a new cabinet. She came back and joined the formation. But for VVD members it never became their coalition or their cabinet. Other parties in the House have the idea that the VVD is waiting for a moment to leave. You can also hear VVD members talking about this in the corridors of the House of Representatives. The most obvious moment for such a fall, which could benefit the VVD, is spring. Then there will have to be new negotiations, again with the opposition, about major cuts. VVD members dream of an election campaign in which it is not about asylum and migration, but about finances. In which their message to the voter could be: we look after your wallet.
Before the summer, the VVD was still openly divided about joining a cabinet with the radical right-wing PVV as the largest party, but after the summer there is no longer any evidence of this. In the polls, the VVD has about 23 seats, hardly a loss. There is no discussion about Yesilgöz’s leadership, although there are doubts in the party about her performances, and especially about her message. She repeats it a lot, always using the same words. The party also hears that it must stand up much more strongly for the liberal constitutional state.
‘Function elsewhere’
In the House of Representatives, VVD members are visibly irritated by their coalition partner NSC. That has a long history. It was NSC founder and party leader Pieter Omtzigt who continued to accuse Rutte of wanting to think of a ‘position elsewhere’ for Omtzigt in 2021, and in the eyes of VVD members he continued to portray Rutte as unreliable. In previous cabinets you could hear VVD members complaining about the feelings of moral superiority they thought they saw at D66, now they complain about the same thing at NSC. And there is something else bothering them: many of the problems in the coalition and the cabinet revolve around hesitations, reservations or sensitivities among NSC members, which attract a lot of attention. And so there is less attention for the PVV, the VVD’s main electoral competitor, and what is not going well there.
According to VVD members, the weakness of the PVV does not only lie with the ministers. The MPs of the PVV, they see, are not allowed to decide anything themselves. Wilders decides. This makes it difficult to work together. They also see this at NSC and BBB.
BBB has always been very much in favor of this coalition, and Caroline van der Plas and Wilders grew closer in the formation. Their parties were also getting along better in terms of content. Opposition parties have been talking about BBB as ‘PVV light’ for some time now. You can sometimes hear BBB members talking about asylum and migration in almost the same terms as PVV members.
There are concerns at BBB: do voters still know that their party is mainly about the countryside? About nitrogen, the farmers? They want more attention for that. Although that also has risks. The government will have to come up with drastic measures to tackle manure and nitrogen, and the four coalition parties still have to find a solution together. Is BBB willing to make compromises?
‘It has to be different’
In the polls, little has changed for BBB since the elections. The party, which was the big winner of the Provincial Council elections in the spring of 2023, has seven seats in the House of Representatives and is now at about five to seven. It is very different for NSC. That party won twenty seats last year, but is at zero to three in the polls. An unprecedented loss, which leads to nervousness among that party. Things have to change, NSC members think, but how?
The idea at NSC is that they have raised high expectations with words like ‘good governance’, but have not yet achieved them. NSC members also see that the image they now have, as morally high-minded know-it-alls, works against them in the coalition. And so the party now plans to change. NSC wants to become “more constructive”, says duo faction leader Nicolien van Vroonhoven NRCand are no longer seen as the party in opposition in the coalition.
Also read
‘We are currently not living up to our promises as NSC’
The coalition parties will think: first see, then believe. In addition, Van Vroonhoven does not stand up for the values and right to exist of NSC in her story, but apparently wants to adapt to the others. In the tough political world of The Hague, this is seen as weakness. It will almost certainly not make the already shaky coalition stronger.
Interview Nicolien van Vroonhoven page 20-21