One of the most important interviews of 2024 was recorded the day before Christmas de Volkskrant. It was an interview with Dick Schoofchairman of the Council of Ministers since July last year. It was so meaningful because Schoof was not found expressing any political views anywhere in the interview. Even when asked why he resigned his membership of the PvdA in 2021 after thirty years, he leaves the reader in the dark. “I was just tired of that party and did not feel at home in other parties,” says Schoof, who apparently spent three decades thinking that a top civil servant should be a member of a party for the sake of his career and changed that principle after the electoral demise of the PvdA has made a diametric change in 2017/2021.
This soullessness of Schoof was no coincidence. On New Year’s Eve he again showed his apolitical side. In a conversation with ophthalmologist Tjeerd de Faberin favor of a fireworks ban, Schoof said on the eve of the annual disaster night that Dutch people “do not have to count” on national measures from the cabinet. “It is really up to parliament. There are no proponents in these coalitions.” What did he think? Not a clue.
School itself calls this “situational leadership”, as it is also called in management courses. “When do I take a step forward? That is always different. You always have to determine: what is the right route?”
Regardless of the fact that, after eight months of group discussions in the Catshuis, he has not managed to even get the Budget Memorandum for 2025 through parliament in an orderly manner – the Senate still has to approve the national budget – and regardless of the shame that he still believes it is appropriate to claim an important-sounding leadership – leaders do not appoint themselves, but acquire that status from others – his open aversion to political commitment is particularly worrying.
Never before in the Netherlands has a council of ministers been led by a public administrator who is as devoid of politics as Schoof. Even the KVP members Jan de Quay, the leader of the Dutch Union during the German occupation who suddenly became prime minister in 1959 without ministerial experience after the war, and Victor Marijnen, the former top civil servant and agriculture minister who succeeded him in 1963, had more politics in their thunder than Schoof. Although, unlike the current Prime Minister, both were able to hide relatively quietly behind their powerful party leaders Carl Romme and Norbert Schmelzer in the House of Representatives.
Schoof’s unpolitical nature is where the danger lies. Not in the short term. The Gestalt therapy in the Catshuis, which Schoof mistakes for ‘situational leadership’, is especially painful at the moment: for him and his ministers. This week it was the turn of PVV Minister Dirk Beljaarts (Economic Affairs) to humiliate himself. He was supposed to go to the World Economic Forum in Davos, but had to cancel a tweet from boss Wilders cancel.
But in the longer term things are different. If his bureaucratic apolitics continues to produce nothing other than budget disputes and empty policy intentions, he will mainly strengthen the anti-political mood in the country, which the populists then use against the pluralistic democratic constitutional state.
After all, the Wilderians make no mistake about it ideal-typical nationin which Wilders will be the real Prime Minister of the Netherlandsthere is no room for concessions and compromises. Apolitical management is not the lesser evil, as journalist Kemal Rijken argued on the opinion page in this newspaper at the end of last year. No, it is grist to the gravediggers’ mill of our pluriform parliamentary system.
Hubert Smeets is a journalist and historian. He writes a column here every other week.