What will Mark Rutte’s answer be during the Great Nitrogen Survey of 2027 to the question of how it is possible that one million young people cannot find a home of their own due to years of shutting down construction? ‘I forwarded that to the specialist minister.’ And, oh yes, that he really only came across an interview with a 33-year-old caravan resident in 2025, who had just made his umpteenth bid in vain on a tiny house and therefore only then suddenly tiny Torentje realized ‘how bizarrely high’ the housing shortage had risen during all his cabinets.
And what will Rutte’s answer be during the Great Asylum Seekers Survey of 2029, to the question of how it is possible that the number of refugees who have to spend the night outside in Ter Apel now exceeds twenty thousand? “I can’t reconstruct that now.” Moreover, all those refugees had different wishes, which required ‘so much customization’. That is ‘much more complex than I ever imagined’.
In both cases, he can then effortlessly fall back on the Gas Survey of last October, from which the above quotes are derived.
Complex
In the twilight of her premiership, a Labor MP asked about Liz Truss, when she no longer dared to appear at a crucial debate, if she was hiding under her desk. Less than a week later, she was able to clear her desk. Rutte had been prime minister for more than a decade, but he was never present either. At all crucial moments, ten years from now all parliamentary inquiries will conclude, he hid under his desk. All so terribly complex!
In this context it is remarkable how even the few sensible VVD members in this country, sometimes after having first clearly explained an urgent problem, then spout great euphemistic nonsense, namely when their own party is mentioned in this context.
Senator Caspar van den Berg in de Volkskrant of 22 October, about the neglect of rural areas (housing, public transport): ‘Around 2000 the idea arose that the Netherlands was spatially finished. A miscalculation. The government currently lacks the necessary knowledge and instruments. My party has not been sharp enough on that.’ Former party leader Ed Nijpels in NRC a week later: ‘The VVD has had the subject of climate hijacked’.
Not sharp enough? Stef Blok once came to announce with joy that he had killed an entire ministry – his own, of Spatial Planning. And as a result of the now threatening further fragmentation of the track due to neoliberal marketing delusions, news hour past an old recording with traffic minister Annemarie Jorritsma, with the platitude that only commercial companies can deliver customer-oriented quality.
Have it hijacked? This suggests that outside Nijpels itself (and Pieter Winsemius) there has ever been some climate awareness within the VVD, where, like Rutte, people mainly want to be able to barbecue undisturbed. The naive expectation of improvement that this expresses is also completely at odds with the incorrigibly infantile ‘vroom-vroom’ mentality that Nijpels encounters in practice, and of which he also clearly identifies the concrete excesses in that interview.
‘Bad measure’
Take Rutte himself, who described the reduction of the maximum speed as a ‘lousy measure’ – as about the worst thing that could happen to him (which is why he was unable to reconstruct the gas earthquakes, the refugee problem and the allowance scandal). Cora van Nieuwenhuizen, who, when the nitrogen problem was no longer undeniable, shouted: ‘We’ll find a ruse.’
Well, Cora’s wiles are worked out. The one who dared to clarify that a few years ago was her party colleague Johan Remkes, with his report Not everything is possible. Whoever dared to attach the logical consequences to this this spring was her party colleague Christianne van der Wal – who was therefore physically attacked by Mark van den Oever’s agricultural terrorist brigade. And then? Then her government screwed up and her party stuck its head in the sand once again.
Anyone who might have hoped that Rutte & co would really stand firm in the summer negotiations that followed – and even I hoped that against my better judgment for a while – now knows better. All concrete limits and deadlines from Remkes’ latest report were immediately watered down by the cabinet, there was no question of coercion, because otherwise the Farmers Defense Force threatens with new trigger terror. Van der Wal had to dig deep into the dust.
In short: new postponement, and that means: the longer one waits, the harder the intervention will become. ‘Volunteousness’ has yielded nothing for farmers all these years, and will therefore also yield nothing without a stick in hand.
Build locked
That also means very concretely: Dutch construction will probably be closed. Due to a lack of nitrogen space, the judge will soon again cancel all construction programs – for homes, but also for companies. Desperate entrepreneurs who are not allowed to expand are already regularly on the phone with the VVD, because ‘their’ party always capitulates to the peasant violence.
Not to mention the many desperate home seekers. To put it bluntly: VVD and CDA therefore consider the housing of pigs more important than that of humans. That seems to me to be a good election slogan for the left-wing opposition in the state elections, also important for the Senate.
Key question: what will D66 do? Does that party accept Rutte’s cowardice? Or will the forced shutdown of construction lead to a rift in the coalition? In that case, the judge will indirectly blow up the government with his veto.
Thomas von der Dunk is a cultural historian.