“Finance is everything.” Pieter Omtzigt unintentionally summarized the Dutch religious doctrine in three words on Tuesday evening. He had it on the talk show Humberto about the formation collapse, which he himself preferred to describe as “the end of this formation round”. The reason he could not continue now, Omtzigt said, was the financial setbacks about which he had been informed too late. It was not clear what the core of the problem was: the setbacks themselves, receiving them too late, or the laconic response of the formation partners to the setbacks. It was clear that Omtzigt takes finances very seriously: they are everything. “There are some medical-ethical things or so, but finances are very important.”
That is certainly true in the Netherlands. Money always wins here over morals, or values, or whatever you want to call it. The Dutch are generally infatuated with the Minister of Finance. The stricter the better; nothing makes people hornier than a hand on the money.
There is often hardly any discussion about this primacy of money. Because of the finances, drastic cuts had to be made under Rutte II, regardless of the social consequences. For financial reasons, the people of Groningen had to accept that the land under their houses was being emptied. Due to finances, universities have to attract more and more foreign students, even if there are no more rooms for Dutch students. For financial reasons, it is only logical to have large numbers of migrant workers do low-paid work, even if this leads to exploitation of the migrants and to housing shortages and friction in the neighborhoods where they end up.
Only those directly affected usually protest against the dominance of finance, the rest of the Dutch understand it. Finance is the language they speak. Perhaps Omtzigt thought: people will understand if I make this a breaking point, no one wants a cabinet that blunders with its finances. It may explain why he started talking about that, and not about the fact that Wilders is an anti-democrat, head of a memberless party that has Muslim hatred “in its DNA” and has made unconstitutional proposals for years.
But maybe there is something else going on. It has already become apparent that Omtzigt likes to find guidance in figures and procedures. If a policy is illegal or financially unhealthy, he has something objective to support his position. But Wilders had been smart enough to withdraw his most blatant attempts to violate the rule of law. He had even “completely accommodated his formation partners on the Constitution,” said one person involved A.D – a bizarre sentence, but that’s besides the point. Meanwhile, Wilders continued to tweet his usual democracy-undermining things, such as a cartoon in which he stands next to Trump pushing against the waves of ‘globalism’. Apparently he likes to stand next to Trump, the man who incited his voters to storm parliament.
These types of tweets fit perfectly into Wilders’ oeuvre, which consists of enemy thinking, sowing hatred and allying with anti-democrats. It is at odds with the ‘democratic ethos’, as CDA leader Henri Bontenbal calls it. But you can’t measure that ethos, you can’t count it, you can’t test it against the Constitution. The impact of Wilders’ accusations, insults and bizarre unconstitutional proposals cannot be objectively determined. So when do you draw the line, as a lover of numbers and procedures?
The nice thing about finance is that you have a measurable fact to hide behind. But Omtzigt failed in his attempt in two ways. He failed in his own objective, because his story remained terribly vague and therefore incomprehensible. The measurable fact could not be measured by the public because it was confidential. He also failed to defend the democratic and rule of law principles that part of the NSC faction reportedly attaches great importance to. And yet these principles need to be defended so urgently right now.
With this formation you miss an adult in the room, someone who understands what is at stake. Someone who says that not ‘everything is finance’: that the basis of a democracy consists of things that cannot be measured, but are perhaps even more important than money. That even what you cannot count counts.
Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC