“The form is a means to achieve content,” Dilan Yesilgöz said last week in the parliamentary debate about informateur Plasterk’s report. Yet the debate was mainly about the form, and the new informant Kim Putters started his first week exploring possible forms. The most mentioned and least understood form is the ‘extra-parliamentary cabinet’, according to Yesilgöz “the most realistic of the remaining options”. She acknowledged that it is a term “that everyone has a different idea of”; That’s why Putters invited almost all Dutch public administration experts and political historians to come along this week for refresher training.
Why the desire for a new form? I think it comes from the age-old need ‘to have your cake and eat it too‘. People do not want to govern with Wilders, but they cannot avoid it either not to rule with Wilders. A new form must unite both wishes. Do justice to the election results, but also keep your distance from the anti-democrat, by tolerating or depoliticizing things.
It reminds me of the proliferation of forms in the field of relationships: open relationships, polyamorous relationships, ‘situationships’. Articles about new forms of relationships have recently appeared in various media, in which radiant young people talk about their liberation from monogamous mores. Here too, there seems to be a desire to combine the best of both worlds. The tension of sex with someone else, not the emotional destruction of cheating. The fun sides of a relationship, not the drudgery.
Both a majority government and a monogamous relationship force people to commit, and that has its disadvantages. Majority cabinets are ‘boarded up’, monogamous relationships are ‘oppressive’. The benefits are currently receiving less attention. In short: a less open form saves a lot of hassle. You don’t have to have endless conversations about where the boundaries are and whether everyone is still on the same page.
Moreover, practice usually proves more difficult than hopeful theory. Renate Rubinstein already knew this in the 1970s. In her Free Netherlandscolumn, she described at the time how free love adepts were fooling themselves: “You can’t push boundaries so far, or the impulse to violate them is greater.”
She opposed the compelling new morality, which denied the downsides of free love with all its might. “Jealousy has never been fun, but nowadays it is a double misery: once for itself and then again because you are not allowed to feel it.”
This does not mean that more open forms, political or amorous, do not work. Sometimes they are probably a good idea or at least worth a try. But anyone who believes that a new form will make all problems disappear is thinking utopianly.
In essence, these problems continue to exist in every form. You can’t eliminate things like jealousy, hurt and boredom from a love relationship, whatever form you choose. Mutual distrust is just as awkward in an extra-parliamentary cabinet as in a majority cabinet. And a new form of cabinet is also not a solution for the major substantive differences. Choices have to be made on sensitive issues such as finance, labor migration and support for Ukraine, and those choices are political, even if you have them carried out by ministers ‘from outside’, or if they are not laid down in a coalition agreement. The major substantive differences cannot be concealed in a new form; these must be bridged.
In that respect, Wilders once again made no attempt to reassure his intended coalition partners this week: at X he showed his most irreconcilable side, both substantively and personally. In the week that almost the entire international community called on Netanyahu to cause fewer civilian casualties in Gaza, Wilders tweeted that he had promised Israeli Minister Yisrael Katz his “full support” by telephone, and that Israel does not deserve “cheap criticism.” It is difficult to do business with such a person, whatever form you choose.
According to Dilan Yesilgöz, an extra-parliamentary cabinet is now realistic because of “the broad desire for a new political and administrative culture.” But philosophizing about forms seems to me to be an example of the old political culture: it is nothing more than beating around the bush.