In two and a half weeks, Mark Rutte will be the longest-serving prime minister of the Netherlands. That he has succeeded, thinks Dutch teacher Robbert Wigt, is because of his ‘large and deep toolbox with persuasive tools’. Wigt (33) has been following political debates for a long time. He did his master’s degree in ‘rhetoric in politics’ and is writing a book about Rutte’s language. The title is now Broadening in Fact† With those words, Rutte admitted in 2018 that there had been something on paper about the dividend tax in the cabinet formation of Rutte III. He had said no before. So the reality was just a bit narrower then.
In a classroom of the Vossius Gymnasium in Amsterdam, where he teaches, Wigt says that he knows no other Dutch politician with as much rhetorical talent as Rutte. “He can make things bigger, smaller, or blurrier whenever he wants. He has an enormous vocabulary and a great language awareness: he knows how words arrive.”
In the debate that almost became his undoing last spring about the position elsewhere memorandum, Rutte said again and again that he was not a liar. You would think: wrong. If you say what you are not, people will remember exactly that, according to communication experts. But Wigt thinks that Rutte did it consciously and therefore assumes that repetition, a rhetorical means, also works in a negative way.
In Rutte’s press conference last Friday, Robbert Wigt sees a “rhetorical trick” that Rutte often uses: giving compliments. Sjaak van der Tak of the agricultural and horticultural organization LTO, who does not want to talk about nitrogen with mediator Johan Remkes, is “a great guy”. Rutte also says that conversations with angry farmers will be fine and then does not use an argument, but the means of persuasion ethos: trust my authority. “I’ve been doing this for a while.”
if The Telegraph Remkes calls Rutte IV “a boss” because he advised the cabinet on nitrogen, according to Wigt Rutte opts for ‘reframing’: Rutte twice describes Remkes as someone who “shaggie rolls”† “I think farmers might also smoke shag, or their fathers. Rutte therefore makes Remkes a bit more farmer than cabinet, and also older. I don’t think anyone smokes tobacco in the cabinet anymore.”
On Friday it is also noticeable that Rutte has come up with something against the accusation that he hardly provides leadership in times of crisis and that there is always a minister between the prime minister and the problem. His predecessor Jan Peter Balkenende, says Rutte, was also told that. “And he had the only correct answer to that: that the trade ministers in charge to be. The prime minister’s role is to help everywhere, but that is not very visible.”
Rutte thought Balkende was a weak prime minister. The fact that he is now suddenly making him authoritative seems to be a broadening of Rutte’s reality. But do tricks remain effective? Robbert Wigt is not reassured. He wants to finish his book before Rutte resigns. “I work all summer long.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of 14 July 2022