It says something that hardly any politician is afraid of their own inconsistencies. Big words enough, for almost all parties, but the best-before date may already have passed by next week. In the SMS debate with Rutte a week and a half ago, SP leader Lilian Marijnissen was one of the politicians who most often attacked the prime minister, three times, for his lack of openness. But by NRC-reporter Pim van den Dool it suddenly turned out over the weekend that the SP kept its own party council closed. On the agenda was a negative verdict by an appeals committee on the party board – very unusual in the SP – and because speakers may have felt “inhibited”, the party said, snoopers were not welcome. After this, the party leadership suffered a resounding defeat. The SP mainly demands openness as long as it is not about the SP.
Foreman Caroline van der Plas (BBB) responded scorning at a RTL-message about former ministers who are out of work. She wrote: aren’t there plenty of vacancies for painters, welders, nurses or fruit pickers? The simplest populism is the best populism. Only: when the government encourages livestock farmers, Van der Plas’s own supporters, to do something else, notably with the help of a generous government allowance, she is suddenly no longer such a supporter of a different career choice. Then she complains about the Netherlands as ‘a communist state’. BBB is especially strict when it comes to non-BBBs.
In this way you can show inconsistencies in most games, but in one game the opposite is true. Last week, at the congress of the coalition party ChristenUnie, a motion was voted on that calls on the House of Representatives to “monitor the government more closely” and “unshy to support motions of no confidence and/or censure” against ministers who “contribute to an unreliable administrative culture”. It was two days after the SMS debate.
The motion’s first proposer, Antonie Fountain, told me that the congressional discussion on the motion was “pretty special.” Before the vote he was asked whether this was intended as ‘support for the House of Representatives’. “No,” Fountain had said, “this should be seen as a call for a change of course.”
Still, 71 percent of Congress supported the motion. A sign of dissatisfaction with Rutte IV in this coalition party. And above all: an attempt to be more consistent in propagating one’s own views on dualism and governance culture.
“So much is going wrong with Rutte IV that the faction gets enough opportunities to show that things can be done differently,” said Antonie Fountain. So this is, he said, “also a signal to the other coalition parties.”
Also read this article: Rutte himself decided which text messages were important and which were not – and that is important
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 31, 2022