A few weeks ago I was on a panel of the Reuring!Cafe. In a room on the Prinsessegracht in The Hague, senior officials there discuss every month how things are going in their profession.
They are meetings with a club feel, they are public, I have been going there regularly for the last ten years. house band The Wizards of AZ plays covers and the host, Mark Frequin, worked as a top civil servant in a range of government ministries. A true insider.
I was poorly prepared due to lack of time, but the panel turned out to be about a sentence on page one of the coalition agreement, which stated that Rutte IV strives for a “just government”.
A striking angle to illustrate how easily accidents occur between politicians and civil servants.
Indeed, how can a civil servant ever determine what the coalition – or the whole of politics – understands by justice? That has traditionally been the point of contention in almost every democracy.
Even if you had only asked coalition factions, you would have quickly lost your way. One would start about reducing abortion, the other about less tax, the third about more windmills.
So after an hour and a half of debate, in which I particularly enjoyed fellow panelist and philosophy professor Gabriel van den Brink, I realized even better how far apart politics and the civil service, two pillars of national government, have become.
For the frivolity with which the most influential politicians formulated in a supporting document a goal that no official can fulfill satisfactorily shows something painful: that it is no accident that the engine room of power falters so often.
When I started this column ten years ago, I had just finished a book about my years as a correspondent in the US. Chapter one outlined the ease with which a man then known as a real estate boss, Donald Trump, got one half-truth after another on the news agenda. His opinions were facts.
The book was so bleak about polarization in the US that no dog bought it. The prestige of politicians was in decline, and they tried to remain meaningful by politicizing people’s private choices. You had progressive and conservative beer, Democratic and Republican Christmas trees.
The result: needless politics and too much weak governance.
This was on my mind when I walked into the Binnenhof in January 2012, and the resemblance to the US was unmissable. The fall of Rutte I in the spring of 2012 illustrated that the government was weakening here too: The Hague had worn out five cabinets in ten years. And here too, private choices were politicized – from Easter eggs to headscarves.
On the advice of electoral researcher Josse de Voogd, I selected an electorally representative neighborhood in Woerden. While walking around, I also encountered annoyance about the too much politics: people didn’t want elections again. They wanted a government that ruled.
So I decided to focus my attention mainly on the art of driving. Less on angry MPs who spoke of bottom stones that had to come up. I wanted to know how the demands made by the House led to decisions in the inner chamber of The Hague, and which officials, lobbyists, advisers and social stakeholders were decisive.
That became this column: identify the persons and mechanisms that influence decisions in The Hague. Like Machiavelli (The ruler1513) wrote: “To estimate the intelligence of a leader, you begin by looking at the people around him.”
So I walked around as many of these people as possible, and after a while I had an idea: The Hague is a world that is not governed but is controlled, especially by social and commercial stakeholders. You could look down on it, you could also say: this is ‘poldering’.
But something had happened. A monster, everyone feared it. It could attack you without you seeing it coming. It could break you. It was: the media reality.
Media reality would eventually also affect the reputation of the administration – and the relationship between politicians and civil servants.
It started in politics: Pim Fortuyn’s breakthrough was interpreted by middle parties as a lesson in marketing. The secret language disappeared from The Hague. Politicians had to talk in short sentences and words with few syllables. They chose one or two themes and repeated their statements (the ‘core message’) endlessly. Politics as advertising.
I noticed it when it was impossible to get into a conversation with a well-known D66 MP. After numerous attempts, he sent a text message: a “quote” for me to use. How insightful: the role of the newspaper journalist reduced to a mailbox.
It went further with ministries. They had started to collect ‘environmental knowledge’ on social media, like a trained social media watcher ever explained to me. In The Hague you had specialized agencies for this. They traced the beginning of protest against measures, and as the resistance grew, they informed the department management: any new media reality had to be signaled immediately.
The fear of losing control was enormous. Officials and spokespersons sent ‘Q&As’ to a minister who presented new policy: a recommended answer for every possible media question. It explained the rise of the prefab interview, flawless but soulless.
All that control instinct also did something else: it stimulated suspicion among reporters, I had that too.
Especially when you saw affairs, I noticed this for the first time around the Teevendeal from 2014, that civil servants were also disturbed by this: if a minister was in trouble, the media reality was polished up with the support of spokespersons and befriended MPs. Beautifying facts, forgetting facts: self-censorship for self-protection.
This has happened more often in recent years. You heard similar complaints about the face mask deal with Sywert van Lienden on official VWS. The benefits scandal also escalated because the top officials of the parent department of Finance protected government officials, while executive officials saw that the facts presented were incomplete to keep the media reality.
It not only showed that ministries had also started to produce too much politics. After the fall of Rutte III over the Allowance scandal, it also caused the government to lose prestige among its own citizens.
Relationships changed. Even civil servants openly marked – a rarity – their role in the engine room of power at the start of Rutte IV: Mark Frequin told me that new ministers could expect “more counter pressure”. Not “bending by itself.” Say no more often. „No more ‘yes, provided’; then the minister only remembers the yes,” said Frequin. “We’ve gotten wet on that often enough.”
Political governance had weakened itself – and became unpredictable. Huge policy changes took place in a short period of time. Doing everything for decades to keep the headquarters of Shell and Unilever in the Netherlands. Then lose both companies in one year. Doing everything for the growth of Schiphol for decades. Suddenly opting for minus growth. Doing everything for a higher production of intensive livestock farming for decades. Going to contraction in a few years.
A more unstable government – a more unstable country.
The pecking order among influencers in The Hague also changed. When I completed my first tour of influential The Hague after 2012, it was clear to me who to look out for. No one had more policy influence than Niek Jan van Kesteren, the top lobbyist of VNO-NCW for about thirty years at the time. An amiable man who knew every niche in The Hague and knew that you have to give in order to take.
No one could talk the most powerful politicians into a cabinet more finely than Herman Tjeenk Willink, indispensable in almost every formation.
And people rarely saw through how The Hague relations worked: in the cabinet debates of Rutte III about corona, the ministers Kajsa Ollongren (Internal Affairs, D66), Eric Wiebes (Economic Affairs, VVD) and Hans Vijlbrief (Taxation, D66) regularly opposed ‘ the white coats’. In 2004-2007 they worked closely together as civil servants at the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
That way you had more names and networks, but they were all people from the inner world. And suddenly the outside world put a foot in the door.
Marjan Minnesma of Urgenda forced compliance with the climate agreements from the Paris Agreement through the courts. Valentijn Wösten, owner of the sole proprietorship Wösten Legal Advice, was the legal brain of the conservationists who enforced the nitrogen ruling from the Council of State in 2019.
Influence was no longer just a matter of informal contacts – also of public confrontation. Outsiders were the new insiders, public opinion was the new elite. When you talked to lobbyists about their work in The Hague afterwards, you heard more often: we first put pressure through the media.
Loudness thus became an entrance ticket in The Hague. During corona, antivaxxers, 10 percent of the population, left a heavy mark on the debates with their aggressive protests. The last few weeks you saw the same thing with the farmers.
The weakened administration could only watch.
The language of the street protest was also heard more often in the House: rudeness, wild accusations, quarrels on the floor of the national assembly hall.
Some political scientists saw the fragmentation as a sign of democratic progress, but practice did not indicate it. Twenty groups with an urge to profile constantly produce too much politics: MPs who draw attention to themselves with the strangest antics.
The energy was to the right of the VVD, with parties that often took uncompromising as their starting point. They were mostly destructive. They indirectly forced moderate-right parties to collaborate with more progressive parties, after which they attacked that collaboration endlessly.
Yet a huge opportunity beckoned for this movement. For the first time in his premiership, Mark Rutte struggled with his popularity, it made the VVD vulnerable, and parties such as CDA and D66, but also PVV and FVD, hardly seemed an alternative to VVD voters.
So especially Joost Eerdmans (JA21), Caroline van der Plas (BBB) and a possible match by Pieter Omtzigt had opportunities here. Interestingly enough, all three former CDA members (it may have said something about that party too).
And with the war in Ukraine, recession fears and an energy crisis with very negative purchasing power effects on the way, an electoral collapse of the backers of the system was no longer inconceivable.
Then the new right could easily become the largest current. The movement that, like no other, was able to transform politics into enormous threats that never materialize (The EU! Soros! The WEF!) but therefore never disappear. Endless spectacle void.
Unnecessarily much politics and much weak governance: the Netherlands is not America, far from it, but the trend is the same.
And after ten years I noticed that I stopped thinking about it more often. I missed moderation in The Hague. The realization that compromise is the highest form of civilization.
I started thinking things that a political journalist shouldn’t think: that politics, also because it has often become a mixture of information and entertainment (‘and now a movie’), maybe gets too much attention.
Nonsense ideas in the current media landscape.
Years was written above this section: ‘Who should you pay attention to to understand The Hague?’ So when I recently told myself for the umpteenth time that it would be best for The Hague if people pay less attention to The Hague, I decided in my head of which this piece is the end result.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of 9 July 2022