Mark Rutte: the agile survivor who was hanging by countless threads

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If anyone knows how your political life can hang by a thread and you never know how it will turn out if you persist, it is Rutte. He reads political biographies fanatically. He endlessly watches political broadcasts and series on YouTube, of which he knows entire scenes by heart. About Den Uyl, whom he admires, about election campaigns by American presidents, also from long ago. And he also watches funerals of Russian leaders just as well. Even if they last twelve hours, and also if such a broadcast is in Russian.

In Brussels he enjoyed authority among the other heads of government. Angela Merkel often said that ‘Der Mark’ could probably come up with a solution

The fact that Rutte won the party leader election over Rita Verdonk in 2006 was not only due to VVD members who wanted him as leader. It was also because there were so many VVD members who saw her as a flat populist, not a ‘real VVD member’ who knew the party through and through like Rutte. Rutte had been chairman of the main board of the JOVD, the VVD youth. He had also been on the VVD’s main board and was state secretary on behalf of the VVD, first of Social Affairs, then of Education.

The fact that Rutte had promised Rita Verdonk second place on the list of candidates for the House of Representatives was perhaps one of the biggest mistakes of his political career. After the 2006 elections, she kept telling him how many preferential votes she had obtained, Rutte still knows the number by heart: 620,555. Almost seventy thousand more than him, as party leader. Whenever she could, she undermined his authority. She thought Rutte was a weak leader. And he kept warning her. Around him, VVD members also thought that was weak: why didn’t he kick her out? But Rutte was afraid that the VVD would then tear in two.

‘Green Right’

In September 2007, just before a party congress, Rutte expelled Verdonk from the party and according to The Telegraph, the newspaper most VVD members prefer to read, he staggered. That’s what Ruth thought too. If his people had not succeeded in bringing former VVD leader Frits Bolkestein to the congress, who fiercely defended Rutte and got the audience on board, it really could have been his last day in politics.

Rutte kept doing everything wrong. VVD members around him saw that he did not seem to understand what their voters were all about: making money, your own house, the car, safety. Rutte himself did not care about money or stuff, and he thought that the VVD could also be the party of care and education. He had ideas about that, he said on TV. He came up with a ‘pamphlet’ about climate that he called ‘GroenRight’, to the disgust of many VVD members, which made it reminiscent of GroenLinks. And in the middle of the campaign for the 2009 European elections, Rutte said that as far as he was concerned, people were also allowed to deny the Holocaust, however “crazy” he thought that was.

In the spring of 2009, the VVD had twelve seats in the polls. If there had been a logical replacement for Rutte at that time, his political career would almost certainly have lasted only three years. But there was nobody. A group of VVD members, including Johan Remkes and Stef Blok, had gone to help Rutte. And not without obligation: if he wanted to remain party leader, he had to adhere strictly to the VVD themes. What probably helped Rutte at the time was that the VVD did smart voter research and came up with slogans that had been extensively tested in advance. The day after the Balkenende IV cabinet fell, newspapers ran a full-page advertisement: “The cabinet has fallen. Can our country finally rise again.”

Last Friday it turned out that that slogan has not yet been forgotten in The Hague. Immediately after the fall of Rutte IV, SP leader Lilian Marijnissen sent an e-mail to her supporters entitled: ‘The cabinet is falling. We stand up for the Netherlands.’

In the 2010 campaign, Mark Rutte was told by his advisers that he should not say that he wanted to become prime minister if the VVD became the largest party. A voter survey showed that this could turn out badly for the VVD, Rutte was not yet popular at all. So he named VVD celebrity Neelie Kroes as a prime ministerial candidate on TV. But he had not doubted for a moment: if the VVD became the largest, he would become prime minister.

You never heard from Rutte again that he had ideas about healthcare or education. And when it came to typical VVD themes, others in his cabinet noticed that Rutte made an insecure impression, was nervous. Whether it was the mortgage interest deduction, the maximum speed on highways, a bed-bath-bread scheme for failed asylum seekers: Rutte seemed to be at a loss every time. The party leadership also did not always trust him when it came to such subjects. Rutte was flexible, he ruled just as easily with the left as with the right and always looked for solutions to keep his cabinets afloat. And so there was always some concern among VVD members around Rutte: did he not give in too much?

It may all have played a role last Wednesday, in the Blue Hall of the Ministry of General Affairs. In the negotiations on another typical VVD subject, asylum and migration, the ministers and state secretaries of D66, CDA and ChristenUnie faced a prime minister who clung tightly to his party’s demands: the VVD wanted measures to prevent war victims from bringing their families to the Netherlands. And if other government parties didn’t want that, bad luck. It was this or the fall of the cabinet. In The Hague, the story later circulated that he had had an outburst of anger that evening, he would have scoffed at Carola Schouten of the ChristenUnie. It wasn’t. Rutte was, say people who were there, almost businesslike.

VVD members in The Hague later said that this was worth a try if, like Rutte, you promised the members to come up with strict asylum plans before the summer recess. It can work. You may send the ChristenUnie away with it, but then there is still a chance of support from other parties in the House of Representatives. Otherwise, the cabinet would fall over a typical VVD subject.

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Helmut Schmidt

If it was strategy, it seems to have failed completely. Rutte was blamed for the fall by just about every other party. According to some negotiators, the prime minister had apologized for his behavior on Wednesday evening a day later. Rutte said on Friday evening, when his cabinet had already fallen and he was on his way home, that that was nonsense. “Apologies? No.”

Campaign advisers of the VVD know Rutte as someone who almost always does what they think of. His ‘fill up’ in the VPRO programme Summer guests, half a year before the 2017 elections, had been carefully prepared. It was his message to the Turkish Dutch that had made it impossible for a NOS reporter to do his job. Rutte said he was very angry about that. The VVD immediately turned it into a campaign film.

There were also statements that Rutte hoped everyone would soon forget. Like the one about the word ‘vision’, in the HJ Schoo lecture of 2013. You had to go to the ophthalmologist for that, he said. It was a quote from Helmut Schmidt, the former Chancellor of Germany, and Rutte thought it was very funny. But not anymore when it turned out that that sentence evoked the image of a prime minister without views. No matter what he or his campaign team tried, Rutte couldn’t get rid of it. Perhaps mainly because people who worked with him saw that Rutte really hardly ever led the way with ideas. His strength, they saw, lay in compromise. Not with the views.

NATO

In the Netherlands, he increasingly received probing questions about everything that had gone wrong under his leadership: with the surcharges, the gas extraction in Groningen. He himself said that you would automatically get a dragnet of mistakes after you, if you stayed prime minister long enough. And then he wanted to talk about “everything that did go well”.

His prestige grew outside the Netherlands. In Brussels, he is one of the longest-serving heads of government, which automatically gives you authority there. He was called more and more often when there were problems. Heads of government in Europe often heard Angela Merkel, Chancellor until the end of 2021, say that ‘Der Mark’ could probably come up with a solution.

There is a good chance that Rutte will be asked again whether he really does not want to become NATO Secretary General

If Rutte had not announced his departure from politics in The Hague on Monday, there was a chance that the House of Representatives would have sent him away the same day. A motion of no confidence was ready, and it was by no means certain that all three ex-government parties (D66, CDA, ChristenUnie) would still have supported him. Then Rutte could not have gone to the NATO summit in Vilnius on Tuesday.

Now you can. It seems certain that colleagues from other countries will ask him again whether he really does not want to succeed Jens Stoltenberg as Secretary General of NATO. Stoltenberg has been wanting to leave for a while, and according to insiders, Rutte is especially good with US President Joe Biden.

At the entrance to the large debate hall, Rutte said that he still does not want that job. In Brussels, everyone knows: if he wants to, he cannot say that he wants to. “A bird that whistles too early,” said former NATO top man Jaap de Hoop Scheffer once, “is for the cat.”

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