Quietly, for no reason to celebrate, Rutte becomes the longest-serving prime minister the Netherlands ever had

Mark Rutte, he now often says, has been doing his job as prime minister of the Netherlands “for a while”. A sentence with a diminutive like Rutte likes to use, as if it doesn’t really matter – his work, and how long he’s been doing it. But then comes: “So I know…” Or: “So you can trust that…” Would that help against the image – in columns, comments and in just about the entire opposition in the House of Representatives – that he has been prime minister for far too long, twelve years in October, and that things can only go well for the Netherlands when he is gone?

Since the 2021 election campaign, Rutte also says that he still has “a lot of ideas and a lot of energy”. He said that again in July in an interview in EW Magazineand again in his last press conference before the summer: Rutte has many ideas, a lot of energy.

But why keep saying what everyone should see? He went the extra mile in the press conference. Every Friday morning when the Council of Ministers starts, he is ready “with dripping mouth corners”. And thinks: “Get started, solve problems!”

Mark Rutte will be the longest serving Prime Minister of the Netherlands from Tuesday 2 August (4,310 days), he has taken over that record from CDA member Ruud Lubbers (4,309 days) and people who know him well know that he is such a great political historical fact. finds. But it visibly irritates him when people think that’s what he cares about. He calls it “no more than a footnote.”

If you have ‘beef’, he said before the summer, you set such a record.

Appointed for life

At the end of the eighties, even before Rutte became chairman of the political youth club JOVD, a friend of his, still from secondary school, wrote a book with a ‘Prime Minister Rutte’ in the leading role. Appointed for life. A little later, at the political youth club JOVD, the main board of which Rutte was chairman called itself ‘Rutte I’.

Also read: Already in seventh grade Mark Rutte followed politics. He wanted to participate in that

The real prime minister at the time was Ruud Lubbers. He also ruled for a while: from November 4, 1982. He led three cabinets and resigned in August 1994. Lubbers died in 2018.

Ernst Hirsch Ballin, Minister of Justice in Lubbers III, thinks that Lubbers “did something” that he was the longest-serving Prime Minister of the Netherlands. “But he wasn’t a date fetishist. I think it was mainly because he admired Charles Ruijs de Beerenbrouck so much.” Ruijs de Beerenbrouck, of the Roman Catholic State Party, was prime minister of three cabinets between World War I and World War II. He was the longest-serving prime minister until Lubbers caught up with him.

During the time of Lubbers’ third cabinet, war also broke out in Europe: Yugoslavia fell apart. That did not have nearly as much influence on daily life in the Netherlands as the war in Ukraine now. “It felt far away for many people,” says Bert de Vries, former Minister of Social Affairs in Lubbers III.

According to Jan Pronk, also a former minister in that cabinet, Lubbers III was “renewal”. Lubbers I and II were with the VVD, Lubbers III with the PvdA. Pronk believes that Mark Rutte should have opted for other parties after the 2021 elections, just like Lubbers, and not for “more of the same”: Rutte IV, like Rutte III, is a coalition of VVD, CDA, D66 and ChristenUnie.

Pronk does not think so, he says, because he was a minister on behalf of the PvdA – which last year, together with GroenLinks from VVD and CDA, should not have even been allowed to talk about the formation. Pronk has not been a PvdA member for years.

What Pronk finds “incomparable” with today, the time of Mark Rutte: “Lubbers was very much appreciated. If it were the case that people thought that he had been there for a very long time, we in the cabinet would not have noticed. At least not until mid-1993. And voters were also fed up with the PvdA. Due to the strict cutbacks, we got a lot more for our bread than the CDA.”

Mentally wrecked

In the formation of the Rutte IV cabinet, other political leaders noticed that Rutte was far from always thinking about it and sometimes made an exhausted impression. They thought it was because of the corona crisis, or the serious threats in the summer – there would be an attack or a kidnapping, he was given extra security.

Rutte was no longer the ‘Dracell bunny’, as PvdA member Lodewijk Asscher once described him, who could always continue to work.

Ruud Lubbers was also tired during his last cabinet. Former minister Bert de Vries even calls him “mentally wrecked”. The CDA top had found the coalition with the PvdA to be too left-wing from the start and therefore “weak wax”. According to De Vries, Lubbers suffered as a result, he seemed unable to do anything right for his party. In addition, he had already designated his successor a few years before he retired: Elco Brinkman, party leader in the House of Representatives. De Vries: „I think that Brinkman then convinced himself that he had to rebel against Lubbers. Just like in the Bible King Solomon’s son, Rehoboam. He thought that as king he should be stricter to the people than his father.” As a result, Rehoboam’s empire fell apart.

It had been an idea of ​​the CDA board to make clear as early as possible who would succeed Lubbers. But Lubbers and others in the CDA had started to doubt that decision and in the spring of 1994 Lubbers undermined Brinkman’s list leader and the CDA campaign by saying that he was going to vote for number three: Ernst Hirsch Ballin.

“That came as a surprise to me,” says Hirsch Ballin now. “I think he wanted to support me because he felt I was being treated unfairly at the time.” Hirsch Ballin had started at a meeting about “social pressure” when parents refused to terminate a pregnancy with an abnormality like Down syndrome. “I was then accused of warning against a Purple cabinet.”

Pitch and feathers

Which, according to Hirsch Ballin, also played a part: the CDA top itself wanted more attention for the numbers two and three on the list. And that’s exactly what Lubbers had done. Hirsch Ballin: “The polls for the CDA and Brinkman were not exactly positive before that.”

Jan Pronk, who still has many notes from that time because he kept a ‘chronicle’, says that Lubbers had already told him in the summer of 1993 that he was “dead tired”. When the CDA prime minister even briefly planned to offer his cabinet resignation in early 1994, shortly before the elections, Kok had told PvdA members that Lubbers might have been ‘ruled out’. Bert de Vries calls the last months of Lubbers as prime minister “very sad”. “He had made great contributions to the country and deserved a much nicer retreat. He hoped for laurels, but he felt he got tar and feathers from his own party.”

The great achievements of Lubbers, according to Bert de Vries: “He led the Netherlands through the crisis in the 1980s with a firm policy, carefully restructured the public finances, so that the country was in an excellent position in the early 1990s.” It will be very different at Rutte, De Vries thinks. “If he leaves, he will leave the country with big problems. Think of the allowances, the climate, nitrogen, box 3. In Rutte II, cutbacks have also been made far too hard, with the blunt axe.”

In parliamentary debates and at press conferences, Rutte increasingly hears such a list of problems or scandals. That all happened under his responsibility, right? Rutte’s answer is then every time in all those years “a lot has also gone well”. And that he was prime minister all along? “I’ll have to learn to live with that.”

But so do others. There is almost no party in the House of Representatives with which Rutte has not collaborated in his twelve years as prime minister – in a coalition, an agreement or an important law. The Rutte I cabinet, VVD and CDA, was tolerated by the PVV and received support from GroenLinks for a police mission in Afghanistan. Rutte II contained VVD and PvdA, but that cabinet did not have a majority in the Senate and received support from D66, ChristenUnie and SGP in all kinds of agreements. The student loan system came about at that time with the support of D66 and GroenLinks. Rutte III received the nitrogen law, with strict standards and agreements, by the Senate with the help of SGP, 50Plus and the SP.

If Rutte is criticized, he likes to bring in all those others. As early July: in De Volkskrant OVV chairman – and former finance minister – Jeroen Dijsselbloem had been harsh about Rutte. If there was to be accountability for decisions in corona time, when it came to “learning and reflecting”, Rutte failed to do so, according to him. A day later, Rutte said in his press conference that he did not agree, but of course took Dijsselbloem seriously. “He sat next to me in the Council of Ministers for five years. I am extremely impressed with this man.” Rutte’s message: for five years this extremely important Dijsselbloem also participated in the national government, next to Rutte.

‘About half’

Many VVD members believe that this will be his last period as party leader, but there are also those close to him who think that this is far from certain. Rutte himself says that, as always, he will decide in the summer before the elections to the House of Representatives whether he wants to become party leader again. That is, if the Rutte IV cabinet does not fall sooner, in 2024. Precisely at a time when the European elections have just been held and the European Commission is looking for a new chairman and new members.

The fact that Rutte continues to say that he does not want to go to Brussels, not even to NATO as secretary-general, means nothing. If he were to leave that option open now, it would undermine his authority as prime minister and his candidacy would almost certainly mean nothing.

In the campaign for the municipal elections, on the street in Leiden at the beginning of this year, Rutte told candidate councilors of the VVD that he is now “over halfway” with his premiership. He laughed hard about it. In his press conference for the summer, he said it again: “I feel I am slowly halfway through.” In the week that he breaks Lubbers’ record, he said of himself, he is not in the Netherlands. And no, he’s not going to celebrate either.