This century, only one Dutch cabinet has managed to sit out the ride. That was the Rutte II cabinet (2012-2017) of VVD and PvdA. In light of this, the fall of the Rutte IV cabinet on Friday 7 July should not be surprising. Yet this cabinet crisis is remarkable because the prime minister himself this time put an end to his own cabinet. Prime Minister Mark Rutte (VVD), the inventor of the ‘goat path’, suddenly declared part of the asylum policy to be non-negotiable. Namely, that the arrival of asylum seekers had to be slowed down by prohibiting family reunification for a certain category of refugees. The VVD euphemistically calls this the ‘pause button for family members’. A measure that is at odds with various humanitarian treaties, and the effect of which, according to experts, will be minimal. However, Rutte was unwavering, knowing that the smallest coalition partner, the ChristenUnie, for whom family values are crucial, could never agree to this. And lo and behold: a crisis and new elections.
The prime minister may have thought of that time when the CDA, led by Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers, got rid of coalition partner VVD in 1989. He dropped his second cabinet because VVD leader Joris Voorhoeve opposed the abolition of the travel allowance. Just as the travel allowance was not the real reason for the fall of the Lubbers II cabinet, it is not Rutte IV’s ‘pause button’.
This cabinet had already fallen clinically on March 15 this year when Caroline van der Plas (BBB) won a monster victory in the Provincial Council elections. As a result, the BBB has recently become the largest party in the Senate. This has upset the political balance in The Hague and has shaken the already ramshackle cabinet. With this result in the end.
It is a bit naive to now accuse the VVD of ‘cynical power politics’. It is not a moral issue but an administrative one. Politics is about accumulating and retaining power, through democratic means, in order to realize as many ideals of the voters as possible. And it is to be applauded that Rutte briefly dropped his disguise as a process supervisor and clearly showed his real guise as a power politician. Because shadyness is the source of much distrust of citizens against politicians.
If you deduct the thousand excuses that Rutte made to everything and everyone last year, the legacy of his now caretaker cabinet is rather meager: solutions for major social problems have not been resolved: nitrogen, Groningen, settlement of the Supplementary Affair, housing crisis, care for the elderly… the The queue is longer than the morning traffic jam on the A1 between Apeldoorn and Amsterdam on a rainy day.
It would be good if the House of Representatives just let the caretaker cabinet finish its job with all those painful files and not declare too many subjects controversial. The Rutte IV cabinet has not been the cabinet of major solutions, but of current affairs. Let it continue with that as much as possible.