Mark Rutte’s thought alone that it is up to him to determine which of his messages are important enough to keep, proves that he has understood little about transparent governance.
The old Saab Sport Estate, the modest apartment in The Hague, the dated Nokia: Mark Rutte has carefully cultivated the image of the modest, frugal prime minister. And it also has something, a prime minister who is not attached to earthly matters, who never declares anything and is satisfied with ‘a book or a CD a few times a year’. It gives him a certain invulnerability.
But that invulnerability must of course not go so far as to indemnify him from the desire for more transparency that has finally taken hold of the Binnenhof. It is well known that the Netherlands is not exactly at the forefront in this regard. Every journalist or concerned citizen knows how it went until recently with requests in the context of open government: silence, postponement, another postponement and then, if something really had to be sent, a stack of black-lacquered pages followed.
After all the fuss about the management culture, some improvement has recently been visible, but the legal term to reply is still exceeded by an average of 133 days. And it’s still a struggle to get completely justified requests for information granted. Often to court, such as de Volkskrant is currently experiencing again with the Ministries of Health and General Affairs in the battle to find out how the Netherlands was governed during the corona crisis.
Deep down, our directors tend to evade transparency. Often arguing that good governance benefits from some confidentiality, but they can never show that a country like Norway (where every request for openness is answered within three days) is governed so much worse.
The message about Rutte’s old Nokia, from which he has personally erased all his text messages for years, is now running into a debate again whether he has violated the letter of the law. He doesn’t think so himself. But Rutte’s thought alone that it is up to him to determine which of his messages are important enough to keep, proves that he still has little understanding of the spirit of the law, that he still fully operates according to his familiar method (so leaving as few traces as possible) and that his penchant for old things stems not only from nostalgia but also from cunning political calculation.
The position of the newspaper is expressed in the Volkskrant Commentaar. It is created after a discussion between the commentators and the editor-in-chief.