On the evening before the parliamentary elections of 2017, Mark Rutte sat at the table with Eva Jinek. And just like this Monday, he got up in the middle of the broadcast to leave. “State affairs”, Jinek then shouted. There was a diplomatic crisis with Turkey, President Erdogan had called the Dutch “fascists” and “remains of Nazis” because a Turkish minister had not been allowed to campaign in Rotterdam.
This time, it was announced during the broadcast that Russian President Putin was sending a “peace mission” to the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. That could be the start of an invasion. “You have to go,” said Jinek. “Get well soon.”
In 2017, the VVD campaign team couldn’t believe its luck: ‘statesman’ Rutte won extra seats that last evening. Municipal elections are now in three weeks’ time, Rutte was again with Jinek for the campaign. But everything seems different. I hear irritated VVD members about the photos that journalists put on Twitter on Monday evening: of US President Bush who sits in a classroom with children on September 11, 2001, gets the news about the attacks whispered in his ear and yet remains seated for a while. Even though the war was threatening, Rutte had been joking about his old Nokia and his Saab with a flat tire: “It will only go away when it’s really gone.”
Why, I hear, do journalists keep asking Rutte about his life after politics? Like Eva Jinek again? Hasn’t he just started a cabinet? I notice that among VVD members, the idea is that journalists do not want to see it, but that Rutte’s campaign story about the “cool” Netherlands that should become “cozy” again after the corona years, does resonate with its own voters.
The VVD is constantly investigating this. The party probably already knows how the performance at Jinek falls with the supporters. I myself go to café Babbels in Leiden on Wednesday afternoon, where Rutte was campaigning with Leiden VVD members a week and a half ago. On the terrace, Rutte had said of himself, and laughing hard, that after eleven years as prime minister he was “at a turning point”: “I am now over halfway.”
Café owner Joop Veninga (59) had already told me at the time that he was voting for the VVD. Now he says that he is not on social media, but Rutte’s TV appearance should also have made him think of George Bush. Although Veninga also does not think that Rutte Jinek could have canceled better. “He tends to make every crisis small. I get that. How else can you last so long?”
On campaign day, Veninga had told Rutte that it would be useful to first relax the corona measures and then go to a cafe to see what the mood was like. A joke, he says. Rutte said: „So you think that we do everything deliberately? Well no.” He had turned. Typical Rutte, Veninga thinks. Throwing things away. He doesn’t mind.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 24, 2022