When Mark Rutte hands over the key to the Torentje to Dick Schoof on Tuesday afternoon, the highest political office will be transferred after fourteen years from a very experienced prime minister to a top civil servant with no political experience who did not know six weeks ago that he would become prime minister. That contrast symbolizes the great and unpredictable political upheaval that the Netherlands is facing. This Tuesday, the Schoof cabinet will be on the steps, including the radical right-wing PVV for the first time in history. And while the transfer of power in The Hague is almost always accompanied by the desire for a different course, the new cabinet wants to force a real break with the Rutte era, both in terms of content and political culture.
Three of the four parties – the PVV, NSC and BBB – owe their electoral success in recent years to their criticism of the Rutte cabinets and to the growing dissatisfaction with politics. The slow and inadequate handling of the Toeslagenaffaire and the damage caused by gas extraction in Groningen are stains on Rutte’s premiership, something for which he donned sackcloth and ashes in farewell interviews and a speech in recent days. The new coalition promises improvement, particularly in the area of good governance, as evidenced by the main points agreement. “Despite good intentions, politics and government have dropped the ball in recent years by not always taking people’s concerns seriously. We are taking a new path.”
And so it is that now an NSC member, State Secretary Nora Achahbar, and a BBB member, Eddie van Marum from Groningen, are responsible for the handling of the allowances and Groningen in the new cabinet. They have to perform better on these protracted dossiers, which will not be easy. The recovery operation around the allowances has proven to be a complex nightmare for the implementation. Someone from NSC, party leader Omtzigt, also played an important role in exposing the affair, but it cannot be solved just like that. And State Secretary Van Marum takes over from Hans Vijlbrief from D66, one of the few ministers who has made himself popular in Groningen in recent years through his involvement.
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Fewer civil servants
The ambition for better governance must be achieved with fewer civil servants, at first glance one of the most striking contradictions in the agreement. The growth in the number of civil servants and hired external staff in recent years (approximately 22 percent) must be “more than reversed”, whereby executive services “are spared”. The question is whether the latter is really possible. In the final report From formateur Richard van Zwol on Monday it is stated that the cuts will attempt to spare in particular the supervisory inspections and the diplomatic post network abroad.
In addition to the administrative culture, the new coalition also wants to break with the policy of Rutte IV on a number of other dossiers, such as asylum policy and agriculture. This break in style will undoubtedly become visible on Tuesday in the handover between State Secretary Eric van der Burg (VVD) and Minister Marjolein Faber (PVV) at the Ministry of Justice. Faber wants to implement “the strictest asylum policy” ever, while Van der Burg said in recent years that the Netherlands was already doing everything possible to limit the arrival of asylum seekers. The coming period will show who is right, and whether the crisis measures that Faber wants to take will hold up in court and actually affect the number of asylum seekers.
Will the cabinet write the plans itself? Or will the coalition parties fully participate in the thinking process?
Something similar is happening at the Ministry of Agriculture, where VVD minister Christianne van der Wal has tried in recent years to seriously reduce nitrogen emissions and Piet Adema (Christian Union) has tried in vain to reform the agricultural sector. Both ministers believed that a transition was necessary to protect nature and to provide legal space for other economic sectors and housing construction.
The Ministry of Agriculture is now in the hands of BBB, a party that has denied the nitrogen problem for years and wants to compete in Brussels for a return of the flexible manure rules for Dutch farmers. It will be interesting to see whether the nitrogen crisis can simply be declared over, or whether housing and infrastructure projects will suffer even more from the lack of nitrogen space.
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Little cabinet experience
The urge within the cabinet to renew politics is also a risk. It is logical that the cabinet contains many newcomers because three of the four parties will be governing nationally for the first time and, because of the ‘extra-parliamentary’ character, recruitment has also taken place outside The Hague. The result is that only Deputy Prime Minister Mona Keijzer (Housing and Spatial Planning, BBB) and State Secretary Mariëlle Paul (Education, VVD) have cabinet experience, although the other three Deputy Prime Ministers do have many years of experience in the House of Representatives. The question is whether it is enough to allow the inexperienced cabinet team, which is taking office at a time of great international tensions, to operate effectively and decisively in government.
In addition, it is still unclear how independently the cabinet will function, and whether Prime Minister Schoof will be able to make his mark. Next Wednesday, he will deliver the government statement in the Lower House, and for the first time he will be able to set out his vision for the Netherlands. An important and exciting moment for Schoof, who during previous public appearances in the formation process seemed somewhat cautious and shy in his new role in the spotlight. After the debate with the House, for which two long days have been set aside, the new ministers will elaborate the coalition agreement into a full-fledged ‘government programme’. According to Van Zwol’s final report, this must be submitted to the House well before Budget Day.
The debate on Wednesday and Thursday should clarify whether the cabinet will really write that programme itself, or whether the coalition parties will also think along. Now that PVV leader Geert Wilders was not allowed to become prime minister, he sits in the Lower House together with the other coalition leaders – Dilan Yesilgöz, Pieter Omtzigt and Caroline van der Plas. If the parties act purely dualistically, they will not interfere much with the cabinet this summer and afterwards, but that is almost unthinkable given the strict agreements in the accord and several crises of confidence during the formation. At the same time, if there is too much interference, there is a risk that it will be unclear who is really in charge (Schoof or the coalition), a situation that increases the chance of political accidents.
Benefit of the doubt
Many Dutch people will be happy that a new cabinet can get to work on Tuesday, more than seven months after the elections. The Schoof cabinet is getting the benefit of the doubt, according to recent research by Ipsos I&O. Four out of ten Dutch people are satisfied, which means the new coalition scores slightly better than Rutte IV when it took office (34 percent). The sentiment among the coalition parties’ supporters varies greatly. While PVV and BBB voters are quite positive about this cabinet, that percentage has already shrunk considerably among VVD and NSC voters. They wonder whether this cabinet will last its term and can ensure stable government. It is striking that VVD and NSC voters mainly have these practical objections, rather than objections of principle or the rule of law.
Party leaders Omtzigt (NSC) and Yesilgöz (VVD) have had some practical and fundamental objections to this new cabinet in recent months. The assessment remained that the right-wing coalition had to be tried, given the election results, before it could fail again. VVD and NSC hope that the ministers of PVV, and to a lesser extent BBB, will actually moderate their tone and start to participate in the government constructively. This will partly determine whether the great political experiment that is the Schoof cabinet can be a success.
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