Once feared vote of no confidence becomes routine: ‘No one is surprised anymore’

The vote of no confidence has become a political routine on Tuesday afternoon. No one in the ministerial profession gets nervous anymore when the PVV loses confidence in Prime Minister Rutte, or when the SP submits a motion of no confidence against the entire cabinet. Only sporadically does threatening such a motion really matter – take the infamous April 1 debate in 2021 – but much more often it is the order of the day after such a red card.

And that is a bad thing, thinks parliamentary historian Bert van den Braak. “In principle, a vote of no confidence is a very powerful weapon. They almost never get majorities, but that does not alter the fact that it can occasionally be a very useful signal that things have to be done differently, or that a cabinet member has to leave.”

Motions of no-confidence are now being tabled very often. Since 2010, when the Rutte I cabinet took office, no less than 95 of them have been put to the vote. In the previous century and a half (!) of Dutch parliamentary history, there were only 28 in total. Van den Braak: “If you submit such a motion too often, no one will notice it anymore.” He therefore thinks that parties should be more restrained, as the small Christian party SGP shows: “If she puts forward a motion of no confidence, everyone is alert. The party never does it, and that has an impact.”

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The PVV of Geert Wilders takes the cake: the opposition party has now submitted no less than 55 motions of no confidence. “You see in a party like this that the high number of no-confidence motions arises from a kind of profiling urge,” explains Van den Braak. “If you want to show that you do not agree with the cabinet, you can come up with alternative plans, but a vote of no confidence is of course much easier.”

BBB leader Caroline van der Plas acknowledges that the drug is used very often and is therefore in danger of losing value. But ‘a lot of things just go wrong’, she says during a break in the debate about Groningen: ,,Sometimes it is pretended that we are always waving motions of no confidence here. But a number of motions are really quite justified. And for me it’s not like ‘oh nice, motion of no confidence, hope we get elections soon’.” Nevertheless, she supports the red card against the cabinet. “For us, the measure is full.”

It is also not the case that all those motions of no confidence have no effect. Threatening with a motion of no confidence is often enough to get a minister to resign, even if he does not yet have sufficient support. “That is the other side of the story,” says Van den Braak. “You saw that with Fred Teeven’s receipts and with Menno Snel with the surcharge affair. They already felt the storm coming, and kept the honor to themselves.”

Political scientist Ruud Koole does see a benefit in an alternative variant of the motion of no confidence, the so-called constructive motion of no confidence. A cabinet can then only be sent home if a parliamentary majority immediately proposes an alternative coalition. “This already applies in Germany,” says Koole. The opposition can then no longer simply slap a finger on the finger. “That is a major obstacle to all those non-serious motions of no confidence. Then you will see that far fewer motions of no confidence are submitted.”

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