On a broadcast of Jinek, in September last year, Caroline van der Plas of BBB said that a new cabinet would be on the platform by mid-January. There was a laugh about that, she said when I met her in the House of Representatives around Christmas. The formation could never last that long, could it?
After the summer, my prediction was still: new elections. Sigrid Kaag had described Mark Rutte as a hustler without vision. If you made such a point about leadership, you wouldn’t join a cabinet under his leadership, would you?
In the book Thinking fast and slow, from 2011, Israeli psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman showed that a prediction from a political interpreter, or an expert in any field, is worth as little as anyone’s. From American research, The Good Judgment Project, then it turned out that it mainly revolves around whether someone dares to doubt themselves. A super expert who asserts something about the future with great certainty is much more likely to be wrong than someone who knows little, but remains critical of his own ideas.
The researchers saw that such a confident, poor predictor was often popular with many people and had a better chance of a successful TV career than a doubter who knew better.
You can now hear from Binnenhof specialists about the Rutte IV cabinet that it will probably fall prematurely because there are three parliamentary surveys are coming: about gas extraction in Groningen, the Allowance affair, corona. That way of thinking, says former VVD strategist Mark Thiessen, is what you call the availability bias: “If something is still fresh in your mind, you overestimate the chance that it will happen again.”
Those who dare to doubt themselves, researchers saw, can predict much better
Last year, the cabinet resigned after a parliamentary inquiry into the allowances. “Then that, the idea is, will happen again because of something like this. I personally think that things can go wrong because of the political climate, which is so rotten.”
In order to really say something about it, you have to question that again. In September last year, when Kaag Rutte found another hustler, the political climate had already deteriorated and perhaps the parties that are now in Rutte IV did not want new elections. You can think that CDA and D66 would like to do that if they think they know for sure that Rutte will not become the party leader again, and then come up with a prime minister themselves. But what do they do when politics gets even more sickening? If the threats become more intense, the unrest on the streets gets out of hand?
A talk show probably can’t do anything with it.
I ask Caroline van der Plas, who was happy with the landing scene, what she thinks: how long can Rutte IV last? “Until May 2023,” she says. The provincial elections have then taken place. “It’s not convenient to fall before that.” But Sigrid Kaag, she thinks, has already left. “Two captains on one ship. That does not work.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of January 13, 2022
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