The Dutch government is a coalition of chaos

The goal of the new Dutch government is, above all, its existence.

It took six months for four constituent parties, ranging from the center-right to the far-right, to craft a coalition agreement that barely pretends to address the Netherlands’ most pressing problems — let alone one that offers a pro-growth agenda or a vision of a happier, more prosperous country. Forming a government is often time-consuming in a country where proportional representation has never produced a majority party. But it usually doesn’t take that long — or produce such a thin government program.

One might expect, for example, that a Conservative government would try to use tax policy to improve incentives to work, save, invest and accumulate human capital. What do we find when we turn to the 26-page “framework agreement” between the parties that was published in May?

First, of course, we come across a strange prose poem, probably titled “Hope, Courage, and Pride.” It begins:

The Netherlands is a beautiful country.

A country we can be proud of.

We have to work hard to gain the trust of the Dutch.

Every day anew.

Because confidence is not automatic.

Moving beyond this work of art, which lasts a few more lines, on page 3 we learn that the coalition intends to “make work pay better by cutting taxes on labour and lowering the marginal tax rate; for example, by introducing an additional income tax bracket.” And that’s it. Much of the rest of the agreement is similarly vague, counterproductive, or relies on unrealistic concessions from other EU member states.

Instead of crafting policy, parties have spent much of the past six months dealing with two unusual challenges.

Two parties have seemed unhappy to be there from the start — the center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) of outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte and the New Social Contract (NSC), a group of opportunistic technocrats formed only last year by renegade Christian Democratic MP Pieter Omtzigt. While both parties want and need to be in government, they find the views and policy preferences of their largest coalition partner — Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration, anti-Muslim Party for Freedom (PVV) — rather disgusting.

Membership in Wilders’ so-called party was another challenge. Controlled by a single legal entity, the PVV relies on the rule of one man, and that one man is the bleached blond Wilders himself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the elected officials who work for him are not chosen for charisma, ideas or skills. Wilders has long lived in isolation due to security measures enforced by threats from Muslim extremists, which also could not help. As a result, he struggled with basic personnel duties throughout the process.

Wilders’s fight began immediately after the election. He chose one of his two longest-serving senators, Gom van Strien, to lead the coalition negotiations. It quickly became clear that van Strien was under investigation for fraud and bribery, so he was forced to withdraw. He was replaced by Ronald Plasterk, a former Labor minister turned conservative commentator.

Because Wilders’s governing partners found him unacceptable as prime minister—given his long history of bigoted and volatile statements and proposals, including a conviction for insulting a racial group—he informally proposed Plasterk for the job in mid-May. It quickly became clear that Plasterk was also under investigation. The University of Amsterdam, his former employer, was investigating potential misappropriation of intellectual property. Plasterk denied any wrongdoing but immediately backtracked.

At least two other potential prime ministers have been asked to serve but have declined. This is not, to be clear, an oddity in Dutch politics – the last time someone declined to serve as prime minister was more than 40 years ago.

Left without a candidate for prime minister, the coalition, as expected, chose a career civil servant, Dick Schoof, to head the new cabinet. Problem solved? Not quite, because Wilders now had the right to appoint a deputy prime minister.

This third attempt at human resources management led Wilders to Gidi Markuszower, a PVV MP. ​​Markuszower was a controversial choice: he had previously argued for tribunals to try politicians responsible for Dutch immigration policy, and had referred to asylum seekers as “beasts” and “hyenas.” He had also been forced to withdraw from the PVV’s candidate list in 2010 after the then interior minister accused him of “threatening the integrity” of the Netherlands. (Markuszower was widely believed to have shared information with Israeli intelligence services.)

Not surprisingly, this time Markuszower failed the security check and Wilders was forced to appoint another deputy, Fleur Agema.

The new government was sworn in on Tuesday, July 2. On Thursday, the first debate in parliament had to be suspended after Agema posted on X (formerly Twitter) about Islamic head coverings. Schoof and his deputy prime ministers needed half an hour to study the tweet, agree on what to say about it and introduce new restrictions on ministers’ use of Twitter.

Now you might think that it was these kinds of concerns that led to the challenges number onemelancholy that leading NSC and VVD figures probably feel at night, as they go to bed and ponder their new coalition. But their hesitation — and the opposition to the coming coalition that exists within the ranks of both parties — was motivated largely by the content of Wilders’s political views, not the quality of his staff.

This is particularly true of the NSC. Omtzigt, who founded the party last summer, spent the election campaign saying he would not make a pact with Wilders because of Wilders’ opposition to basic rights and freedoms, especially freedom of religion. Omtzigt has also spent much of his political career giving speeches on good governance and the rule of law.

While I assumed Omtzigt would change his position on these issues as soon as it became politically convenient, some in the National Security Council undoubtedly share Omtzigt’s claims, and he himself must continue to make declarations to preserve his reputation.

For this reason, Wilders was not allowed to become prime minister, a decision that came after months of negotiations. The negotiating parties also insisted for some time that the new cabinet would be an “extra-parliamentary” one – a cabinet that would rely largely on experts from outside national politics and would include ministers not directly linked to any of the four parties.

Apart from the occasional Prime Minister Dick Schoof, this has not materialised, and the new cabinet will consist, if anything, of more current and former members of parliament than previous cabinets. Not an extra-parliamentary cabinet, but an extra-parliamentary cabinet, as the joke goes.

But that doesn’t mean the new ministerial team brings a lot of experience to the table. It will be the first time since 1905 that no one on the team has been a minister before.

The two challenges—personal and political—cannot of course be entirely separated. Wilders’s extreme views have made it difficult for him to recruit competent officials, and the extreme statements made by some of his supporters in the past have made his party difficult to accept for both coalition partners and the public at large.

Take his other candidate for deputy prime minister. Marjolein Faber, who will also serve as minister for asylum and migration, once focused her contribution to a Senate debate on the threat of “omvolkowanie” (Or “Sick leave” in the original German), a version of the theory better known in English as the “Great Replacement Theory,” the racist idea that elites are conspiring to replace white Europeans with non-white immigrants.

Rutte’s calm explanation that the term came from “the 1930s, from the circles of Adolf Hitler and the German NSDAP” did not impress her at the time. She linked this, in classic national conservative style, to other controversies, such as the 2015 incident in which she gave party money to her son’s company, which was allegedly building a website for the PVV.

Or take the coalition’s new minister for international trade and development aid, Reinette Klever. Klever is another brilliant replacement theorist whose previous work includes work on Black Diary Pietenjournaal TV show created for the sole purpose of showing people dressed as “Zwarte Pieten,” a widely disregarded traditional figure with a black-painted face associated with Christmas. This seems hard to reconcile with her new professional responsibilities — will she really be leading trade missions to, say, Atlanta?

These appointments may seem incompatible even with the declarations that Omtzigt and the NSC want to commit to the ideals of good governance and the rule of law. In response, the director of the NSC research institute resigned.

When confronted with them, NSC officials now say they assume that ministers will feel bound by an oath to the Dutch constitution—the same oath that members of parliament take and that most PVV ministers have taken before. They say they assume that ministers will feel bound by the coalition agreement. And they say they assume that ministers will stick to the so-called “rule of law declaration” that the NSC forced other parties to sign in January. Generally speaking, if you insist on an extravagant declaration of respect for the rule of law, it is not a good sign that you expect your partners to abide by it.

In fact, the open bigotry of most PVV ministers goes to the heart of the scandal that shaped Omtzigt’s career and fueled the growth of his party. the index finger affair—or the childcare benefit scandal—ten of thousands of parents were falsely accused of benefit fraud between 2005 and 2019. In many cases, families were plunged into poverty and despair. Rutte’s third cabinet resigned over the scandal, and in 2022 the government admitted that institutional racism was behind attacks on members of minority groups in the case.

But for the National Security Council, none of that seems to matter now, with ministerial appointments within reach.

However, despite the weaknesses of the new cabinet, it also has two significant advantages.

The Minister of Finance, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Defence, Minister of Justice, Minister of the Interior and several other members are representative, mainstream and probably competent figures, although they lack experience. They will ensure a significant degree of continuity in Dutch foreign and fiscal policy and defend the Dutch commitment to the EU, NATO, the defence of Ukraine and the climate transformation.

Perhaps most importantly, the two parties most likely to end the coalition, the NSC and the VVD, have both suffered significant losses in the polls since the election. The VVD has 18 seats after winning 24 in November, while the NSC has seven seats after winning 20. That suggests this is not a good time to be going back to voters — and means that this shaky coalition, which has already lost its majority in the polls, may hold out a bit longer than expected.