The purpose of the new Dutch cabinet is, first and foremost, to exist at all.
It took half a year for the four constituent parties, which range from the center right to the far right, to produce a coalition agreement that barely even pretends to solve the Netherlands’ most pressing problems—let alone one that presents 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 doesn’t usually take this long—or produce such a thin program of government.
One might expect, for instance, a conservative government to try to leverage 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, which was published in May?
First, naturally, we encounter a bizarro prose-poem, possibly titled “Hope, Courage, and Pride.” It kicks off as follows:
The Netherlands is a gorgeous country.
A country to be proud of.
We must work hard to earn the confidence of the Dutch.
Every day anew.
Because confidence is not automatic.
Moving beyond this work of art, which continues for several more lines, on page 3, we’re told that the coalition intends to “[m]ake work pay more by reducing taxes on labor and lowering the marginal tax rate; for example, by introducing an additional income tax bracket.” And that is all. Much of the rest of the agreement is similarly vague, counterproductive, or reliant on unrealistic concessions from other European Union member states.
Instead of policy development, the parties have spent most of the past half-year dealing with two unusual challenges.
Two parties seemed unhappy to be there from the start—outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and the New Social Contract (NSC) party, a grouping of opportunistic technocrats formed only last year by renegade Christian Democratic parliamentarian 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-immigrant, anti-Muslim Party for Freedom (PVV)—fairly icky.
The membership of Wilders’s so-called party was the other challenge. Controlled by a single-member legal entity, the PVV relies on one-man rule, the one man being the bleached-blond Wilders himself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the elected officials who work for him are not selected for their charisma, ideas, and abilities. Wilders has long lived a life of isolation due to security measures necessitated by threats from Muslim extremists, which cannot have helped, either. As a result, he has struggled with basic staffing responsibilities throughout the process.
Wilders’ struggle started immediately after the election. To lead the coalition negotiations, he selected one of his two longest-serving senators, Gom van Strien. It rapidly became clear that van Strien was under investigation for fraud and bribery, and he had to withdraw. Ronald Plasterk, a former Labor Party minister-turned-conservative commentator, replaced him.
As Wilders’s governing partners deem him unacceptable as prime minister—for his long record of bigoted and unhinged statements and proposals, including a criminal conviction for insulting a racial group—in mid-May, he informally proposed Plasterk for that role. It rapidly became clear Plasterk, too, was under investigation. The University of Amsterdam, his former employer, was looking into potential misappropriation of intellectual property. Plasterk denied any wrongdoing but promptly pulled out.
At least two more potential prime ministers were asked to serve but declined. This is not, to be clear, some sort of peculiarity of Dutch politics—the last time that someone refused to serve as prime minister was more than 40 years ago.
The coalition, left without a candidate for prime minister just as it was expected to present one, proceeded to select a career civil servant, Dick Schoof, to lead the new cabinet. Problem solved? Not quite, as Wilders was now entitled to name a deputy prime minister.
This third attempt at human resources management led Wilders to Gidi Markuszower, a PVV parliamentarian. Markuszower was a controversial choice: He had previously argued for tribunals to judge the politicians responsible for Dutch immigration policy and referred to asylum-seekers as “beasts” and “hyenas.” He had also been forced to withdraw from the PVV candidate list in 2010 after the then-interior minister accused him posing a “risk to the integrity” of the Netherlands. (Markuszower was widely believed to have shared information with the Israeli intelligence service.)
Unsurprisingly, Markuszower did not make it through his security screening this time, and Wilders was forced to name a different deputy, Fleur Agema.
The new government was sworn in on Tuesday, July 2. On Thursday, its first debate in parliament had to be suspended after Agema posted on X (formerly Twitter) about Islamic head coverings. It took Schoof and his deputy prime ministers half an hour to study the tweet, agree on what to say about it, and instate new restrictions on Twitter use by ministers.
Now, one may think that these are the kinds of concerns that led to challenge numero uno, the melancholy presumably felt by leading NSC and VVD figures in the evening as they go to sleep and ponder their new coalition. But their hesitation—and the opposition to the incoming coalition that exists in both parties’ ranks—has been motivated largely by the substance of Wilders’s political views rather than the quality of his personnel.
This is particularly true for the NSC. Omtzigt, who founded the party last summer, spent the general election campaign claiming that he would not form a pact with Wilders because of Wilders’s opposition to basic rights and freedoms, especially the freedom of religion. Omtzigt has also spent a significant chunk of his political career pontificating about good government and the rule of law.
While I assumed that Omtzigt would change his position on these questions the moment that it became politically convenient, segments of the NSC surely bought into Omtzigt’s claims, and Omtzigt himself has had to continue to pay lip service to them to preserve his brand.
For that reason, Wilders has not been allowed to become prime minister—a decision that was reached months into the negotiation process. The negotiating parties also insisted for some time that the new cabinet would be an “extra-parliamentary” one—one that would draw heavily on experts from outside national politics, and that would feature ministers not directly tied to one of the four parties.
Apart from accidental Prime Minister Dick Schoof, this has not materialized, 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 one, the joke goes.
But that does not mean that the new ministerial team brings large amounts of experience to the table. It will be the first time since 1905 that nobody in the team has been a minister before at all.
The two challenges—personnel and politics—cannot, of course, be fully separated. Wilders’s extreme views have made it difficult for him to recruit competent elected officials, and the extreme statements delivered by some of his minions in the past have made his party hard to swallow for coalition partners and the general public alike.
Take his second choice for deputy prime minister. Marjolein Faber, who will also serve as the minister of asylum and migration, once focused her contributions to a Senate debate on the threat of “omvolking” (or “Umvolkung” in the original German), a version of what is better known in English as the “great replacement theory,” the racist idea claiming that elites are conspiring to replace white Europeans with nonwhite immigrants.
Rutte’s calm explanation that the term originates in “the 30s, from the circles of Adolf Hitler and the German NSDAP” did not seem to impress her at the time. She has combined this, in classic national conservative fashion, with other controversies, such as an incident in 2015 in which she directed party money to her son’s company, which was reportedly building a website for the PVV.
Or take the new coalition’s minister of international trade and development aid, Reinette Klever. Klever is another great replacement theorist whose previous professional experience includes work on the Zwarte Pietenjournaal television program, established purely in order to show people dressed as “Zwarte Pieten,” the widely disparaged traditional blackface character associated with Christmas. This seems hard to square with her new professional responsibilities—is she really going to lead trade missions to, say, Atlanta?
These appointments may seem incompatible with even just the lip service that Omtzigt and the NSC want to pay to the ideals of good government and the rule of law. In fact, the director of the NSC’s research institute resigned in response.
When confronted, NSC officials now say that they assume ministers will feel bound by their oath to the Dutch Constitution—the same oath that members of parliament take, and that most PVV ministers have taken before. They say that they assume ministers will feel bound by the coalition agreement. And they say that they assume ministers will stick to the so-called “rule of law declaration” that NSC made the other parties sign back in January. Generally speaking, if you insist on an extravagant declaration of adherence to the rule of law, it’s not a great sign that you expect your partners to follow it.
In reality, the open bigotry displayed by most PVV ministers goes back to the heart of the scandal that made Omtzigt’s career and fueled the rise of his party. In the so-called toeslagenaffaire—or child care benefits scandal—tens of thousands of parents were falsely accused of benefit fraud between 2005 and 2019. In many instances, families were driven into poverty and despair. The third Rutte cabinet resigned over the scandal, and in 2022, the government acknowledged that institutional racism drove the targeting of members of minority groups in the affair.
But none of that appears to matter to the NSC now that ministerial appointments are within reach.
Yet despite the new cabinet’s weaknesses, it has two key strengths, as well.
The finance minister, the foreign minister, the defense minister, the justice minister, the interior minister, and a few other members are presentable, mainstream, and plausibly competent figures, albeit ones who are lacking in experience. They will ensure a significant level of continuity in Dutch foreign and fiscal policy and defend the Netherlands’ commitment to the EU, NATO, the defense of Ukraine, and the climate transition.
Perhaps most importantly, the two parties most likely to end the coalition, the NSC and VVD, have both taken significant hits in post-election polls. The VVD is polling at 18 seats after it won 24 in November, while the NSC is polling at 7 seats after winning 20. That indicates that it’s not a great time to go back to the voters—and means that this ramshackle coalition, which has already lost its majority in the polls, may hang together a little longer than expected.
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