Where Will Teflon Marc Rutte Turn Up Next-- Now That He's Pulled The Plug On His Own Government?

Dutch Elections Coming In November

-by Toon Janssen

Dutch Prime Minister Marc Rutte’s latest coalition government (VVD + Christian Democratic Appeal, Democrats 66 and the Christian Union), in power since January 2022 after a formation period of almost one year, collapsed on Friday July 7th after a prolonged period of crisis after crisis. Teflon Marc, survival artist of various political stormy scandals specialized in keeping things together while minimizing damage to himself and his neoliberal VVD party, failed this time. An era of Rutte political dominance came to an abrupt end and to the surprise of many observers, he pulled the plug himself.

Breakpoints were delay and restrictions in family reunification of asylum seekers— the attempt to shorten the process. Family reunification is almost sacred for the extreme conservative Christian CU, a small party with only 5 seats in the House of Representatives (2nd kamer) of 150 seats, but extremely important. They claim to work on what they call a humane and effective migration policy based on biblical ethics with family membership as a cornerstone of society and reunification options as a must. Rutte knew from the beginning CU family policy was their crown jewel and unmentionable taboo. Without their support his extremely fragile coalition government would never even have existed. Why, is the question opinion makers in the media wonder about.

During Rutte’s 13 years of neoliberal VVD supremacy, his Machiavellian ideology created a society in which blatant egoism, brutality, inequality, individualism and rampant grabbing became the norm. That twisted the internationally renowned shared society of collective responsibilities and the world famous consensus model of endlessly talking everything to death. Successive conservative governments turned leftist thinking into a swear concept and rewarded rampant hubristic behavior. No wonder, despite his popularity as a voice canon he got stuck in his worthless neoliberalism, resulting in endless lies, many so called “inactive memories,” and many, many failures on crucial policies. In the end, Marc Rutte created an unsupportable collection of enemies, his power weakened by the moment. Meanwhile he polished his image, walking around with sleeves rolled up, driving around in an old Saab without a chauffeur or on a bike as a perennial youngster. He couldn’t be out of the news.

Rutte’s VVD, currently holding 34 seats in the House, is the biggest coalition partner and indeed no way that party can be ignored in the political landscape. But on March 15th 2023 elections for the Provincial States, on which seat membership in the Senate (1st kamer) is also based, showed shocking results. Caroline van der Plas’ BBB became biggest party with 17 seats, as if she came out of nowhere. I posted about BBB, the BoerBurgerBeweging, before on this blog. Van der Plas claims to represent farmers in their struggle for survival in a modern and densely populated urbanized society where competition for space between functions is tense, with strict EU regulations from Brussels. Her party grew bigger and bigger as, let’s put it this way, a collection reservoir for overall resentments. There aren’t that many farmers in the Netherlands after all. Her party succeeded in framing resentment under its banner. No wonder van der Plas announced a run for elections for the House of Representatives (de 2e kamer, our main political institution), planned this coming November. She might win, according to the polls, and become Dutch prime minister as a trophy. Realizing her power, she stated in advance she’s not running to become part of a coalition with or under Marc Rutte. Other parties announced the same strategy. That might be the reason why Rutte decided to pull the plug and opt out all together.

And next? It might be time for Dutch voters to experience firsthand what you get when a fallen up marketing bureau for agro millionaires in a sneaky way pushes voting for a party with conspiracy theorists setting their agenda. Also Van der Plas can’t escape showing her buttocks…

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I called Toon yesterday but forgot to ask him about Van der Plas’ buttocks. However, we did talk about a few things I feel worth adding. First of all, there is widespread speculation that Rutte may be angling for a job as either head of the EU or head of NATO. And secondly, the leftist parties— presumably the Socialist Party (9 seats), the Labour Party (9 seats), GroenLinks (8 seats), the animal rights party (6 seats), DENK, an immigrants rights party (3 seats) and BIJ1, the anti-capitalism party (1 seat)— seem to have decided it's time to put aside their differences and make a serious run for the House as one entity. So far just Labour and GroenLinks have announced a merger. It's important to remember that during the 2021 general election the 5 left-of-center parties commanded around 30% of the raw vote.