Total surprise in the Second Chamber of The Hague, Monday, July 10, when the deputies were to debate the fall of the coalition led by the liberal Mark Rutte. Three days after having precipitated the end of his alliance with three other parties on the migration issue, the Prime Minister announced that he would no longer be the candidate of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). He will therefore cease to be prime minister and will leave, he says, politics for good.
When questioned after this statement, he said: “In politics, we wonder some evenings: is all this really useful? A teacher should never ask himself this question.. An allusion to the fact that, even at the head of various governments since 2010, Mr. Rutte has never given up giving lessons in a school in The Hague.
Dozens of curious people massed near the Binnenhof, the center of power in The Hague, on Friday July 7, tried to understand why the liberal Mark Rutte, who, in January 2022, had taken the head of his fourth government by presenting himself as the man of stability, had just precipitated the fall of his coalition after 543 days.
In the evening, at the end of three days of discussions, the four parties making up his coalition in fact parted on a finding of total disagreement about the asylum policy. Mark Rutte, who said to himself ” disappointed “evoking differences “insurmountable” with its partners, presented in writing, in the evening, the resignation of its government. King Willem-Alexander, returned from Greece, where he was on vacation, spoke with him on Saturday. Elections are expected to take place in November.
An unexpected proposal from the Prime Minister, Wednesday, July 5, on migration policy set fire to the powder. Determined to limit the family reunification of refugees, Mark Rutte hoped that people who had fled a war – and likely, according to him, to return one day to their country of origin – could only bring relatives to the Netherlands they had sufficient financial resources. Exceptions would have been granted for a maximum of 200 people per month.
Rush a return to elections
“Unacceptable”, decreed the centrist Protestant party ChristenUnie, supported by the left-wing liberals of D66. This formation however tried, with the Christian Democrats, fourth component of the government, to propose a compromise, evoking a mechanism of temporary limitation of the reception. The Prime Minister refused, clearly eager to satisfy the base of his movement, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), which has been calling for a stricter migration policy since 2017.
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