Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte visited the king on Saturday to hand in the resignation of his four-party coalition, putting the deeply divided Netherlands on course for general elections later this year.
King Willem-Alexander flew back from a family holiday in Greece to meet with Rutte, who drove to the palace in his Saab station wagon for the meeting. The thorny issue of curbing migration, which has troubled countries across Europe for years, was the final stumbling block that toppled Rutte’s government on Friday night and exposed the deep ideological differences between the four parties that made up the troubled coalition.
Now she looks set to dominate the campaign for an election months away.
“We are the party that can secure a majority to significantly stem the flow of asylum seekers,” said Geert Wilders, leader of the anti-immigrant Freedom Party, which backed Rutte’s first minority coalition 13 years ago but ultimately toppled her .
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Opposition parties on the left also want the election to tackle issues they accuse Rutte of failing to adequately address – from climate change to a chronic housing shortage to the future of the country’s billion-dollar agricultural sector.
Socialist Party leader Lilian Marijnissen told Dutch broadcaster NOS that the collapse of Rutte’s government was “good news for the Netherlands. I think everyone felt that this cabinet is finished. They created more problems than they solved.”
Despite the four-party divisions in Rutte’s government, the latter will remain in power as an interim government pending the formation of a new coalition, but will not pass any major new legislation.
“Given the challenges of the times, of a war on this continent, no one benefits from a political crisis,” tweeted Sigrid Kaag, leader of the centrist, pro-European D66 party.
Rutte, the Netherlands’ longest-serving prime minister and veteran consensus-builder, seemed poised to torpedo his fourth coalition government with harsh demands in negotiations over how to slash the number of migrants seeking asylum in his country could.
Rutte spent months negotiating a package of measures to reduce the flow of new migrants to the country of nearly 18 million. Proposals reportedly included creating two classes of asylum – a temporary one for people fleeing conflict and a permanent one for people trying to escape persecution – and reducing the number of family members allowed to join asylum-seekers in the Netherlands. The idea of excluding family members was firmly rejected by the minority coalition party ChristenUnie.
“I think that the talks created unnecessary tension,” said Kaag.
Pieter Heerma, chairman of the coalition partner Christian Democrats, called Rutte’s approach in the talks “almost ruthless”.
The government’s fall comes just months after a new populist farmers’ party, the Farmers Citizens Movement, known by its Dutch acronym BBB, shocked the political establishment by winning provincial elections. The party is already the largest bloc in the Dutch Senate and will pose a serious threat to Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy.
BBB leader Caroline van der Plas said her party would dust off its campaign posters from the provincial election and run again.
“The campaign has started!” Van der Plas said in a tweet that showed supporters of her party hanging flags and banners from lampposts.