Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has announced the resignation of his government. Differences between the four coalition parties over asylum and migration policies are irreconcilable, the Conservative-Liberal prime minister said in The Hague on Friday. Overnight, the government confirmed that Rutte had tendered his resignation to King Willem-Alexander and would meet him on Saturday. According to the Dutch electoral authority, new elections cannot take place before mid-November.
Until then, Rutte announced that he would remain in office as an executive and continue to take care of the tasks that lie ahead, including supporting Ukraine against Russia’s war of aggression. He still has the “energy” to run in new elections as the lead candidate for his centre-right VVD party, but he needs to “think about it” first.
Tensions within the ruling coalition rose, according to media reports, after Rutte’s VVD proposed stricter rules for asylum seekers and threatened to leave cabinet if those measures were not approved. Among other things, Rutte demanded that family reunification of refugees be made more difficult. Days of crisis talks between coalition partners have not led to a deal, Rutte said late on Friday.
The Christian Democratic party Christen Unie declared that it “could not live with Rutte’s proposal”. Christen-Unie politician and deputy prime minister Carola Schouten said it is a “core value” for her party that “children grow up with their parents”.
Finance Minister Sigrid Kaag’s center-left D66 party also rejected Rutte’s call for three-day crisis talks. Kaag described the government’s downfall as “regrettable” and tensions within the coalition as “unnecessary”.
Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra of the coalition’s fourth partner, the Christian Democrat CDA, called the dissolution of the coalition “very disappointing” and “inexplicable for the people”.
The Dutch government has been at loggerheads on the issue since it took office a year and a half ago. A scandal erupted last year when a baby died in an overcrowded asylum center and hundreds of people had to sleep outside. Rutte’s previous government resigned in 2021 following a child support scandal.
The next election campaign should be heated. The citizen farmers movement (BBB), which was born just four years ago and gained strength from protests against EU-backed climate protection plans, also wants to win the national parliamentary elections after a clear electoral success in the provincial elections of March. Pressure from the BBB may also have contributed to the government’s downfall from the Dutch media: Rutte wanted to get tough on asylum policy to distinguish himself from the right wing of his VVD party – as the BBB is now also trying to woo the disappointed VVD voters .
Like other European countries, the Netherlands is struggling with the question of how to deal with the large number of immigrants. According to earlier media reports, Rutte was prepared to let the government fail if necessary. Asylum claims in the Netherlands rose by a third to over 46,000 last year and are expected to rise to over 70,000 this year – a new record since 2015.
Mark Rutte (56) has been Prime Minister of the Netherlands for almost 13 years, making him one of the longest-serving heads of government in the EU. Since January 2022, he has led his fourth cabinet after coalition talks that lasted a good nine months, making them the longest in the country’s history.
After numerous crises, the numbers in the coalition’s polls have dropped sharply. In the last provincial elections in March, in which the first chamber of parliament was elected – comparable to the Federal Council -, all government parties recorded significant losses. The big winner of the election was the right-wing populist peasant movement BBB, which became the strongest force immediately. The BBB is represented by only one deputy in the Chamber of Deputies. Great success is predicted for the party in a new election.