Mark Rutte successfully exceeds all challenges.
And with him he survives his until now Minister of Finance, Wopke Hoekstra.
Or the one who was the exterior minister of him, Sigrid Kaag, who has debated all year round to ally with him or maintain distances.
In the end, he ended up watching his ears to the wolf: The centroderech did not accept his conditions to include to the left in the government, reaching an agreement seemed impossible, an electoral repetition was coming in which he could leave losing and more after having
Dimit for the chaotic evacuation mission of Afghanistan in summer.
Kaag, at the head of a pro-European party that with some willingness could balance the scale to Southern Europe, ended up yielding and accepting that the fourth ally of the future Dutch Government returns to be the conservatives of Christian Union, whom he already had of
Partners, together with Rutte and Hoekstra, since 2017. And that he tried to veto several times and swore not to want to ally with them to not give up the bills of his party, the left-wing Liberals D66, who want to adopt measures
of medical ethics without the censorship of Christians.
The Liberals VVD (Rutte), the Christian CDA Democrats (from Hoekstra), the Socioliberal D66 (KAAG) and Christian Union Cu rose four years, until they presented their full resignation in January to assume responsibility for one of the most shocking scandals of
Holland: the unfounded accusations of fraud, from the hand of the Hacienda administration, thousands of parents who had requested aid to cover the spending expenses and the care of their children.
That situation forced them to face financial, psychological and family problems.
Hacienda had allowed the algorithms to make a ‘blacklist’ of potential frauders based on their double nationality.
The scandal was such that Rutte’s political future hung from a thread, but in the end he not only returned to win the elections, but he did it with a broader representation for the liberals, and the coalition he had been directing earned more seats in
Total of the adjusted majority with which he counted until March this year.
But the unanimity of that coalition was evaporated shortly after.
A rutte leg message in April, after the elections, put him between the sword and the wall for several days.
He had lied to Congress and the media about his attempt to place a controversial deputy in a position that keeps him far from his parliamentary seat, the same seat he had used in previous years to criticize and reproach Rutte the treatment of families with children
Then he exploded on his face in January.
Rutte wanted Peter Omtzigt, of the same party as Hoekstra, entertained with other less annoying issues than the defense of families with double nationality.
A part of the Congress put Rutte in April a motion of censorship that did not make enough majority to dictate the end of his career.
It was thanks to Kaag and Hoekstra, who decided to save him with a motion of reprobation who achieved enough support.
With this last motion, it was left in the hands of Rutte to leave the back door, or fight to recover the confidence of him and lead them into another more legislature.
“Here our paths are separated,” Kaag said.
“Too many things have passed,” added Gert-Jan Segers (Cu), who said he did not want to be in a government that leads Rutte.
But he chose to stay: his life is politics.
Nobody imagines it, for now, in another position beyond tolentje, the prime minister’s office.
There are also no viable alternatives in the Netherlands.
A sum of calculation errors and fortuitous circumstances led the dialogue to a neutral point and allowed Rutte to lengthen the agony so many months that all its partners fell on the way.
Kaag resigned for the evacuations of Afghanistan, and the name of Hoekstra appeared in Pandora’s roles as an investor in a computer-based company based on the Virgin Islands.
In the end, everyone had dirty rags in sight and little room for maneuver.
Kaag renounced his goal of forming coalition with the Social Democrats and the Greens, Hoekstra ducked his head and in October, the same as they began to negotiate a new coalition agreement that will finally be known this Wednesday, again months later.
These same parties have already spent almost a year in an interim government, most of the time trying to overcome the distrust that each other is: united in the councils of ministers, and looking at each other at the negotiating table.
The funny thing is that there is hardly disagreement about the content of a government agreement, including the climate issue, the scarcity of housing and economic recovery.
The problem was more statements to the press that made a match, the report that published another means or the critical column of a newspaper of National Shot: the newspapers were thrown to the head, being agreed at the bottom of the matter.
Up to this week.
You still do not know who will occupy the 20 ministries that will have in the next legislature, but Hoekstra does not seem to want to continue at the front of finance and this ministry could pass at the hands of the D66 pro-Europeans.
All this will be negotiated at Christmas, when Rutte assumes the role of forming government.
What is now in Holland is much hurry to have a cabinet that can govern beyond dictating restrictions: the problems are piled up and society loses patience.
