I have read very, very little about Dutch politics in recent years. Today I read that Rutte is even more unpopular among you than the misanthrope Macron.
Whose mother-in-law did this guy kill? What’s going on in your country?
Greetings from next door
I couldn’t even make a proper summary of everything he has done to fuck people over but the most important things he has done:
- The tax authority ruthlessly hunted people who received tax breaks for paying for babysitting, most of them received the tax breaks fairly but the tax authority went after them mostly because of racist reasons, such as a foreign sounding name. Some of these parents lost their kids or committed suicide
- He and a couple of other politicians took away the financial support for people studying and made them take out loans. This happened RIGHT as I went to uni, so there is just a generation of students who are completely fucked because the loan impacts their ability to get a mortgage and Rutte already caused a housing crisis, so young people can’t buy a house anyway.
- They mined in one of our provinces for gas, this caused numerous earthquakes destroying some homes. Rutte does not give a shit and does whatever he can to ignore the problem.
I know you’re just summarising, but I don’t think your first point gets across how deep the childcare benefits scandal goes. Thousands of parents had to pay tens of thousands of euros, often for no clear reason. The debt made them lose their posessions, jobs, relationships, and their own wellbeing. Their kids were taken out of their homes because parents in debt can’t take care of their children. These people literally lost years of their lives because of one single action by some unknown employee of the tax authority with no justification needed.
The government is supposed to protect its citizens from itself, and the Dutch government failed at its most important task. The protections against arbitrary punishment that you have on paper were actively being bypassed. Requests for information resulted in completely blacked out documents. When it was brought to court (if you could somehow afford a lawyer), even the highest judges blindly trusted the information they got from the tax authority (even though vital information was illegally left out), rather than assuming innocence. The ombudsman seemed to care very little. The government also lied to parliament, and most MPs did not question it too much anyway because staying in the coalition is so much more important. And then the fourth power, the press, took over a decade to bring all of this to light, after ignoring several signs before. All branches of government failed here, and the foundation of rule of law was violated. Rutte, of course, knew about it, but oopsie he has no active memory of it.
I think he’s the image of a perceived broader issue in Dutch politics; that people are more human than we’d like to believe and we really get to see that now.
Our political system is getting too ‘casual’, mirroring the low hierarchy and down-to-earth vibe in our society. This removes a basic form of respect which can be useful in social structures, while still trying to maintain the core democratic values; leading to everyone has a say, stuff takes long to achieve, especially with the spread of parties we now have.
The result is that our system cannot keep up with the speedy changes of our world with stuff like covid, AI algorithms, nitrogen-crisis, housing, social media and fails to have a concrete debate where people actually listen to each other while together building on a solid solution (without tackling the other when the opportunity arises).
The VVD (party of Rutte) had made some questionable choices in the past, which did not take issues of the left into account and seems to have caused issues in the long run which have stayed unaddressed for too long. Quite some big groups like farmers, students, Groningers, parents with aid and fugitives have been put in situations with a lot of hardship / uncertainty for too long. In addition, people began too question his trustworthiness due to his way of ‘forgetting’ important parts of conversations, removing messages from his old Nokia ‘as it was full’ and some suspicious notes during the formation of the latest government. Now quite some things have blown up and Mark Rutte is the face of all that, and of course formally responsible.
Personally I don’t think he’s that bad, he just has different beliefs and priorities in what he wants for the Netherlands, which is fair. I think his view is more externally oriented (how to keep The Netherlands stable in the competition with other countries, with the focus on keeping us a nice place for big companies). The internal affairs have been brushed off too much in my opinion. As a person he was known to be quite likeable in the past though. In debates he still comes across as reasonable to me and he’s got a good presence when working on an international level.
Long story short, I think he’s survived quite long, as people still see him as capable to manage a stressful job without losing face internationally. But too much build-up of negativity is chasing him, and society is more vocal than ever.
Rutte became PM in 2010.
Today, in 2023, he’s still PM.
13 years is plenty of time to anger the majority of your constituents in one way or another. Unless you have some sort of religious or cultural support, governments tend to become unpopular over time. And that’s not even addressing substantively what happened in NL over the past decade…
