Rutte set for historic fourth term in coalition with pro-EU party

Mark Rutte is on course to make Dutch political history after winning his fourth successive election and potentially extending his premiership of the eurozone’s fifth-largest economy to 15 years.

The 54-year-old has been a totem of stability in the Netherlands, navigating a series of crises and steering the country through twin downturns caused by the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.

His right-leaning VVD party cemented its position as the largest in the 150-seat parliament, gaining three additional seats to take 36.

The election’s main surprise was a surge in support for the pro-EU D66, which will become the second-largest party in the chamber after gaining eight seats and usurping Geert Wilders’ far-right PVV.

Rutte’s victory is a remarkable feat for the former Unilever executive, who will oversee an unprecedentedly fractured legislature. A record 16 parties are due to enter the Tweede Kamer, the Dutch lower house — continuing a trend of party splintering dubbed “Dutchification”.

Single-interest parties, including one for animals and another representing the over-50s, have been a feature of Dutch politics under the country’s proportional electoral system.

Dutch people are not extreme, they are moderate

D66’s fortunes have been revived under leader Sigrid Kaag, a multilingual former UN diplomat who made a virtue out of her internationalist career and cosmopolitanism during the campaign. She took helm of the party last year on the back of a punishing defeat in 2019’s European elections.

The party won significant support from first-time voters, appealing mostly to young, educated urbanites. Kaag also pushed for more attention to be paid to European issues in a largely domestic electoral campaign in which Rutte and the centre-right Christian Democrats evaded topics such as the EU’s forthcoming Covid-19 recovery fund. 

A former trade minister in the last Rutte coalition, Kaag has been attacked by the anti-Islam Wilders, who pilloried her on the eve of the election as a “traitor” for wearing a headscarf during a ministerial trip to Iran in 2018.

But in contrast to Rutte, who has been accused of flirting with the far-right on issues like migration, Kaag was one of the few politicians to consistently challenge Wilders in an election campaign that was mostly restricted to televised debates during the coronavirus lockdown

Fluent in Arabic and French, the former diplomat is married to a Palestinian and is the mother of two Dutch-Arab children. She has been outspoken on racism in Dutch society, saying she is often “treated as a foreigner in my own country” because of her family.

D66’s performance equalled the party’s best ever electoral showing last achieved in 1994. Kaag danced triumphantly on the table in her office when the first exit poll data was published on Wednesday night. “Dutch people are not extreme, they are moderate,” she said.

Kaag is almost certain to strike a coalition deal with Rutte, alongside a third or fourth party, to reach the required 76-seat majority in the 150-seat parliament. 

As the second-largest party, D66 would be in a position to take the reins at the finance ministry, which has been the intellectual hub of Dutch Euroscepticism and anti-federalism inside the government. Outgoing finance minister Wopke Hoekstra led a band of “Hanseatic” hawkish capitals who before the pandemic opposed plans for a eurozone budget.

D66 taking the finance ministry could help the Dutch forge a more “constructive attitude” on European issues, as debate looms on how to finance the coronavirus recovery fund, said Pepijn Bergsen, research fellow at Chatham House. 

But he warned that the party’s record in the last government suggested it would not wholeheartedly embrace EU fiscal union or expansionary budgets at home.

“While D66 is clearly pro-EU, it does not necessarily actively engage with the difficult questions around the monetary union. There is no reason to believe that the Netherlands will suddenly turn into a proponent of deeper fiscal integration with a D66-led finance ministry,” said Bergsen. 

A new coalition government will also have to contend with a sizeable Eurosceptic bloc in the parliament. Although Wilders lost some vote share, it largely went to the anti-establishment Forum for Democracy (FvD) led by Thierry Baudet, which gained five seats to win a total of seven. The anti-EU JA21 party also entered parliament for the first time with three seats. 

“The populist radical right seems to have obtained its highest seat share since its breakthrough in 2002,” said Sarah de Lange, professor of politics at the University of Amsterdam, who calculated the three party’s combined seats at 29. 

The FvD capitalised on anti-lockdown sentiment by holding rallies in breach of the country’s pandemic restrictions and arguing the curbs were a breach of fundamental freedoms. Its success comes despite a year of turmoil in which senior members were dogged by accusations of racism and anti-Semitism. 

The Dutch cordon sanitaire against the far-right will hold for now as mainstream parties have ruled out working with Wilders or Baudet. D66’s likely role in a new coalition will be to temper the anti-federalism of Rutte’s VVD.

Dutch political contests have often been cast as a battle between Rutte and a blonde challenger who questions government consensus on the EU. But it is the pro-EU Kaag, rather than populist Wilders, who will be carrying that mantle now.

@mehreenkhn