Dutch Discomfort

Channeling radical change into competent governance is hard, as Trump and Wilders have discovered

As the world took a front row seat last week in the rapidly escalating fight between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, another dramatic political divorce took place in The Netherlands. Both events highlight the trouble with bringing in radical change while working within the systems that resist that change.

By blowing up its uneasy governing right-leaning coalition, Geert Wilders put The Netherlands deeper into a political crisis that started some two years ago. Think about it. The government of - now NATO chief - Mark Rutte collapsed in the summer of 2023, elections followed in November that year and after nine months of talks a right-leaning coalition emerged in the summer of 2024 which ended last week. New elections will be held in October, so if you add another coalition discussion marathon there is a fair chance that the Dutch will have been without a properly functioning government for close to three years come 2026.

The proportional system where you need more than one party to form a parliamentary majority doesn’t help, sure. But the current crop of politicians, from all sides, have made the process even worse. And it is not that the Dutch can relax and play political games, urgent legislative action is required on crises in immigration, housing, environmental regulation (which stops building new homes), affordability and of course the war in Ukraine.

So why did it happen? Did the right-wing anti-immigration party under Geert Wilders not win the election and was he not able to broker a governing deal with three other right-of-center parties? Well, yes and no. Wilders, who in 2012 had already walked out of a co-governing arrangement, was seen as politically too toxic to be part of the new coalition government and was after a long negotiation agreeable to forgo the prime minister’s seat. An unknown bureaucrat without party affiliation, Dick Schoof, would become the nation’s consensus leader. Wilders and the other coalition party leaders would steer the cabinet from the relative distance of parliament. It is the principle of ‘duality’: the cabinet governs and is clearly separated from parliament which controls. It is the exact opposite of the Westminster system that you will see in the UK and Canada.

Not a bad idea, apart from the fact that it doesn’t really work. The prime minister lacks the political base to lead and direct the council of ministers, and party leaders like Wilders may get the idea that policy is developed without their direct input. And that is why Wilders put the foot in: legislation on immigration moved too slow and he demanded that a specific and somewhat draconian list of action items be implemented to curb the endless wave of asylum seekers crossing the Dutch border. If the government did not act on this instantly Wilders would pull his party out and that is precisely what happened.

From Wilders’ perspective a fairly logical move were it not for the fact that his party had never been this close to actually help craft legislation with its own distinct political flavour. The Dutch populist right was accepted into the halls of power and received unprecedented buy-in from the more moderate and centre-right parties. It was almost a sort of Trumpian entrance in a system that is designed to block overly extreme moves. Yet Wilders has proved himself to be much better at campaigning and arguing - which got him a lot votes - but far less capable at compromising and governing. His party, the largest in Dutch parliament, has just one official member, himself, and he is rumoured to be such a control freak that he distrusted the motivations of his own ministers. At one point earlier this year he even managed to almost throw one of them under the bus over a prison policy issue.

But apart from his own character flaws he also may have taken a calculated bet: forcing new elections that could propel him to a position where he would no longer be ignored and could indeed become prime minister. A big roll of the dice: on the one hand he now assumes that a sizeable number of the Dutch will align with his concerns over a poorly managed immigration file, while risking a situation where a frustrated electorate abandons the right and favours the left-leaning opposition. We will see the results on October 29.

On a macro scale there are two phenomena that stand out from this Dutch episode that have their parallels in other democracies too. First, the system will resist a drastic new political direction. The Dutch coalition was not only struggling as it represented four different parties, its plans and policy initiatives ran into serious resistance from the large bureaucracies and various influential advisory bodies whose support and collaboration are required to give effect to new policies. As crises are ever more urgent and require immediate action it is sobering to see how civil servants have become politicized and have started to act as a counterweight to what voters actually voted for. This is what Trump figured out only after his not so successful first term. And it is an argument to back up the frustrations from the emerging right, their efforts are often hindered. But against them, and that is my second point, is that you can’t expect to have extreme policy ideas make it through unfiltered in any democracy, there is still the art of compromising, tweaking and adjusting to engage in before you see your set of ideas come to fruition in viable laws and policies.

Wilders failed to grab that opportunity and with a bruised reputation will have to launch another shot at the ballot box. Trump took the lessons from term one and he is now far more effective in getting the results he wishes to see. Whether the open break with the very person who bankrolled his entry into the White House may risk his success to date remains to be seen. But it is key to note that right-of-center politicians, on the rise globally, will have to play within the system and in failing to do so they may be their own worst enemies.