Last full Cabinet meeting for longest serving Dutch PM; Rutte excited to start NATO job

Mark Rutte will attend his last Council of Ministers—the weekly Cabinet meeting—on Friday. The Netherlands’ longest-serving Prime Minister will still hold the position until the new Cabinet takes office on July 2, but next Friday, he’ll be in Brussels for a European summit. The expectation is that Rutte will officially be appointed the NATO Secretary General just before the summit. Rutte responded to the new job for the first time on Thursday, seeming excited for the challenge.

“It still has to be made formal next week,” Rutte told NOS about the NATO job as he left his Ministry of General Affairs on Thursday. Rutte’s only opponent for the job, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, withdrew yesterday, leaving the way open for the Dutchman to succeed Jens Stoltenberg.

Rutte is excited about the new challenge but also looks forward to some time off first. “I have three months off now, wonderful, and then I have to work hard.” He’ll go on holiday, and then he hopes to have some coffee and lunch dates with friends. “And people then say, ‘I don’t have time right now, you are unemployed, I am not.”

Last summer, after the Rutte IV Cabinet collapsed, Rutte speculated about maybe being a teacher in The Hague for a while. But then he started thinking about the NATO top job again. “With everything that’s happening in Ukraine now, the instability in the world, and people thinking I could do it, you can’t just push that aside,” he told NOS.

Rutte met with his intended successor, Dick Schoof, on Thursday. The two have known each other for years, Schoof said afterward. “The fact that it is a Dutchman who will lead this extremely important organization is very nice,” Schoof said. “It gives me a safe feeling. He knows very well what must and can be done internationally. There is no better candidate imaginable.”

The new Cabinet is set to take office on July 2. Then Rutte will hand over the baton after 14 years as Prime Minister, leading four Cabinets. “We just said to each other: it’s great that this can still happen in the Torentje,” Schoof said. The Torentje is the Prime Minister’s workplace. It will soon close for years due to the Binnenhof renovations.