Tumultuous first 100 days for Prime Minister Dick Schoof; Coalition hanging on by thread
It’s been 100 days since former top civil servant Dick Schoof unexpectedly became the new Dutch Prime Minister. His first 100 days have been tumultuous, to say the least, with the Cabinet already nearly collapsing once, the coalition party leaders hardly speaking to each other, and his authority regularly coming under pressure.
Schoof was thrown into the deep end right from the start. In his first parliamentary debate, he had to repeatedly stress that his Cabinet was not racist while PVV leader Geert Wilders called him “weak” for not defending the Ministers more.
A few weeks later, the Cabinet nearly collapsed when presenting their budget plans to the coalition party leaders. The VVD and NSC clashed on who should get the biggest purchasing power bump. The argument escalated to the point that NSC leader Pieter Omtzigt said his party wouldn’t support the budget, and VVD leader Dilan Yeşilgöz proposed announcing to the waiting press that the Cabinet had collapsed. Wilders eventually managed to keep things together.
Since then, tensions have been high in the coalition, with party leaders largely giving each other the silent treatment and NSC leader Omtzigt is sick at home. The coalition again clashed over the asylum plans, with the NSC and to a lesser extent VVD promising only conditional support for declaring an asylum crisis using the state emergency law. Wilders and his PVV are holding tight to this plan and he hinted that the government may topple on this point.
Various experts and stakeholders told Nieuwsuur that Schoof is in an extremely difficult position. Despite him often telling the press that he, and not the coalition party leaders, was in charge, practice often proved different. Just yesterday, Schoof told the Senate that he had little choice about declaring an asylum crisis, referring to the coalition agreement and Wilders’ vehemence in holding on to that plan.
“You can shout very loudly that you are the leader, but it also has to be granted to you,” Janka Stoker, a leadership expert at the University of Groningen, told the current affairs program. If the people around you won’t grant you authority, “it becomes very complicated to be the leader.”
