Dutch PM Schoof looks back in exit interview; Many voters sceptical of incoming Cabinet

Dick Schoof himself acknowledges that his Cabinet was not a success. The political chaos stemmed from four party leaders who “weren’t very kind to each other,” he said in a retrospective interview with Trouw. Still, he thinks his Cabinet managed to put in place some scaffolding that future Cabinets can build upon, especially with the asylum policy and support for Ukraine. On Monday, the new Cabinet will be sworn in. Many voters are already skeptical.

“In any case, it’s a shame you can’t finish the job. After 11 months, the PVV pulled the plug. We had quite a few things in motion at that point, but then you become handicapped,” Schoof told Trouw from his office. “I think I really tried to keep the Cabinet together and connect with the four party leaders of the PVV, VVD, NSC, and BBB. There was a coalition program that could have been truly meaningful for the Netherlands. And yes, you feel the responsibility when it didn’t work out. The Cabinet fell.”

“I think it’s a shame because it was an extraordinary Cabinet with special parties, born out of a kind of necessity,” Schoof said, referring to a quarter of voters voting for the far-right populist PVV in the 2023 election. “I felt that voice had to be reflected in the government.”

Schoof felt some trepidation in joining a consultation-based Cabinet with a populist party, which thrives on conflict. But he hoped that the main-line coalition agreement would keep the parties together. But that quickly proved unfeasible when the party leaders started to bicker with each other on social media and turned Schoof into a joke figure, with PVV leader Geert Wilders openly calling him weak in parliament.

“The coalition parties were not very kind to each other. The dynamic between them was stronger than I expected,” Schoof said when asked what caused the chaos in the coalition. “The fault lay mainly in the relationship between the party leaders of the coalition. Things went quite well in the Cabinet.”

The party leaders went their own way, creating a distance from the Cabinet, Schoof said. “I did what I could. But if party leaders - perhaps some more than others - aren’t willing to actively support the Cabinet, then things get complicated.”

Schoof is not thrilled to be going into the history books as a non-partisan Prime Minister of a twice-collapsed Cabinet, a kind of placeholder between Mark Rutte and Rob Jetten. “When that history is written, I hope they’ll see that some things did happen. We don’t know yet how the Jetten Cabinet will fare, but I think there are some parallels between what we did and what is now in the agreement between D66, VVD, and CDA. I see continuity on many issues. Things we couldn’t finish, their Cabinet will continue in a different way.”

“I think we ultimately set a lot in place, but we weren’t able to finish it,” Schoof said. “No, you can’t say it was a successful Cabinet if it falls after 11 months and then falls again. You can’t say it was a success. But that’s different from saying it was powerless and a failure.”

On Monday, King Willem-Alexander will swear in the Jetten I Cabinet, consisting of a coalition of D66, VVD, and CDA. Many voters are already skeptical of this government, which won’t hold a majority in either parliament or the Senate, EenVandaag found in a survey of over 20,000 members of its Opinion Panel.

A third of all voters (32 percent) say that they have confidence in the new government. That’s significantly lower than the 42 percent of voters who had confidence in the Schoof I Cabinet when it took office a year and a half ago. Rob Jetten also starts as Prime Minister with a lower confidence rating (41 percent) than his predecessors Mark Rutte (51 percent) and Dick Schoof (57 percent) did in their first terms.

Voters are mainly worried that it will take the Cabinet a long time to make decisions and get anything done while having to gain support from opposition parties in both parliament and the Senate.