Wilders suggests new leader for next round of Cabinet formation talks

Geert Wilders wants SER chairman Kim Putters to be the new “informant” to lead and guide the next round of Cabinet formation talks. The PVV leader says that the PvdA member is prepared to fill this position. The radical-right wing politician proposed a short round of discussions lasting three to four weeks to which all parties are invited. The discussion must explicitly include the form of a possible coalition that the political leaders envision.

It is the second time that Wilders has pushed a member of the left-wing PvdA forward to oversee the formation negotiations. In the previous round, Ronald Plasterk was the informant. Under Plasterk’s guidance, the parties did not talk about what form the coalition would take because that was not parliament’s assignment to Plasterk. Wilders said that the assignment to Plasterk was “perhaps, in retrospect,” not a good one.

Wilders’ push for an “intermediate step” involving all party leaders again has to do with NSC leader Pieter Omtzigt indicating that he does not want to be part of the negotiations. That makes a majority Cabinet with Wilders’ PVV seem more unreachable.

Parties outside the formation talks wanted to know why the negotiations weren’t halted over a month ago when the NSC said it did not want to fully join a Cabinet. Plasterk’s report showed that the NSC indicated on January 10 that the distance to the PVV with regard to the constitution and the rule of law was too great.

“Why did you go around in circles for a month when you knew that the outcome is that the informateur’s assignment could not be carried out,” asked GroenLinks-PvdA leader Frans Timmermans. CDA leader Henri Bontenbal said he “sincerely does not understand” why discussions continued for another month after that. According to D66 leader Rob Jetten, the informant would have been better off sending an interim report to parliament when this happened. Meanwhile, 85 days after the elections, “a lot of time has been wasted,” and nothing has been achieved,” he said.

Wilders said that the NSC accepted the basic line of the constitution. And they couldn’t discuss another way for the NSC to be part of a coalition because that wasn’t in Plasterk’s assignemnet, Wilders said.

The PVV, VVD, NSC, and BBB “could have reached an agreement” during the last round of talks, Wilders said. “If Omtzigt hadn’t left, we would have started the second phase tomorrow,” he said as Omtzigt shook his head.

Wilders said he has gone to great lengths to get his party in talks about a possible coalition - in whatever form - with the VVD, NSC, and BBB. The PVV leader said that at his initiative, the parties finally had talks without Plasterk at the Ministry of Justice. “No party has been as constructive as the PVV,” Wilders said.

He accused Omtzigt of using the state of public finance as an excuse to withdraw from the talks. The NSC “was looking for distance, could not find it in terms of form, and then started to find distance in terms of content,” Wilders said.

Kim Putters

The 50-year-old Putters has chaired the Social and Economic Council, the main government advisor on socio-economic themes, since 2022. He was previously director of the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP) and served for ten years on the Senate on behalf of the PvdA. De Volkskrant called him the most influential Dutchman several times.

As SCP chairman, Putters did a lot of research and wrote about dissatisfaction in the Netherlands. In 2019, he described the “smoldering issues” in society, including things like increasing social inequality, in the book Veenbrand.