The crisis night of the coalition: Prime Minister Schoof came by but waited for the hallway

Prime Minister Dick Schoof comes to the Ministry of Finance on Tuesday evening around eleven. There, the negotiations for the Spring Memorandum are increasingly difficult, the party leaders of the PVV, VVD, NSC and BBB government parties have been sitting at the table for hours, there is a tense atmosphere. Anyone of the participants asked the prime minister to come is later unclear. In fact: whether anyone has asked him. One of the negotiators later thinks he was sure that it was his own idea. « He wanted to come after the state banquet. »

Of course I have a role, isn’t that very clear?

Schoof had the Sultan of Oman on Tuesday. There was a ceremony on Dam Square, and in the Palace on Dam Square a dinner with the king and the crown princess. And now, at the end of the long day, he is in the hallway in the Ministry of Finance. He is not sitting at the table with the others. In the breaks he will be added, it is striking that he mainly talks to VVD leader Dilan Yesilgöz. Some negotiators think that it can be useful that Schoof joins the NSC people who sometimes consult in a separate room. It runs high there. There is contact with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Social Affairs Eddy van Hijum of NSC: who has announced that he « cannot » « bear » that the duration of the unemployment benefit is shortened without mitigating circumstances. He demands money for that. PVV, VVD and BBB see that as ‘negotiating’, as NSC often does: the shortening of the unemployment benefit is in the outline agreement of the four parties.

Finance Minister Eelco Heinen of the VVD in the corridor are frustration about how things go. He’s done with it, he says

It seems like a serious crisis-in-the-made, and there is now. But the moment he has to calm down NSC does not come, he doesn’t have to go into the room. All the time it remains uncertain whether his cabinet survives this night: Minister of Finance Eelco Heinen of the VVD in the corridor are frustration about how it goes. He is done with it, he says deep into the night, it is no longer necessary from him.

Getting used to crisis

It is the umpteenth near-crisis in the difficult collaboration of PVV, VVD, NSC and BBB. Pollings show time and time again that the trust of voters in the Cabinet SCHOOF is decreasing rapidly. But it seems to get used to indoors. It is about the unemployment benefit for hours because NSC wants to, and also hours, also because NSC wants to, about ‘Octas’. But what is that about? Caroline van der Plas from BBB sends pictures from an Octopus to Geert Wilders. The others see that VVD member Aukje de Vries, who has come up with Yesilgöz as a financial expert, writes down ‘Octaz’.

It appears, it turns out, about the reform of the disability benefit WIA, which will cost a lot of money. For NSC leader Pieter Omtzigt, that has been a large, principle point for a long time. It almost led to a cabinet crisis in August last year. The other parties do not understand why NSC, which is stated in a loss of eighteen seats in the polls, that it plays out in this way. How many voters, says a negotiator later, do they think they can convince that? The PVV has selected the expensive messages as the subject, BBB De Boeren and the accessibility of the regions, the VVD defense.

To disguise

But how they also do their best the next morning to tell what they have achieved, it is soon also news that there is a lot to argue with. BBB receives the Lower Saxony Line, which connects Groningen with Enschede, but it is paid with money from the Lelylijn, which is therefore not coming for the time being. The VVD receives 1.1 billion for defense. That seems a lot, but it does not yet lead to the NATO standard that the VVD wants: 3.5 percent of GDP. The VVD also agreed to a higher income tax and an increase in the housing allowance for people with a low income of which Wilders has made a ‘shopping bonus’. The VVD summit will not be happy to have read the editorial comments in the newspaper of their supporters, De Telegraafwho blames the coalition: reducing the difference between the highest and the lowest incomes, of which many VVD people need nothing.

Relief, survived again

Just as after earlier near-crises of this coalition, there is mainly relief at the parties that they have survived again. In full awareness that it can go wrong again next week. Mutually, the VVD is mainly looked at, the only coalition party that rises in the polls, and which seemed not to be in the mood for this collaboration from the start. When will the moment that the VVD people think that the time came to get out? There is also unrest about the PVV, which loses in the polls. By RTL News–panel Wilders also loses his own supporters in Hém as a leader. What does that do with Wilders? The others have no idea. It is certain: he is unpredictable.

And how do voters see the Schoof cabinet after this week? The ministers had in their meeting on Thursday nothing more to say About the agreement in which the party leaders of PVV, VVD, NSC and BBB had come along after a political-historically long negotiation. As if not the cabinet members, but the party leaders are driving the country.

In his press conference on Thursday, Dick Schoof says that he thought at night and the following morning: « This will be very complicated. » What had his role been as a partyless prime minister? That is what Schoof thinks a strange question. « Of course I have a role, that may be obvious? Although that does not mean that I have been there all the time. »

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