En leaving the office he had occupied for almost fourteen years, the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte pleaded, in July 2024, for the“Excellent Dutch tradition of consultation and intelligent compromises”. Did he believe in it when it had taken more than seven months for four parties, including his, managed to agree on a government program largely inspired by the Party for Liberty (PVV), the formation of the far-right leader Geert Wilders, winner of the November 2023 elections? From 2010 to 2012, Mr. Rutte had briefly tried to govern with the external support of the populist and xenophobic leader. He had concluded that all alliance with him would now be impossible.
However, it was the same Mark Rutte who, in July 2023, was going to prepare the field for the victory of the PVV. Decreeing a limitation of family reunification for refugees, the liberal leader precipitated the fall of his last coalition and at the same time legitimized Mr. Wilders' speech on the “Asylum tsunami”. Other conservative leaders then went further, including Dilan Yesilgöz, who had succeeded Mr. Rutte at the head of the Liberal Party. Taking up the rhetoric of PVV on migration, she also declared that in her eyes this formation was frequentable. Enough to cause the flight to the far right of 20 % of its voters, suddenly uninhibited.
Naive, unconscious or blind, those responsible for the farmer-citizen movement and the new social contract party, PVV partners in the coalition laboriously set up on July 2, 2024, also estimated that they were obliged to negotiate with the far-right party because it had gathered 23.5 % of the voters in the legislative elections of 2023. harmful to greenhouse gases and the size of farms; The latter were tabling on a reform of the country's governance.
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Source: Lemonde