THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten held an hours-long crisis meeting Friday with the senior leaders of his two coalition partners, as he sought to ease open acrimony in the three-party minority administration and stave off its collapse less than nine months into its four-year term.
Late Friday, Jetten said the coalition partners had agreed to further talks in the coming days in a bid to salvage the administration after a bruising debate Thursday over its tax plans.
“Good things have happened recently, but there are also things that are not going well, and that affects our relationships with one another,” he said. “That can and must improve — in terms of substance, politics, and on a personal level. This calls for fundamental discussions, which we began today.”
But in a sign of the tensions straining the coalition, the leader of the right-wing People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, said minutes later that “as far as we are concerned, the experiment of a minority cabinet has failed. It cannot continue in this way. Adjustments are necessary—and, in theory, such adjustments are possible.”
It is the latest crisis in a splintered political landscape in the Netherlands that has seen four general elections in a decade and eroded public trust in the nation’s lawmakers.
Jetten, the Netherlands’ youngest premier, took office pledging to seek a new era of consensus among parties in the Dutch parliament, but has so far struggled to rein in political infighting among parties in the legislature and even in his own coalition.
The already fragile unity in Jetten’s Cabinet took a hit this week when lawmakers from his centrist D66 party and the center-right Christian Democrats (CDA) agreed to amendments proposed by two center-left opposition parties — PRO and Volt — to push a tax package through the Dutch parliament in a tight vote Thursday night after a daylong debate.
But the terms of the deal — PRO’s leader Jesse Klaver repeatedly called part of the agreement a “millionaire’s tax” — enraged the VVD.
Lawmakers from the VVD voted against the tax plan and the party’s parliamentary leader, Ruben Brekelmans, told reporters that it was “disconcerting” how coalition partners had acted.
“I didn’t expect the CDA and D66 to take such a huge turn to the left,” he said. “Bad for our economy, bad for business in the Netherlands, bad for our country.”
