Wim Voermans in NRC: ‘The Schoof cabinet is unpredictable, and that’s risky’
With four coalition parties and an unelected Prime Minister, the new Dutch cabinet is unique. This has resulted in an unstable, unprecedented situation, writes Wim Voermans, Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law, in his op-ed for Dutch newspaper NRC.
The formation of the Schoof cabinet was not without its hiccups, and the collaboration since then has not always gone smoothly either. Professor Voermans explains how the cabinet debates led to confrontations between the coalition parties and what this says about the cabinet’s future: ‘Is this first performance by this unusual and laboriously-formed cabinet a sign of things to come? Is this cabinet – due to construction flaws and mutual distrust between coalition partners – unstable and doomed in the short term? Many people have a view on that. After all, we’re a country full of spirited political interpreters. But can you truly predict a cabinet's chances of survival?’
Professor Voermans discusses previous Dutch cabinets that have endured similar situations, and asks what we could learn from them.
He describes the unprecedented situation that the Netherlands finds itself in due to the current cabinet: ‘Since 1918, there has never been a Dutch cabinet whose political leaders all lay down in a trench in the House of Representatives, with a party led by just one person, who, without internal opposition spent 15 years voicing such radical ideas that the other coalition partners demanded that he promise in writing, in advance, that he would adhere to a common baseline for safeguarding the Constitution, fundamental rights and the democratic rule of law.’
All in all, it’s been an unstable start for the new Dutch government, Professor Voermans argues, with insufficient parliamentary history to assess the chances. He adds: ‘But anyone familiar with recent history can sense that the chances of the cabinet’s success aren’t great.’
Read the full article in NRC (in Dutch, €).