D66 leader Sigrid Kaag expressed her dissatisfaction with the failure of the attempt to form a cabinet with the left-wing bloc of GroenLinks and PvdA in the annual HJ Schoo lecture. Especially the VVD and its leader Mark Rutte had to suffer.
Without explicitly mentioning him, she strongly criticized the outgoing prime minister. “Leadership to me is the opposite of arranging and rustling without vision.” Rutte said a few years ago that, as far as he is concerned, vision is like the elephant that obstructs the view. He later regretted that statement.
In her speech, Kaag also quoted a top official who asked herself whether the government has achieved anything great in the past twenty years. “As much as he would like to be wrong, he couldn’t come up with anything. Neither did I. How long I think about it,” said Kaag.
Maybe too gullible
In the lecture, which was organized by Elsevier Weekblad (EW), Kaag said tonight that it is “difficult for her to comprehend” that the attempt to form the left has failed. “Sometimes I have the feeling that I am on a different track than my opponents and colleagues in politics.”
“Maybe I was too gullible all along”, Kaag analyzed. “Because although I had not ruled out that we would end up here, I still hoped otherwise. I thought it was serious, working from the content.”
Last summer, VVD and D66 wrote an outline piece that was to form the basis for a coalition agreement. The left-wing parties reacted positively, but VVD and CDA insisted that they did not want to govern with both GroenLinks and the PvdA.
Hague hassle
Potential allies are therefore excluded on non-substantive grounds, according to the D66 leader. “The level of The Hague stuff in this formation is much too high. More time seems to be spent on what is written in the newspaper than the history we want to write ourselves. I don’t feel comfortable with that.”
According to Kaag, it is up to the six parties that have been involved in the formation to come to a joint solution. “A good cabinet in the Dutch tradition is a cabinet that consists of conservative and progressive forces. So a balanced cabinet,” says the D66 leader. According to her, the VVD, as the largest party, has “the responsibility to regain substantive support and political confidence, especially from the left”.
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