Dutch PM meets king after government falls

THE HAGUE – Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte held talks with the king on Saturday after

his coalition government collapsed

in a row over migration, triggering elections later in 2023.

King Willem-Alexander was out of the country on holiday when the government fell. He flew back to the Netherlands to meet Mr Rutte, who is the country’s longest-serving premier and has been in power since 2010.

The 56-year-old Mr Rutte drove himself in a grey station wagon to the royal Huis Ten Bosch Palace in a forest near The Hague, an AFP journalist said. He left about 1½ hours later.

“It was a good discussion but I’m not saying anything else because these discussions are confidential,” Mr Rutte, the leader of the centre-right VVD party, told reporters through the open window of his car as he left.

Mr Rutte is leading a caretaker government until the elections expected in mid-November.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he had called Mr Rutte, whose government has backed Kyiv’s fight against the Russian invasion, including with training for fighter jet pilots.

“I expressed support at a difficult political moment. I thanked (him) for the steadfast principled stand of the Netherlands,” Mr Zelensky said on Twitter.

He added that they had “coordinated positions” ahead of a Nato summit in Vilnius next week.

Europe has faced rising tensions over how to deal with migration, and it was the issue that finally tore apart the Netherlands’ shaky coalition government, Mr Rutte’s fourth.

The four coalition parties fell out over Mr Rutte’s plans to tighten curbs on reuniting families of asylum seekers, in a bid to curb numbers following a scandal in 2022 over overcrowded migration centres.

ChristenUnie – a Christian democratic party that draws its main support from the staunchly Protestant “Bible Belt” in the central Netherlands – and the centre-left D66 party had strongly opposed Mr Rutte’s plan.

Dutch newspapers picked over the carcass of the unstable coalition that took office only in January 2022, after a record 271 days of negotiations.

The Volkskrant daily said the Cabinet “stumbled from the starting blocks and never managed to recover”.

The elections now promise to be some of the most divisive in a generation, with a toxic brew of issues, including migration, angry farmers and the cost of living.

The newest challenge to Mr Rutte’s bid for a fifth term comes from an upstart farmers party that opposes European Union-backed environmental rules, while the Dutch far right remains a threat.

“We can make the Netherlands a beautiful country again with fewer asylum seekers and crime, more money and houses for our own people, decent care, plenty of room for our farmers and fishermen,” anti-Islam leader Geert Wilders tweeted.

The Farmer-Citizen Movement, or BBB, will be seeking to repeat the success of Senate elections that it won earlier in 2023.

Its leader Caroline van der Plas has refused to serve in a coalition with Mr Rutte, and she did not rule out standing for prime minister.

Despite leading them to electoral success for nearly 13 years, Mr Rutte’s bid for an unprecedented fifth term also faces challenges from within the VVD.

If the BBB does well enough in the elections to demand a place in a coalition, Mr Rutte’s VVD could be tempted to ditch him to keep its place at the head of the government.

Mr Rutte himself said there were tensions at the party’s conference in June over migration, adding on Friday that he still had the “energy” for a fifth term but needed to think it over. AFP