Coalition is considering a cabinet with 20 ministers and 10 state secretaries | Inland

In the current plans, the VVD would get eight ministers, there are six posts for D66, the CDA is signed up for four and two people from the CU are on the platform photo. That adds up to a total of twenty ministers, quite a bit more than the sixteen that the Rutte III cabinet started in 2017.

Not only the total number, but also the relationships between the parties shift. In the previous cabinet, VVD had six ministers, D66 and CDA four and CU two. The CDA in particular will therefore lose influence in the Council of Ministers with the new division. That is also in line with the election results: where D66 and CDA still won the same number of seats in 2017, the Democrats (24 seats) have been considerably larger in the House of Representatives since the elections than the Christian Democrats (now 14 seats).

More influence VVD and D66

The VVD and D66 in turn gain more influence in the Trêveszaal and the CU remains well endowed, just as in the current cabinet, if the two ministerial posts are compared to the five seats in parliament. But if the proportions of the election results were kept tight, the VVD would have to get almost seven times as many ministers as CU.

Insiders are still skeptical, the exact distribution can still shift at the end of the negotiations.

Workload

The reservation applies even more strongly to the secretaries of state. It is currently expected that ten of these will come. A division has already been drawn in pencil for this, according to comparable proportions: four for the VVD, three for D66, two for the CDA and one for CU. Incidentally, secretaries of state do not have the right to vote in the Council of Ministers.

The total number of ministers and state secretaries in the current plans is thirty. It is a lot more than the 24 Rutte III once started with. It has to do with the high work pressure in political The Hague, which emerged in the past year. MPs such as Harry van der Molen and Pieter Omtzigt, but also ministers Bas van ‘t Wout and Bruno Bruins, have recently had to take a step back because of fatigue.

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