The grumbling in the VVD about Rutte is increasing

It comes a bit like mustard after dinner, but the VVD board thinks – at least formally – that the wrong candidates were sent to the House of Representatives on March 17. During a digital party meeting yesterday, the board embraced a motion that called for selecting mainly on ‘critical power’ in the future. At the moment, the liberal group mainly consists of politicians who have been put up for election because of their ‘Hague background’, according to the authors of the motion. In other words: there are too many pumpjacks in it, who slavishly run after party leader Mark Rutte, that is how I interpret the somewhat woolly text.

Naturally, party chairman Christianne van der Wal spoke invocative words after she had adopted the motion. She called the current parliamentary party ‘a nice mix’, admitting between the lines that the VVD squadron in the House has a lot of members who have previously been parliamentary assistant, political assistant or departmental official. She is also in favor of the fact that the group consists of MPs who ‘show guts’. The next elections will be in four years’ time, she must have thought. Who then lives, then cares.

Yet there is reason for Rutte to be concerned. The call to select more critical MPs did not come completely out of the blue. More and more liberal leaders are becoming annoyed with the state of affairs within their party. Everything revolves around Rutte. If he ‘gets under the tram’, the VVD will be over, said former MP Ton Elias in the Volkskrant on Saturday. And that is by no means an exaggeration. Nobody, absolutely nobody, would be able to succeed Rutte at the moment. Edith Schippers, Halbe Zijlstra and Klaas Dijkhoff were previously considered possible candidates, but they all dropped out. Zijlstra had to leave after he, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, was caught lying about a stay in Putin’s dacha. But you can suspect that Schippers and Dijkhoff have said goodbye to politics because they did not want to wait forever for Rutte’s farewell.

Should the VVD select candidates in the next elections who are not by definition favorable to Rutte, the position of the hitherto undisputed number 1 could nevertheless be at stake. And that moment could be well before 2025. Maybe even before Rutte IV can be installed. Because the cabinet formation – despite all the fine talk of informateur Mariëtte Hamer – is going very slowly. And that is not only because PvdA and GroenLinks need so much time to accept Rutte as prime minister. Within the VVD (also the CDA, by the way) there is increasing resistance to the idea of ​​governing with these left-wing parties. Not the left has won the elections, but the right, say these opponents. A statement that cannot be disputed.

Rutte wisely does not yet take a position in this discussion. But he can’t keep doing that. He will eventually have to make a choice. And if there is nothing else for it, he will probably agree with PvdA and GroenLinks as coalition partner, because in his eyes Rutte IV must come anyway. But in the meantime there will be more and more grumbling about him in the VVD. It is that they have no alternative for him, because otherwise…

–

–