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Dutch opposition parties filed a no-confidence motion against Acting Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Thursday, accusing him of lying in public about what he had discussed in private during cabinet-building talks, posing the greatest challenge to his leadership. in a decade.
utte was the clear winner of the March 17 parliamentary elections that were seen as a referendum on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Losing a vote of confidence would force Rutte to submit his resignation to King Willem-Alexander, constitutional law professor Joop van den Berg told the Financieele Dagblad newspaper.
It would also ruin the negotiations on forming a coalition.
It was unclear whether the centrist parties of Rutte’s previous coalition, which will likely participate in any new coalition, would support him. It seems likely that a debate on the situation will drag on until the early hours of Friday.
The crisis emerged on Thursday after Rutte acknowledged having privately discussed what job should go to a prominent member of parliament who had been critical of his previous cabinet. Rutte had previously said that he did not.
“All I can do here is say from the bottom of my heart, from my toes, say what happened, what went right, what went wrong, that I never lied,” Rutte said in parliament on Thursday. .
Rutte, a 54-year-old conservative who has been in office for more than 10 years, pointed to his track record and said he looked forward to continuing to lead the country.
Talks about forming a new government were abruptly suspended on March 25 when one of the top negotiators unknowingly revealed a sensitive document to a news photographer as he was leaving parliament after learning that he had tested positive for the coronavirus. .
The document showed that negotiators were discussing a position “elsewhere” by popular MP Pieter Omtzigt, a prominent critic of Rutte’s previous cabinet, although Omtzigt’s Christian Democrats were part of the ruling coalition. The cryptic comment has been interpreted to imply outside of Parliament or outside of the Netherlands.
Rutte told reporters on March 25 that he was not the one who brought up Omtzigt’s position.
‘HE LIED TO THE WHOLE COUNTRY’
In Parliament on Thursday, Rutte told skeptical lawmakers that he had forgotten to mention a cabinet position for Omtzigt in a private conversation. He said he had not hinted at a position “elsewhere” during the Cabinet talks, which he said meant he had not technically said anything false.
Opposition lawmaker Geert Wilders, who filed the no-confidence motion, said Rutte had “lied to the whole country.” “Find a job elsewhere yourself,” Wilders said. “We cannot go any further with this prime minister.”
Omtzigt, who was sworn in as a member of parliament on Wednesday, said the implication that he should be removed was “an affront to the Dutch voter.”
He demanded full transparency about how his name had appeared in the document.
Rutte’s conservative VVD party convincingly won last month’s national elections, despite the fact that his government resigned in January over a scandal in which thousands of families were wrongly accused of child care fraud over the years, a often for ethnic reasons.
Omtzigt had persistently asked questions about the matter until it was made public.
In his defense, Rutte appealed to his record on Thursday.
“I led the country through an economic crisis, an immigration crisis and a very serious health crisis, a pandemic, and I really want to work on the recovery of this country,” he said.
The Omtzigt case was not the first time Rutte has blamed a poor memory for making false statements in public.
By saying he did not have “an active memory” of crucial details, he survived a series of heated debates in recent years, on issues ranging from Iraqi civilians killed in Dutch bombings to a corporate lobby to eliminate a dividend tax.
Reuters
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