Nature minister Christianne van der Wal and junior asylum minister Eric van der Burg have ruled themselves out of taking up posts in the new right-wing cabinet led by Dick Schoof.
Van der Wal, whose plan to buy out farmers is set to be abandoned by the new government, which includes the farmers’ party BBB, said on Friday that she would spend the next cabinet term in parliament.
“I think that being an MP suits me better in this constellation,” she said ahead of the weekly cabinet meeting. “I’m more someone for making progress and transitions: that’s what gives me energy.”
Both outgoing ministers are likely to be awkward backbenchers for the VVD, one of four parties in the coalition headed by the far-right PVV, which has 24 MPs altogether.
Counterweight
Van der Burg said a “liberal counterweight” from the VVD was needed in parliament in an interview with Amsterdam TV station AT5.
“I don’t feel sufficiently at home with the composition of this coalition,” he said. “I understand it and within the party group I’ve agreed to the new coalition agreement, but I’ve also said that I feel more at home in parliament than in the new cabinet.”
Van der Burg’s chances of staying in government were already slim after he clashed with PVV leader Geert Wilders in April. Van der Burg said during a debate in parliament that the decision not to appoint Wilders as prime minister was an “excellent choice,” triggering a tweet from Wilders calling him a “nasty little man”.
Wilders came under fire at the weekend for tweeting an AI-generated image of a blond white family beneath a message saying: “The sun will shine again in the Netherlands.”
The image had overtones of similar campaigns by far-right parties elsewhere in Europe, such as Alternative für Deutschland’s 2017 poster featuring a pregnant white woman’s belly and the slogan: “New Germans? We’ll make our own.”
AfD was last week ostracised from the far-right ID family in the European parliament following remarks by its leader, Maximilian Krah, that people who served in the SS during the Second World War were not automatically criminals.