Dear reader,
In the same week as the attack on the Capitol Building, it’s not surprising if you didn’t hear the news that the Dutch government has fallen.
This isn’t nearly as dramatic as it sounds, or nearly as dramatic as the events at the Capitol.
So what does it mean?
As a matter of fact, almost nothing has changed. Prime Minister Mark Rutte is still the Prime Minister. The government is still operating. It’s a lame duck government, but still has the ability to carry out the usual day-to-day business.
They won’t, on the other hand, be able to push through any new legislation. There are no executive orders in this system, and no such thing as prime ministerial pardons, so no last-minute drama.
While the media here in the Netherlands has devoted a lot of time to the scandal that brought the government down – but not really down, or not just yet – there is no fear or panic. Governments in this parliamentary democracy can fall remarkably easily, and it’s not the end of our democracy. It just means holding a new election.
So what do the Dutch mean when they say their government has fallen? Generally this happens after a) a leader resigns, as Mark Rutte (and his cabinet) did last week or b) after a no-confidence vote.
Elections are due to be held in March anyway, so the current government will stay in place until then as a “caretaker” government.
In other words, nothing has changed.
I won’t get into the whole political system today; I’ll do that closer to election day.
You might be interested, for now, in the scandal that led to Rutte’s resignation.
The scandal that brought down the government
It all has to do with the kinderopvangtoeslag (a subsidy that helps pay for child care). When parents first receive this subsidy – with low-income parents receiving the most – it is paid without a system of checking the validity of the request. Any checking happens after the fact, which leaves the system open to fraud.
This is exactly what happened about 10 years ago: several childcare facilities committed fraud, followed by a case of large-scale fraud by a Bulgarian gang. They invented families using fake addresses and applied for kinderopvangtoeslag, then absconded back to Bulgaria when the fraud came to light. These incidents led to a new effort in the tax service (the equivalent of the IRS) to catch people committing fraud with the kinderopvangtoeslag.
The result, over the next several years, was that over 12,000 families – the true number is not yet clear and it could be over 20,000 – were accused of fraud: that they collected kinderopvangtoeslag that they weren’t entitled to. Often this was due to an overly-strict application of the rules: parents who made a mistake on a form suddenly found themselves accused of a crime.
Somehow it’s not surprising either that many of these accused parents have a migration background: in other words, they are what would be called people of color in the US.
Once they had been accused, the tax service not only stopped the payments, but also demanded that they pay back everything that they had received over a period of years, sometimes many thousands of euros, even when they could prove that the money was correctly used to pay for childcare. Parents had little recourse: the tax service dismissed their complaints, forcing them to try to prove their innocence instead of the tax service having to prove the parents’ guilt. The bureaucratic maze they had to navigate was too much for most of the affected parents: there was never a clear procedure to follow to prove their innocence. Papers got misfiled. It was a mess.
For years the affected parents dealt with the stress of this sudden debt. They couldn’t take out loans because they had supposedly committed fraud. They couldn’t qualify to pay the debt back in installments, because they were stamped as fraudsters. Marriages and relationships ended, families lost their homes and/or jobs. Even some suicides were reported.
Functionaries in the tax service did complain to the Ministry of Finance, asking for the rules to be softened and the penalties to be reduced. If a parent didn’t have the receipt to show they paid their own part of the childcare costs or forgot to sign a form, for example, why should the entire subsidy be withdrawn? The complaints were ignored, misunderstood, or simply filed and forgotten. The tax service stonewalled requests for information from politicians, and their poor record-keeping systemmade information hard to access anyway. The victims were not allowed to see their own records and were never told what mistake they had made that led to being accused of fraud.
The situation didn’t really hit the media – and Parliament – until 2017. Still it took two more years for the machinery of government to admit the extent to which the system had failed, which happened after a commission was formed to investigate the situation and reported its results in late 2020. Evidence came out of much earlier warnings about mishandled cases and memos pointing out how these failings were systemic rather than incidental.
This week, Mark Rutte and his whole cabinet resigned, taking responsibility for the scandal. His party, the VVD, was responsible for pushing the legislation through that made this possible in the first place, and it allowed it to go on for too long.
All affected parents will receive their money back and also an extra cash sum of at least €30,000.
It’s not clear if the resignation of Rutte and the cabinet means that they’re actually going to be gone. Rutte’s party could still get the most votes in the election and be the party that leads whatever coalition forms the new government. Rutte is still the VVD’s lijsttrekker (the first name on the party’s list of nominees) for the election in March, which means if they get the most votes, he will still be Prime Minister. It remains to be seen how much this scandal has damaged him; he may need to withdraw from the VVD list.
While business goes on as usual until the election, a full resolution to the problem with the tax service will have to wait. It’ll be up to the new government to decide on any changes to the law that might prevent this from happening again, while still being able to catch actual fraud. And final restitutions to the families involved will still need to be sorted out.
So the government’s fall doesn’t lead to drama in the Netherlands. Life goes on as usual, as much as that is possible during a tightening lockdown.
In the meantime, the Dutch watch the much more dramatic events in the US with fascination.
Met vriendelijke groeten,
Rachel
P.S. I write about independent travel at Rachel’s Ruminations. Please join me there!