Now that Klaas Dijkhoff has announced his departure from politics, there remains one big candidate for the VVD to become party leader: Mark Rutte.
Edith Schippers gone, Halbe Zijlstra gone, Jeanine Hennis gone and soon Klaas Dijkhoff also gone. It is getting quieter in the waiting room of the VVD where heirs to the throne are patiently awaiting their chance. Who should take over from Mark Rutte as leader in the future? With the disappearance of Dijkhoff, the flush in the top of the party becomes thinner and thinner.
Rutte officially decides around December 1 whether he wants to be the party leader again in the upcoming parliamentary elections (March 2021). It was he before in 2010, 2012 and 2017, it turned out to be a guarantee of success. It seems a formality that Rutte will pull the cart again, not only because the waiting area is almost empty.
Research by “Trouw” and I&O Research showed this weekend that the prime minister is loved by right-wing and left-wing voters. Its popularity has soared during the corona crisis. In other words, the Dutch are still not tired of him, despite the fact that he has been in the Torentje for ten years now.
Repack
But history shows that things will end badly with parties that supply the prime minister for so long. It happened to the CDA after the Lubbers and Balkenende periods and the PvdA after the Kok era. In an interview with NRC this Saturday, Klaas Dijkhoff hints at such a scenario for the VVD. He says, “It is a political law of nature that crumbles you, erodes you after such a time. And at the next elections you will be shocked to be thanked for services rendered and you will be allowed to regain yourself with a small club in the Chamber.
During the previous cabinet period, eyes were on Edith Schippers, then the Minister of Health. She seemed like the ideal new party leader, until she left the Binnenhof in 2017 to work at DSM. In the background, Dijkhoff worked at lightning speed on a successful career, replacing the resigned Fred Teeven as State Secretary for Immigration Affairs. He did this creditably and apparently smoothly. He then briefly served as defense minister, before taking on the grueling job of group chairman after the last elections. He seemed cut out to become party leader in 2021.
Penalty bench
Dijkhoff himself never radiated that he would have liked to become the new VVD leader. As group chairman, he has tried to refresh the party’s profile over the past three years, with his “Klaas Stories” and his essay “Liberalism that works for people”. In 2018, he argued that crimes in certain zip code areas should be more severely punished, and it provoked a torrent of criticism. Dijkhoff also had a tough time last year, when he was discredited because he received redundancy pay as a former State Secretary, on top of his salary as a Member of Parliament. “It was not my best months,” he says in NRC. “You have to spend a while on the penalty bench.”
It did not play a part in the consideration of whether he would leave the Chamber. Dijkhoff, he says, already made that choice in 2018 and shared it with Rutte in 2019. Indeed, bystanders have not been able to catch Dijkhoff flirting with the leadership in the last two years, no matter how small. He found it “amusing” to read and watch the outside world speculate about his future. In NRC: “I always thought: let me be the crown prince, so that others don’t have to bear that burden.”
Rutte now has the fine task to prove Dijkhoff’s wrong, that a prime minister can remain successful even after ten years in power. Or Schippers must still return to The Hague to replace Rutte. That would be an even bigger surprise than Dijkhoff’s imminent departure.
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VVD Crown Prince Dijkhoff surprises friend and foe with his departure from politics
It can safely be called a resounding surprise: Klaas Dijkhoff, party chairman of the VVD in the Lower House, will leave politics after the elections in March next year.
