[D66] Dutch government falls as deaths mount in COVID-19 pandemic | wsws.org

[R.O.]

    Dutch government falls as deaths mount in COVID-19 pandemic


          Alex Lantier <https://www.wsws.org/en/authors/Alex-Lantier>,
          Parwini Zora <https://www.wsws.org/en/authors/Parwini-Zora>


          14 hours ago

On January 15, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced his 
government’s resignation ahead of national elections scheduled for March 
17. He will head a caretaker government until then.

Rutte claimed that his resignation aimed to redress the wrong committed 
in a 2013-2019 welfare scandal, where the Dutch state falsely accused 
26,000 parents of dual-national families of welfare fraud, improperly 
forcing them to pay back tens of thousands of euros in child benefit. 
“With this decision, the government wants to do justice to all those 
parents who have been unprecedentedly wronged,” Rutte said. “The rule of 
law should protect citizens from the all-powerful government, and that 
has gone horribly wrong here.”

The welfare scandal is a state crime: tens of thousands of families, 
selected by Dutch welfare agencies via ethnic profiling of those holding 
Moroccan or Turkish dual citizenship, were financially ruined and 
humiliated. This cold-blooded ethnic selection of citizens to be ruined 
is a disturbing sign of growing fascistic sentiment within the state 
machine, implicating the entire Dutch political establishment. What is 
driving Rutte’s resignation is not, however, a national crisis, let 
alone Rutte’s supposed contrition over his government’s anti-Muslim 
policies.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte (Arno Mikkor/Wikimedia Commons)

Rutte brought down his own government amid mounting anger among workers 
internationally at the ruling elite’s “herd immunity” policies on the 
COVID-19 pandemic, and as Dutch deaths in the pandemic hit 13,000. 
Governments across Europe are tottering after US President Donald Trump 
incited a mob to storm the Capitol in Washington on January 6 in an 
attempted fascist coup. Rutte resigned only a few days after Matteo 
Renzi pulled out of Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s coalition 
government, and Estonia’s government fell over a corruption scandal.

Rutte’s resignation comes as the bourgeoisie internationally debates a 
turn to authoritarian forms of rule, against mass anger building in the 
working class at austerity and “herd immunity” policies.

With the resignation, Rutte aims to weather the storm, win re-election 
and continue his policies, including “herd immunity” and inciting 
anti-Muslim hatred, with as few changes as possible. Above all, the 
resignation aims to perpetuate the political fraud that the Dutch 
bourgeoisie’s policy is liberal and democratic, while it in fact 
continues a murderous, ever more fascistic policy on the pandemic and 
against the rights of the working class—especially of immigrant workers.

Rutte’s demagogic claims he is sorry his government “unprecedentedly 
wronged” immigrants are belied by the political establishment’s defense 
of successive ministers from various parties who oversaw the persecution 
of the child benefit recipients.

Economy Minister Eric Wiebes, from Rutte’s own People’s Party for 
Freedom and Democracy (VVD), resigned. He brazenly said he did not feel 
guilty for ruining welfare recipients: “For a long time, I searched for 
what I could have done differently. I don’t feel guilty, but I do feel 
extremely responsible. I walk around with that, it won’t leave me 
anymore. I have not been able to discover what I could reasonably have 
done differently to prevent this. That only makes it more sad.”

Finance Minister Wopke Hoekstra, now an election candidate of the 
Christian-Democratic Appeal (CDA), shamelessly declared his profound 
sympathy for the parents: “The conversations with the parents touched me 
deeply. Through no fault of their own, they have been brought into 
serious trouble by the government. This cannot and must not happen in 
our rule of law, and we must ensure that it never will happen again.”

As former Social Affairs Minister Lodewijk Asscher resigned as a Labor 
Party (PvdA) candidate in disgrace over the scandal, the PvdA hailed 
him. PvdA chairwoman Nelleke Vedelaar declared, “Lodewijk shows what 
characterizes a real leader: decisiveness, vision and idealism. On 
behalf of the entire party, I would like to thank Lodewijk incredibly 
for his tireless efforts for the party and the future of social democracy.”

As for the Green Left Party and the petty-bourgeois Maoist Socialist 
Party (SP), they are politically implicated by their decision to join 
and promote the toothless special parliamentary committee that 
investigated the scandal in November-December 2020. Green Left 
parliamentarian Tom van der Lee and SP parliamentarian Renske Leijten 
sat on the committee and signed its report. While they titled the report 
“Unprecedented Injustice,” they sent no high-ranking politicians or 
officials to jail. A better title for their report would have been 
“Unprecedented Impunity.”

These parties are now working to promote the state machine and whatever 
illusions can be stimulated that these elections will end state 
corruption and criminality. Green Left Party chairman Jesse Klaver said: 
“The House of Representatives must rectify the mistakes it has made in 
recent years, so that a start can be made on restoring the welfare state 
as quickly as possible.”

The SP, whose leader Lilian Marijnissen hailed the parliamentary 
committee report on the scandal as “very tough,” reacted to Rutte’s 
resignation by issuing a statement titled “Welfare Benefits Scandal: 
It’s not the End, it’s the Beginning.” It wrote, “In part thanks to SP 
parliamentarian Renske Leijten, the benefits scandal was revealed. … We 
are pursuing our fight for a just government.”


In fact, the endless protection of the Rutte government by the Green 
Left Party, the SP and their various political allies has primarily 
benefited Rutte himself. He has been prime minister since 2010, 
including throughout the period when welfare agencies persecuted the 
parents. His relentless inciting of anti-Turkish sentiment in the 2017 
elections—going so far as to order Dutch police to expel visiting 
Turkish officials from the Netherlands—helped incite the xenophobic 
climate in which these abuses occurred.

Nevertheless, despite all the coverage of the welfare benefits scandal, 
Rutte’s VVD leads the polls with between 35 and 43 percent of the vote. 
Second behind the VVD is the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) of Geert 
Wilders at around 25 percent.

More astute sections of the bourgeoisie are speculating that this will 
allow Rutte to win a second term, despite his utterly reactionary 
record. The /Financial Times/ of London wrote: “Ironically, a government 
collapse may end up protecting Mr Rutte by apportioning responsibility 
[for the pension scandal] on all four coalition parties, rather than 
just the prime minister. The Dutch go to the polls on March 17. Should 
Mr Rutte emerge victorious—as polls suggest—the scandal will be yet 
another political pitfall that he has successfully swerved.”

Above all, this scandal reveals that, throughout the pandemic, as Rutte 
refused a lock-down and thousands needlessly died, he had the support of 
virtually the entire political establishment. Apart from neo-fascists 
like Wilders, the rest—especially the cynical middle class parties 
falsely marketed by the media and the ruling elite as the “left”—bent 
over backwards to protect him.

The elections will solve none of the issues facing the working class. 
Not only have all of the principal parties supported “herd immunity” 
policies, but all of them are complicit in the stoking of xenophobic and 
Islamophobic sentiments. The historically unprecedented event of a 
fascist coup being attempted in Washington is a warning as to the 
fascistic forces being strengthened not only by those like Wilders, but 
above all by the policies of the Rutte government and the parties that 
have protected it.

Fighting this requires a turn to the international working class, and 
the building of a movement in the working class across Europe for 
general strike action against “herd immunity” policies, the growing 
danger of fascism, and the capitalist system, based on a socialist 
perspective.

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