The national ombudsman in the Netherlands has issued a stinging new year’s critique of the 12-month-old coalition led by prime minister Mark Rutte, warning that multiple high-profile failures are “diminishing public trust in the apparatus of government”.
The coalition, sworn in on January 10th, 2022, is the fourth consecutive administration led by Mr Rutte and comprises the same four parties – his own Liberals, the Christian Democrats, centre-left D66 and Christian Union – forced to resign in January 2021 after a nationwide childcare scandal.
Having apologised publicly for that scandal in which more than 26,000 families were wrongly accused and pursued for fraudulently claiming child benefit payments, Mr Rutte promised “a new political culture” – a promise at which the ombudsman, Reinier van Zutphen, took direct aim.
In an interview with the daily newspaper, De Telegraf, on Tuesday, Mr Van Zutphen declared: “When you believe action will be taken and a year later nothing has happened, and then you hear the same thing all over again, you realise there’s little to see when it comes to the new political culture.”
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Usually, the job of the ombudsman is to investigate complaints about state institutions lodged by members of the public, but in this interview he focused on the institutions’ political masters – criticising both individual ministers and the government jointly for failing to meet expectations.
“What we’ve seen are ministers making the same mistakes over and again: failing to bring the public on side by being honest with them, and not living up to their promises,” said Mr Van Zutphen, a lawyer by training.
In particular, he remains critical of the government’s failure to resolve the social and economic fallout from the childcare scandal; its failure to deal with compensation after the Limburg flooding disaster on the German border in summer 2021; and the long-running row over earthquake damage allegedly caused by gas extraction in Groningen, to the north.
“In Limburg, 18 months after the floods, people are still waiting for compensation,” said Mr Van Zutphen, who reports directly to parliament.
“In a wealthy country like ours, you expect things to be generally well organised. You would expect this issue to have been dealt with. And the government knows what has to be done to resolve it, that’s the worst thing of all.”
The misgivings outlined by Mr Van Zutphen echo a report at the end of last summer by the government’s sociocultural think tank, the SCP, which also criticised the refugee accommodation crisis at Ter Apel, where a three-month-old infant died, an issue outside Mr Van Zutphen’s remit.
Increasingly, he said, however, “people are experiencing government as something on the opposite side of the table when it should be sitting next to them. This is a damaging development.”
