Hague Letter: Public discourse has coarsened to undermine democracy and social cohesion

It was one of the memorable moments of the Dutch 2021 election: former UN diplomat Sigrid Kaag led her centrist D66 party to a bullish second place behind Mark Rutte’s Liberals (VVD), elbowing the Christian Democrats and Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party out of her path.

It had a memorable image to go with it too. Overcome by emotion, the normally reserved Kaag, party leader for just six months, climbed on to a table and did a little jig, declaring to the cameras: “This result is proof that Dutch people are not extreme, they are moderate.”

Moderation has since been the hallmark of Kaag’s D66 but the harsh reality is that in an increasingly fragmented and tribal political environment, it has done her no favours at all. Quite the opposite.

Just a couple of weeks ago, when premier Mark Rutte, under pressure from his own party, tabled the tough new immigration proposals that brought the government down, D66 looked somewhere between impotent and irrelevant, decrying his plan as too extreme yet with nothing better to offer.

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As is always the case when coalition governments have outlived their usefulness, Rutte’s partners were starting to behave and sound like the opposition.

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A fortnight on, although the focus has understandably been on Rutte’s departure given his long, high-profile and frequently controversial tenure, he’s not the only one who has quit politics.

Three of the four leaders of the outgoing coalition parties – Rutte; Christian Democrat leader Wopke Hoekstra (47); and most recently Sigrid Kaag – have all thrown in their respective towels. It’s a remarkable attrition rate.

After 17 years as Liberal leader, Rutte could reasonably make the case that his time had come.

And yet there was a sourness to the way it happened in the end. Having said on the day of the collapse that he would willingly lead a fifth consecutive cabinet were the opportunity to arise, he was widely blamed for sparking an unwanted election and 48 hours later he was gone.

In the case of Hoekstra, who became leader of the Christian Democrats in January 2020, it looked as if he were there for the long haul, a realistic competitor for Rutte.

During Covid, however, he became embroiled in a row over an EU reconstruction fund for southern European countries and was forced to apologise when he bemoaned the “inadequate fiscal buffers” of neighbouring nations – as they buried their dead in their hundreds, if not thousands, every day.

It was, said Portuguese prime minister Antonio Costa at the time, a “repulsive” remark.

After a “calamitous” result in regional elections in March, and accusations that he was “deaf” to criticism, Hoekstra vowed to stay on. Then earlier this month, as the parties steadied themselves for a November 22nd general election, he announced he was stepping down for good.

Next to go was Kaag, who’s had perhaps the rudest awakening of the lot in her short tenure at D66.

She’s been persistently targeted by an extraordinary mix of so-called “far right” protesters, a motley bunch who’ve labelled her “a witch” and have held vigils with blazing torches outside her home and at public meetings she attended.

What exactly they wanted remains unclear except, as Rutte said at the time, to “intimidate” a government minister, someone they rightly regarded as a progressive pro-globalisation neoliberal, and keep her looking over her shoulder.

Her daughters said in a television interview last May that they wished she’d do “a different job”.

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Asked about that when she resigned, she responded: “I came back to the Netherlands because I thought I could achieve something worthwhile. Looking back I asked too much of my family. I can’t ask it of them a second time.”

The hounding of Sigrid Kaag is like nothing so much as the hounding the former head of the government’s Covid response team, virologist Prof Jaap van Dissel, who was jeered in the street, spat upon, and accused by being a Satanist and a paedophile – until he finally retired in March.

While these cases are not the same, all do reflect the degeneration of public discourse to the point where public engagement routinely exposes one, it seems, to harassment somewhere on a scale between undesirable and downright frightening.

The groups involved are diverse, perhaps unconnected. Their motivation, however, is clear, as the Dutch security services, like those in other EU countries, have repeatedly warned: the undermining of democratic authority and social cohesion.

One wonders if Sigrid Kaag would voice the same confidence today – as she leaves her political career behind – in the indestructability of Dutch moderation? It must be at best unlikely. It’s hard to blame her.