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Dutch Talks on Forming Coalition Government Collapse
The Dutch Liberal Party and the Christian Democratic Alliance failed to agree on forming a coalition with the support of the anti-Islam Freedom Party, leaving the Netherlands without a new government almost three months after elections.
Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders told a news conference in The Hague today, broadcast on national television, that his group had lost confidence in the ability of the CDA to form a stable administration. Three Christian Democrat lawmakers said this week they wanted to break off talks.
“The trust of the Freedom Party in the Christian Democrats has recently declined to a low point,” Wilders said. “We didn’t cause this mess. We are a stable party.”
The collapse ends a third attempt to form a coalition headed by the Liberal Party, which won the June 9 elections. It leaves the Liberals with limited options to establish a government that would have a majority in parliament; the most straightforward would be to team up with the Christian Democrats and the Labor Party, which placed second in the elections.
“This has taken much too long already. Therefore I think the next step should be that I myself write a coalition agreement,” Liberal Party leader Mark Rutte told reporters. “Then you need to see which parties see sufficient ground on the basis of that agreement to start negotiations.”
Lubbers Intervention
The talks began to break down after three-time Christian Democrat Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers, who initially brokered the discussions, announced he was opposed to cooperation with Wilders, saying he was concerned about freedom of religion. The Christian Democrats held crisis talks this week to try to find a common position to continue talks.
The Christian Democrats’ parliamentary leader, Maxime Verhagen, told reporters he was “convinced” that all 21 Christian Democrat members of parliament would have supported any coalition that had come out of the talks. “I was unable to restore Wilders’s confidence, but there was nothing more he could ask me to do,” Verhagen said.
Rutte’s Liberals won 31 seats in the 150-seat parliament in June, making them the largest party, after pledging to balance the budget within four years. The election ended the rule of Christian Democrat Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, whose party’s support was cut in half to 21 seats. The Freedom Party more than doubled its representation to 24 lawmakers while Labor dropped to 30 seats.
“Now the broad, national coalition of Liberals, Christian Democrats and Labor comes into the picture,” said Kees Aarts, a professor of political science at the University of Twente in Enschede. “This is unattractive for the Liberals and Labor as they’d face competition in parliament from the Freedom Party and Socialist Party. Only the Christian Democrats would profit from their position in the center.”
In the Netherlands’ southern neighbor, Belgium, talks on forming a coalition government also collapsed today. Parties have also been negotiating there since elections in June.
-- With assistance from Maud van Gaal, Jeroen Molenaar, John Buckley and Fred Pals in Amsterdam. Editors: Eddie Buckle, Andrew Atkinson.
To contact the reporters on this story: Martijn van der Starre in Amsterdam at vanderstarre@bloomberg.net; Jurjen van de Pol in Amsterdam at jvandepol@bloomberg.net.
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