With a finely tuned instinct for minor flare-ups with the potential to snowball into full-scale national political rows, one of Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte’s trademark stratagems is to defuse confrontations by using his office to apologise for the failings of the state.
It is a popular approach with the electorate. In a world in which most crises have multiple interlocking drivers and often appear intractable, it’s reassuring to have someone to shoulder the blame when big stuff goes wrong – people willing, as Judge Judy used to put it, to “suck it up”.
Rutte – now at the head of his fourth consecutive coalition – has sucked up more than his fair share.
In recent memory, he’s apologised to those wrongly targeted in the child benefits scandal that brought down his last government, only, ironically, to see the same four parties returned to power a few months later.
He apologised during the summer to the UN peacekeepers of Dutchbat III for the unspeakable trauma of Srebrenica and the opprobrium they endured unfairly afterwards for allegedly failing to defend the enclave against more numerous and heavily armed Bosnian Serbs.
He apologised on behalf of the royals – for whom he is, for better or first worse, the political point man – when they were childishly less than honest about their adherence to social distancing and travel regulations during the coronavirus pandemic.
Most recently, he apologised for the accommodation crisis at the main refugee reception centre at Ter Apel, in the north of the country, where conditions have been decried as “inhumane” and “primitive” by the Red Cross, by Medecins Sans Frontieres, and even by the children’s ombudsman.
Rutte’s visit to Ter Apel was prompted by the death in August of a three-month-old baby living there in a less-than-sanitary sports hall used as a makeshift shelter for newcomers with nowhere else to sleep. Hundreds were already crowding the grass verges outside.
The prime minister admitted he was “ashamed” of conditions at Ter Apel. They were due, he said, to what he accepted was a chronic lack of permanent refugee accommodation across the Netherlands – compounded by a national housing shortage that his current government has pledged to tackle.
Accepting the blame, if not specifically using the word “apologise”, he also warned, however, in a concession that drew far less attention from the media, that the scale of the problem was not something that could be reversed in a matter of weeks “or even months”.
Rutte’s apology might – with a fair political wind and some rapid improvements to facilities at Ter Apel with the help of the army – have been the end of the crisis. But what followed instead was recrimination.
Junior justice minister, Eric van der Burg, blamed the country’s local authorities for the chronic overcrowding, revealing that the vast majority – 194 out of 345 – had not earmarked any long-term accommodation for refugees for more than a decade.
Just three of the country’s richest 25 authorities had made any provision at all – while all 25 of the poorest authorities had made some temporary provision at least.
As a result, refugees arriving at Ter Apel effectively had nowhere to go – a problem that should have been tackled as soon as that bottleneck became apparent. But it wasn’t. It was too embarrassing.
What all this illustrates, of course, is that the refugee accommodation crisis in the Netherlands is about nothing more exceptional than plain old-fashioned Nimbyism – an affliction of most western European countries with affluent and ageing populations.
Everyone is sympathetic to the plight of those fleeing with nothing from war zones until the question is raised as to where they should settle and the answer comes back in the form of a deafening silence: not in my backyard.
The problem for the Dutch is that they can’t have it every way. Nor should they. The government says that unless local authorities relent it will legislate and force them to do so. Perhaps as soon as this week.
If the government does attempt to bulldoze change through – perhaps with the unsavoury aid of financial inducements – it will probably cause the very political storm Rutte was hoping to prevent when he apologised in Ter Apel this summer.
And a good thing too. Rutte’s brief may be to keep a lid on political controversy, but it’s unhealthy for Dutch democracy if that means failing to thoroughly debate what’s already become a national scandal in need of a full and uncomfortably honest airing.