He was the great survivor of Dutch politics, a man whose capacity to swerve criticism and survive scandal earned him the nickname “Teflon Mark”, combining backroom skills with everyman appeal to become the country’s longest-serving leader.
But Mark Rutte came unstuck on Monday, telling shocked MPs and reporters in The Hague he would not be standing in the next elections after his divided coalition government collapsed on Friday over asylum policy.
The decision brings to an end the 56-year-old’s 17-year tenure as leader of the liberal-conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and 13 years as prime minister of the Netherlands at the head of four different governments.
“I do this with mixed feelings, with emotion,” he said. “But it feels right.”
As the EU’s longest-serving government leader after Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, his name has been floated for international jobs, including at Nato and the European Council.
In characteristically low-key style, however, Rutte said he harboured no such ambitions. For several years now, he has taught social studies once a week at a high school in The Hague. “Maybe I’ll do it a couple of times a week,” he said.
Analysts have long said Rutte had three key assets: first, he was a skilful, savvy operator with a talent for building and maintaining unlikely alliances – so much so that his critics felt he was always more interested in power than principles.
He has never found it hard, for example, to pander to the far right on issues such as immigration, “Dutch values” and integration, forming his first coalition in 2010 with the backing of the firebrand anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders.
In Europe, too, his leadership of the “frugals” opposed to EU bailouts drew fury from member states in the south, who called him “Mr No”. But he managed ultimately to find common cause with Germany and France on most issues.
Rutte’s second major asset was his image as “Mr Normal”. Only rarely was he out of step with the views of his voters, seeming at times to pick up shifts in public opinion even before they occurred (as an example, he initially supported, then condemned, the Netherlands’ “Zwarte Piet” blackface tradition).
He still lives in the same part of The Hague where he grew up, in a house he bought with friends as a student, he bikes to work – except if he is in a hurry, when he drives a battered Saab – and goes on holiday with the same people.
In short, Rutte projects the kind of down-to-earth, no-nonsense, cautious image the Dutch adore: he once said that owing too much to a bank would keep him awake, and on another occasion refused to let cleaners mop up his coffee after he spilt it in parliament, insisting on doing it himself.
The youngest of seven children, his father Izaak’s first wife died in a Japanese internment camp in Indonesia. The family fled the former colony and started again from scratch in The Hague, with Izaak eventually marrying his late wife’s sister, Rutte’s mother.
Rutte’s older brother died of Aids, which he has said made him realise “you only get one chance at life”.
Rutte worked for Unilever before becoming junior social affairs minister in 2002, VVD party leader in 2006, and prime minister four years later.
Perhaps the outgoing Dutch prime minister’s biggest advantage was that nothing ever seemed to stick to him. Even in 2021, when his coalition resigned over a scandal in which 20,000 families, many from minority ethnic backgrounds, were wrongly accused of childcare subsidy fraud, he bounced back, with the VVD increasing its seat tally at the next election.
He also narrowly survived a no-confidence vote, as well as a parliamentary motion censuring his behaviour and accusing him of undermining public trust and “not speaking the truth” during particularly fraught coalition negotiations that year.
Rutte ultimately ran out of road, however, over his demands for a limit on family reunifications for asylum seekers, a move bitterly opposed by his coalition partners ChristenUnie, a Christian democratic party, and the centre-left Democracy 66.
A managerial rather than a visionary leader – his favourite quote is reportedly one of the former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s: “People with visions should see a doctor” – his longstanding policy of meeveren, altijd meeveren (go with the flow, always go with the flow) – finally failed him.
