Dutch Coalition Faces Pressure as Prime Minister Pursues Stability After Tax Clash

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Prime Minister Rob Jetten held a lengthy crisis meeting on Friday with the senior leaders of his two coalition partners, as he worked to ease rising tensions within the three-party minority government and prevent its collapse less than nine months after it took office.

Later on Friday, Jetten said the coalition partners had agreed to hold further talks in the coming days in an effort to save the administration after a difficult day of debate on Thursday over its tax proposals.

“Good things have happened recently, but there are also things that are not going well, and that affects our relationships with one another,” Jetten said. “That can and must improve — in terms of substance, politics, and on a personal level. This calls for fundamental discussions, which we began today.”

But the strains on the coalition were evident when Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, the leader of the right-wing People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), said later that “as far as we are concerned, the experiment of a minority cabinet has failed. It cannot continue in this way. Adjustments are necessary — and, in theory, such adjustments are possible.”

The episode marks the latest crisis in a fragmented Dutch political landscape that has seen four general elections in a decade and has weakened public confidence in elected officials.

Jetten, the Netherlands’ youngest prime minister, came to power promising to pursue a new era of consensus in parliament, but he has so far struggled to control political infighting among coalition partners and even within his own government.

The already fragile unity within Jetten’s Cabinet was shaken this week when lawmakers from his centrist D66 party and the center-right Christian Democrats (CDA) backed amendments put forward by two center-left opposition parties, PRO and Volt, to push a tax package through parliament in a tight vote late Thursday after a daylong debate.

But the terms of the deal — which PRO leader Jesse Klaver repeatedly described as a “millionaire’s tax” — angered the VVD.

Lawmakers from the VVD opposed the tax plan, and the party’s parliamentary leader, Ruben Brekelmans, said it was “disconcerting” that coalition partners had acted that way.

“I didn’t expect the CDA and D66 to take such a huge turn to the left,” he said. “Bad for our economy, bad for business in the Netherlands, bad for our country.”

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