Outgoing PM Mark Rutte’s VVD (Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie) will not be booted from the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) group after all.
According to Euronews, an observer will be sent out to the offending party instead. That person will be deployed to ascertain whether the VVD is “crossing any red lines in terms of [the group’s] values and liberal principles.”
Supplementing this work of a liberal commissar, guidelines will also be drawn up for ALDE members on how they should deal with rightist parties in a coalition scenario, declared an ALDE spokesman.
According to that same source, it was the VVD that first proposed such a supervisor should pay a visit to its party offices in The Hague, which is to take place before the the next ALDE congress in early October.
ALDE is one of three political forces that make up the centrist Renew Europe group together with the French Renaissance and the European Democrats in the European Parliament (EP).
During May’s run-up to the European elections, debate raged within the ALDE Group regarding a possible expulsion of the Dutch party for having entered into a coalition government with Geert Wilders’ Partij Voor de Vrijheid (PVV) in the Dutch parliament.
In the June elections, Wilders’ party won six seats in the EP and is part of the Identity and Democracy (ID) group, which currently has 58 MEPs.
During the election campaign, Renew chairman Valérie Hayer unilaterally signed a declaration in which the leaders of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), Greens,and Left groups also agreed “never to cooperate nor form a coalition with the far right and radical parties at any level”—an accusation which she subsequently leveled at the VVD.
After the VVD helped reach a Dutch four-way coalition government agreement, Hayer deemed the agreement “the opposite of what we defend in terms of values, the rule of law, the economy, the climate and, of course, Europe”—ignoring the fact that the agreement was an expression of the electorate’s wishes.
Collectively, the four coalition partners received over half the vote in the 2023 Dutch election.
Following Renew’s 21 seat-loss in those elections, a vote on the VVD’s fate had been postponed indefinitely, as the group is currently vying for the position of third-largest parliamentary group with the rightist European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).
The group can hardly afford the further bleeding that would be caused by excluding the VVD—which could explain the middle-way solution of sending in an observer.
Insiders suggest that earlier, there had been talk of a ‘fact-finding mission,’ but this is not to be applied to the VVD.
Recently, when the Czech ANO party chose an increasingly right-wing populist course, Renew ordered such a mission, the findings of which last week led to that party being ejected from the group.
