For now, Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte can still be spotted around The Hague mopping up his own coffee spills, teaching a weekly social studies class at a mostly immigrant high school, or puttering about in his battered Saab (bought in 2009, a year before his premiership began). But this spring he will probably be given a rather more consequential job. The US, UK, France and Germany have backed him to succeed Jens Stoltenberg as Nato’s secretary-general. How would Rutte manage a military alliance that might face simultaneous attacks from Vladimir Putin and a re-elected Donald Trump? I asked some of his Dutch intimates.
Rutte went into politics with almost no interest in foreign affairs. His mentor Ben Verwaayen, longtime chief executive of BT, urged him to join the conference circuit of Munich, Davos and Aspen to learn about the world. Rutte preferred domestic minutiae. But in 14 years as prime minister, he outgrew the daily Dutch negotiations about how to distribute small budget cuts or windfalls across competing interest groups. He now finds the great world more compelling. Still, don’t bother trying to identify his worldview. Rutte likes to quote the late West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt: “Anyone having visions should see a doctor.”
A Dutch premier is a chairman, not a visionary. Rutte’s job was shepherding disparate coalitions towards consensus. He’ll bring this skill to Nato. Notionally centre-right, he in fact has no discernible political beliefs and worked as cheerfully with the left as with far-right leader Geert Wilders. He broke with Wilders only when the latter proved himself an unreliable partner, bringing down Rutte’s first coalition in 2012. Rutte still greets him heartily in The Hague.