The financial backdrop to the investiture worsened considerably last week when the national statistics office issued surprise figures showing last October’s deal – aimed at bringing the Dutch budget deficit within the Eurozone limit of three percent of GDP – would still leave a deficit of 3.4 per cent or more.
The figures came as an embarrassment for the Liberal-Labour coalition government, not yet six months old, which was put together on the basis of agreeing a “balanced” package of healthcare and welfare cuts which would restart the economy without disproportionately hurting the less well-off.
Far from providing the “stability” mentioned by Queen Beatrix as she announced her abdication, the figures have led to emergency meetings of the main political parties and the social partners aimed at reaching what the prime minister, Mark Rutte, said he hoped could still be “a broad agreement”.
However, it is Mr Rutte’s junior coalition partner, Labour leader Diederik Samsom, who is likely to be most directly in the political firing line despite calling for a united “Orange agreement” on the cuts – widely regarded as a slightly ill-conceived effort to catch the nationalistic mood of celebration for the new monarch.
Having argued in the run-up to last September’s general election that a budget deficit limit of 3 per cent “should not be written in stone”, Mr Samsom finds himself proposing a second round of cuts to meet that very target – including significant reductions in unemployment benefit strenuously opposed by the unions who normally support him.
In such a straitened climate, there’s even concern as to how the €7 million for April 30th’s royal celebrations will be raised.
Mayor of Amsterdam Eberhard van der Laan has asked central government for a significant contribution – while the government says it in turn will ask employers’ and farmers’ organisations and the national lottery to stump up to toast the first king since 1890.
