The Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, has announced the resignation of the country’s entire government, accepting responsibility for years of mismanagement of childcare subsidies, which wrongfully pushed thousands of families to financial ruin.
Mr Rutte, who leads the conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy as part of a four-party ruling coalition, stepped down following a cabinet meeting.
In a statement, Mr Rutte said, “We are of one mind that if the whole system has failed, we all must take responsibility, and that has led to the conclusion that I have just offered the king, the resignation of the entire Cabinet.”
He added that he would continue to work to compensate affected parents.
The other parties in the Netherlands’ leadership had called for Mr Rutte to go, after a parliamentary inquiry last month found that officials at the tax service had wrongly accused families of fraud.
The report found that around 10,000 families had been made to repay tens of thousands of euros of subsidies after being wrongly accused of fraud. This in some cases lead to unemployment, bankruptcies and divorces, in what has been termed a decade of “unprecedented injustice”.
According to the tax office, many of the families were targeted for the subsidies based on their ethnic origin or dual nationalities.
Orlando Kadir, a lawyer for around 600 families in a lawsuit against politicians, also said people had been targeted “as a result of ethnic profiling by bureaucrats who picked out their foreign-looking names”.
Janet Ramesar, a parent who was waiting for the news of Mr Rutte’s resignation, said, “It’s important for me because it is the government acknowledging, ‘we have made a mistake and we are taking responsibility,’ because it’s quite something what happened to us.”
Earlier this month, the Public Prosecution Service revealed in a statement that after analyzing the case, it found “no criminal suspicion” of civil servants wrongfully claiming public funds or discriminating.
It added that because the tax office is part of the state apparatus of government, it’s immune from prosecution.
“Responsibility for culpable acts attributable to the state must be sought in the political domain and not in criminal law,” the prosecution service said in the statement.
Parliamentary elections are due to be held on 17 March, with the current government expected to stay on until then in a caretaker role.
Mr Rutte is expected to lead his party to the polls, with polling suggesting it will win the most seats and in the driving position to form the next coalition.
His party is projected to take just under 30% of the vote, more double of what the second placed PVV, the anti-Islam party of Geert Wilders is expected to attain
Mr Rutte’s resignation to King Willem-Alexander is the first government collapse in the country since 2012.
Mr Rutte was also at the helm then, although that dissolution was due to disagreements over austerity measures. He has served since 2010, having won re-election twice.
The Netherlands is currently amid its tightest lockdown of the pandemic, and Mr Rutte has been considering tighter action.
