Dutch Labour leader Job Cohen has accused Prime Minister Mark Rutte of being inconsistent about government ministers with dual nationality. Labour has been in opposition since the swearing in of a new right-wing cabinet earlier this month.
Mr Cohen is demanding an apology for a remark made by the current Prime Minister in 2007, when he was a member of the opposition. At the time, free-market liberal Mark Rutte said that Labour Deputy Minister Nebahat Albayrak, who is of Turkish descent, should give up her Turkish passport in favour of her Dutch one. But three years on, Mr Rutte himself appointed a deputy Health minister with dual Dutch and Swedish nationality, saying he “saw no problem” in doing so.
Labour leader Cohen told national dailies de Volkskrant and AD on Monday that as early as 2007, Mr Rutte appeared to have been in thrall to Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party. The Freedom party got 15 percent of the votes in the general election on 9 June 2010 on a nationalist, anti-Islam platform. Mr Wilders’ 24 MPs currently hold a key position, voting with Mr Rutte’s minority right-wing government without being part of it.
Mr Cohen criticised the influence of the Freedom Party on the new government’s policies: “What their programme boils down to is that ‘we don’t want those Muslims here, we can do without them’. I’m concerned about this. The government’s view is threatening an entire section of the Dutch population with exclusion.”
