Mark Rutte
Mark Rutte was prime minister of the Netherlands from 2010 to 2024, fourteen years and four cabinets, the longest in Dutch history, the Liberal who cycled to the palace, taught a class a week at a vocational school in The Hague, lived in the flat he had bought as a student and governed by not being pinned down, which the press called Teflon, through the euro crisis, in which he led the frugal north against the south's debts. There was the Ukraine airliner MH17 shot down over the Donbas in 2014 with a hundred and ninety-six Dutch aboard; the childcare-benefits scandal in which the tax office had ruined tens of thousands of families, many of them of immigrant origin, on false fraud claims, over which his third cabinet resigned in 2021; the pandemic; and the immigration quarrel over which his fourth fell in July 2023. After that he said he would leave politics and became secretary-general of NATO in October 2024. He was born in The Hague in 1967, the seventh child of a trading-company manager, studied history at Leiden, worked for Unilever as a personnel manager for ten years. He was a junior minister for social affairs and then education from 2002 before winning the Liberal leadership in 2006 over Rita Verdonk by a few hundred votes. The election of 2010 made the VVD the largest party for the first time and him prime minister of a minority cabinet supported by Wilders, which Wilders sank in 2012 over the cuts. The second, with Labour, made the cuts, raised the pension age and lost Labour three-quarters of its seats. The third and fourth, four-party coalitions with the Christian Democrats and two liberal parties, took two hundred and twenty-five and two hundred and ninety-nine days to form. He apologised in 2022 for the Dutch role in slavery, for the massacres in Indonesia, and to the victims of the benefits scandal. At NATO he has spent his first year keeping Trump in the alliance, which he did in The Hague in June 2025 with a five-per-cent spending pledge and a text message calling him daddy that the president published.
- Lived: 1967 CE – ?
- Nationality: Dutch
- Roles: prime minister, politician
