The angry exchange of words between prime minister mark Rutte and PVV leader Geert Wilders during Thursday’s budget debate generated numerous comments in the papers.

At one point, Wilders told the prime minister to ‘stop behaving stupidly’ leading the PM to tell Wilders to do the same.
Orchestrated
Trouw comments that up until the outburst, which came shortly before the end of the afternoon session, the debate had been focused and serious. ‘The debate centred around the personal health budget, the euro and the effect of accumulated cutbacks on families. But that is not what they are going to be remembered for’, the paper writes. ‘Parliament should think long and hard on how to avoid a similar low point in the future’.
Elsewhere in the paper Wilders’ behaviour is described as ‘carefully orchestrated’. ‘Why do we keep falling for it?’, the paper wonders before going on to explain that ‘Attack is the best defence for the PVV leader. Pull the first puch and that will be the talking point, not your own weak points. (..) It diverted attention away from the fact that Wilders is supporting a budget that is hitting ‘Henk and Ingrid’ very hard. (..) But Wilders simply refuses to answer his critics. It’s an old trick but it works every time’.
The paper concludes that ‘the attempts by the coalition partners to neutralise this political hooligan have failed miserably’.
Bar room brawl
The Volkskrant opines that ‘both men lost their sense of decorum and looked as if they were involved in a bar room brawl. Where earlier confrontations had seemed like a playful exchange, this time both lost their tempers and said more than they intended’, the paper writes.
It quotes a much more censorious Job Cohen who said ‘People are watching this and thinking: how can he let this happen? It is very well for Mr Rutte to say that he is not affected by it all but he is the prime minister! He should have made that clear during the debate and he didn’t. I don’t understand it. We need authority to fight this crisis. But this sort of thing eats away at authority.’
Warning signs
According to the NRC, the altercation is not going to jeopardise the coalition. ‘A few heated words are not going to break up the cabinet, certainly not between two gentlemen who, in the words of Maxime Verhagen, have ‘an open relationship’. But the incident is not altogether without meaning’. The paper has detected two possible warning signs: CDA’s Van Haersma Buma pointedly announced that supporting the coalition and behaving with ‘common decency’ are equally important to his party while Rutte’s loss of control shows that securing Wilders’ support comes at a price and is not as easy as he is trying to make out.