The first new Dutch prime minister for almost 14 years takes office on Tuesday, heading a cabinet who are politically unknown quantities, but bring a wealth of experience from other areas, including diplomats, judges, military officers, media personalities and businesspeople. Here is a rundown of the 16 ministers appointed by the four-party coalition and the 13 junior ministers who will be supporting them.

Prime minister: Dick Schoof, 67 (no party)

Schoof is a familiar face in the corridors of power in The Hague but has a low public profile, having largely avoided the spotlight. He spent five years as head of the counter-terrorism unit, two years as director-general of the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD and the last four years running the civil service team in the ministry of justice. Schoof is officially non-partisan, though he disclosed at his first press conference that he had been a member of the Labour party (PvdA) until 2021, a detail that came as a surprise to many of his colleagues. He heads a small department known as the Ministry of General Affairs (AZ), but his main role is to chair cabinet meetings and represent the Netherlands on the world stage. As the first “neutral” prime minister since 1918, he is expected to take a more technocratic approach than his predecessors and leave the political oratory to the four coalition party leaders.

Minister of Public Health and deputy prime minister: Fleur Agema, 47 (PVV)

The position of “first vice prime-minister” is usually combined with one of the senior ministries such as finance or home affairs. But Geert Wilders’s PVV has little interest in rules and conventions. Wilders had to discard his first choice for the VPM role, Gidi Markuszöwer, after he failed the security screening, and so the honour passed to Fleur Agema, one of the “nine knights” who formed Wilders’s inaugural team of MPs in 2006. Agema has been the PVV’s health spokeswoman for most of her parliamentary career, campaigning for better care for the elderly and the abolition of the excess charge in health insurance. In 2012 she revealed she suffers from multiple sclerosis.

Junior minister for Long-Term Care: Vicky Maijer (PVV)

Junior minister for Youth, Prevention and Sport: Vincent Karremans (VVD)

Minister of Climate and Green Growth and deputy prime minister: Sophie Hermans, 43 (VVD)

Hermans was a political assistant to former prime minister Mark Rutte until 2017, when she was elected to parliament and was Rutte’s co-negotiator for the talks to form his third cabinet. Geert Wilders infamously mocked her as “Rutte’s bag carrier” in one of her first debates, but she gained a reputation as a robust and capable negotiator as leader of the VVD’s parliamentary group. Hermans is seen as one of the party’s more progressive members, hence her appointment as climate minister, where she is likely to come under pressure from Wilders and the farmers’ party BBB to water down the Netherlands’ plans to combat climate change. But she also led the campaign within the party to force Rutte to cut immigration numbers, which triggered the collapse of the last cabinet a year ago.

Minister of Social Affairs and Work Opportunities and deputy prime minister: Eddy van Hijum, 52 (NSC)

Like many of the new MPs for Pieter Omtzigt’s Nieuw Sociaal Contract party, Van Hijum is a former Christian Democrat, having sat in parliament alongside Omtzigt between 2003 and 2014. He was subsequently elected to the provincial assembly of Overijssel and became a member of the European Committee of the Regions, advising the EU on its policies for small and medium-sized businesses. Van Hijum is credited with writing the bulk of NSC’s manifesto and seconded Omtzigt during the coalition negotiations. He recently called for an investigation into the misuse of European coronavirus recovery funds after 22 people were arrested in four countries accused of stealing €600 million from the collective subsidy pot.

Junior minister for Participation and Integration: Jurgen Nobel (VVD)

Minister of Finance: Eelco Heinen, 43 (VVD)

Heinen started his political career at the finance ministry in 2007 as a policy adviser, before becoming a researcher for the VVD’s parliamentary faction. Colleagues describe him as a fastidious worker whose experience with the IRF, the department within the finance ministry tasked with identifying budget savings, will stand him in good stead for his new role. The VVD is keen to preserve its reputation for prudent financial management and has to plug a number of gaps in the accounts caused by the “box 3” judgment that hamstrung the wealth tax system and the failure to sell part of power grid company Tennet to Germany. He is perhaps best known for delivering his second child on the hard shoulder of a motorway during the Covid-19 curfew.

Junior minister for Taxation and Customs: Folkert Idsinga (NSC)

Junior minister for Tax Allowances: Nora Achahbar (NSC)

Minister of Home Affairs: Judith Uitermark, 52 (NSC)

Uitermark’s career has embraced all three branches of government in less than a year: before being elected to parliament for NSC, she was a criminal court judge in Haarlem. Having played a key part in efforts to introduce mediation into the Dutch justice system, she wants to focus on making government clearer and more accessible. “I see that the government is far too complicated and impersonal for a lot of people and that the most vulnerable people in particular get in a bind,” she said on NSC’s website. Before joining the judiciary she spent three years on Haarlem council for the CDA.

Junior Minister for Restoration of Groningen: Eddie van Marum (BBB)

Junior Minister for Kingdom Relations and Digitalisation: Zsolt Szabó (PVV)

Minister of Foreign Affairs: Caspar Veldkamp, 60 (NSC)

A career diplomat who has been the Netherlands’ ambassador in Israel and Greece and describes himself as a “committed European”, Veldkamp was one of the first of Pieter Omtzigt’s MPs to be tipped for a ministerial post when NSC joined the coalition. He has also worked in Washington, Warsaw and Brussels, while his most recent position was as a director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London. Veldkamp’s time in Athens coincided with the Greek debt crisis, when he supported Labour (PvdA) finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem in his often testy relationship with his Greek counterpart Yanis Varoufakis. His first major challenge could be to oversee a programme of embassy closures: according to a ministerial memo seen by AD, the department faces having to cut 34 of the 157 Dutch missions to meet spending cuts targets.

Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Aid: Reinette Klever, 56 (PVV)

Klever is the only “minister for” in the cabinet, meaning she will have no dedicated department or budget at her disposal. As a PVV MP she once called for the international development budget to be abolished to free up more money for welfare spending. She won’t quite get her wish as development minister, but she has been given the task of trimming the bill by €2.4 billion, which she claims will be worth €300 to every family in the Netherlands. During the parliamentary hearings for ministerial candidates she declined to change her position on “population replacement” theory, calling it a “factual description of a demographic development”, but after her colleague Marjolein Faber distanced herself from the term (see below), Klever followed suit without accounting for her about-turn. She is a board member of right-wing TV broadcaster Ongehoord Nederland (ON), which has been fined for breaching journalistic standards, and presented the Zwarte Pietjournaal, ON’s alternative Sinterklaas news show for devotees of blackface.

Minister of Justice and Security: David van Weel, 47 (VVD)

Van Weel is crossing paths with outgoing prime minister Mark Rutte, having spent the past four years as Nato’s assistant secretary general for innovation, hybrid and cyber. Prior to that he was Rutte’s foreign policy and defence advisor, having started his career as a naval officer. Since the start of the war in Ukraine he has been a regular contributor to newspapers and talk shows highlighting the threat from Russian weapons and cyber attacks. Like his predecessor and party colleague, Dilan Yesilgöz, he takes command of the ministry of justice despite having no legal background.

Junior minister of Justice and Security: Ingrid Coenradie (PVV)

Junior minister for Legal Protection: Teun Struycken (NSC)

Minister of Defence: Ruben Brekelmans, 37 (VVD)

The youngest member of the new cabinet has a high public profile as an outspoken supporter of both Ukraine and Israel in their respective military conflicts. He was first elected to parliament in 2021 and quickly made a name for himself as the party’s spokesman on asylum and migration. Brekelmans was opposed to the so-called “spreading law”, drawn up by his party colleague Eric van der Burg, which tried to ease the bottleneck in the asylum system by requiring local councils to accommodate a minimum number of refugees. Van der Burg steered the law through both houses of parliament, but the new coalition has vowed to repeal it. The junior defence minister is Gijs Tuinman of the BBB, a decorated former army officer who has served in Africa and Afghanistan.

Junior minister of Defence: Gijs Tuinman (BBB)

Minister of Asylum and Migration: Marjolein Faber, 64 (PVV)

Faber burst into the public consciousness five years ago when she insisted that a tweet she wrote stating that a knife attacker in Groningen had a “north African appearance” was correct, even after the local police had publicly contradicted it. It reflected Faber’s uncompromising, unapologetic and unsubtle debating style, which brought her into conflict repeatedly with previous administrations. Mark Rutte rebuked her in the Senate for describing migration as “omvolking”, a term for population replacement that was used by the Nazis to justify their cross-border incursions to “protect” ethnic Germans. At ministerial interrogation by MPs she distanced herself from the term and promised not to repeat it again as a minister, but the essence of the message is the same: the “demographic development” caused by immigration is a crisis that can only be tackled by drastically reducing the number of asylum seekers.

Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Security and Nature: Femke Wiersma, 39 (BBB)

Wiersma first caught the spotlight as a participant on the reality TV show Boer Zoekt Vrouw (The Farmer Wants A Wife) in 2010. She moved in with Gijsbert Bakhuizen and had three children with him before the relationship ended and she moved back to her native Friesland. Wiersma was the number two candidate for the BBB for the general election in 2021, when Caroline van der Plas won a seat, and entered parliament at the second attempt in November. She was previously a policy adviser for the Dutch dairy farmers’ union before becoming an assistant to Van der Plas. In March last year she was elected to the provincial assembly in Friesland, where she negotiated a coalition deal with the CDA, the ChristenUnie and the Fryske Nasjonale Partij. She was the only minister to swear her inauguration oath in Frisian.

Junior minister for Fisheries, Food Security and Nature: Jean Rummenie (BBB)

Minister of Infrastructure and Transport: Barry Madlener, 56 (PVV)

Another of the original intake of PVV MPs from 2006, Madlener has been the party’s spokesman on a range of issues including infrastructure and defence. Before entering politics he was an estate agent, but he was nevertheless a vocal supporter of outgoing housing minister Hugo de Jonge’s drive to bring more houses under rent controls to protect tenants. Madlener has called in the past for the national train operator NS to be fused with the rail network manager ProRail, but dismissed plans for a cross-border train service between Aachen and Eindhoven as a “left-wing hobby”.

Junior minister for Public Transport and the Environment: Chris Jansen (PVV)

Minister of Housing and Spatial Planning: Mona Keijzer, 55 (BBB)

Keijzer was the BBB’s candidate for prime minister before the election, when the farmers’ party was leading the polls, and was said to be so determined to take a cabinet post that she didn’t even unpack her boxes after being elected to parliament. She is another BBB recruit from the CDA, having twice stood for the leadership of the Christian Democrats. She is also one of the few ministers with previous experience in cabinet, though it did not end happily: Keijzer was sacked by Mark Rutte as junior minister for economic affairs after she spoke out against the cabinet’s vaccination rules during the coronavirus lockdown.

Minister of Economic Affairs: Dirk Beljaarts, 46 (PVV)

Beljaarts’ ministerial hearing was dominated by two issues: his promise to renounce his dual nationality, since he qualifies for Hungarian citizenship through his mother, in keeping with the PVV’s opposition to owners of second passports holding public office. He was also grilled about his management of a hospitality firm, KHN Rekenwerk, which went bankrupt after running up debts of €2 million. Beljaarts said he only became actively involved in the company’s affairs after the shareholders raised concerns and the allegations of fraud came to light as a result of his “intense supervision”. An investigation by the receiver is ongoing. Beljaarts has no previous political experience and says his motivation for accepting a cabinet post was to restore the trust of small and medium-sized companies in government while making sure the investment climate remained attractive to large companies.

Minister of Education, Culture and Science: Eppo Bruins, 54 (NSC)

Bruins’ appointment is mainly controversial because until 2021 he was an MP for the ChristenUnie, which is implacably opposed to co-operating with the PVV. Indeed, he was on the CU’s list of candidates for the European parliament elections less than a month ago. CU leader Mirjam Bikker said she was “disappointed” in his decision and made clear that the appointment was “not in our name”. Bruins chairs the advisory council for science, technology and innovation and was previously the CU’s spokesman on education and media. Schools minister Mariëlle Paul of the VVD is the only member of Mark Rutte’s outgoing cabinet to keep her job, though she becomes a junior minister.

Junior minister for Primary and Secondary Education: Mariëlle Paul (VVD)