As Pieter Omtzigt takes a step back from active politics, Gordon Darroch asks if any politician’s stock has fallen as fast in recent times as his?

Little over a year ago, at the launch of his party, Nieuw Sociaal Contract (NSC), it seemed Pieter Omtzigt could do no wrong. His tireless campaigning to expose the childcare benefits scandal (toeslagenaffaire) allowed him to stand apart from the tarnished brand of the Christian Democrats (CDA) and became the springboard for his own party.

Omtzigt promised to breathe new life into a political system that had grown stagnant at the end of the Rutte era. He would make government accountable again, ensure bureaucrats and institutions served the people rather than the other way round, and establish a basic standard of living (bestaanszekerheid). The Netherlands would be a fair, efficient and decent place to live once more.

Omtzigt enjoyed the most precious and scarce commodity in modern politics: respect. For most of the election campaign NSC was in a group of three parties leading the opinion polls. Other leaders openly courted Omtzigt: Caroline van der Plas of the farmers’ party BBB famously declared: “I want to be with Pieter”.

He was routinely spoken of as the next prime minister, despite insisting he had no interest in the job. And though his appeal waned during a bruising campaign that played into Geert Wilders’s hands, the 20 seats won by NSC should still have given Omtzigt a platform to work his ideas into a new cabinet’s programme for government.

But just a year after its launch, NSC looks like a busted flush. At the European elections in June the party finished behind the CDA, the BBB and the animal rights party PvdD with less than 4% of the vote – around a fifth of its polling level last September.

Bestaanszekerheid, a buzzword during the campaign, has dropped out of the political lexicon. His demands during the coalition talks for “concrete proposals” to strengthen the courts, research institutions and media came to nothing. And the PVV’s emergence as the largest party in the Netherlands owes much to Omtzigt’s dithering, backtracking and knack for scoring own goals.

During the campaign Wilders capitalised on Omtzigt’s inability to explain how his policies would affect voters or even answer simple questions such as whether he wanted to be prime minister. Wilders’s straight-talking immigrant bashing proved more appealing than Omtzigt’s technocratic meanderings.

Straight after polling day Omtzigt ruled out working with the PVV because its manifesto clashed with the constitution. The stakes could hardly have been higher, but not for the last time, Omtzigt contrived to throw away a strong hand. After Wilders withdrew three draft laws that had been gathering dust in the parliamentary archives – a largely symbolic gesture, given that they had no chance of achieving a majority – Omtzigt folded and joined the negotiating table.

A month later he walked away from the talks in protest at his treatment by lead negotiator Ronald Plasterk, only to return a week later. Wilders made much of the fact that Omtzigt briefed journalists on his departure in a clandestine meeting at a hotel before he informed the other parties via WhatsApp. Accountability for thee but not for me, was the subtext.

It was a disastrous move that turned the slow erosion of NSC’s public support into a landslip and strengthened the position of Wilders, who by now had turned the other party leaders, Dilan Yesilgöz of the VVD and Van der Plas, into his backing vocalists on Twitter.

The relationship between Omtzigt and Wilders is one of the most perplexing features of the new coalition. Time and again Wilders has trampled across the red lines that Omtzigt drew up at earlier stages of the coalition talks without incurring a murmur of protest.

In May Omtzigt told parliament he would “take action” if the PVV leader overstepped the mark on the subject of the Middle East, where Wilders is a zealous defender of Israel, after one of his MPs called the Palestinians a “fake people”. But when Wilders tweeted two months later that “Jordan is the only true Palestinian state”, earning him a rebuke from the Jordanian foreign minister, it was met with customary silence from Omtzigt.

At other times Omtzigt has been oddly protective of a man who not so long ago denounced him as a “slippery Catholic”. When Frans Timmermans described the PVV MPs as Wilders’s “minions”, it was Omtzigt who stood up and condemned it as a “deeply insulting” way to speak about “36 fellow parliamentarians”.

Yet the PVV group has been absent from more than 100 debates since taking their seats in November, including on crucial issues such as Ukraine, meaning parliament has been operating for much of the time on 75% capacity. One MP has spoken just seven words in the chamber in the last 10 months.

It is hard to conceive of a more blatant insult to Omtzigt’s vision of a new constitutional settlement in which MPs are supposed to be the guardians of democracy. Omtzigt won admirers as a political pitbull, but within the coalition he is the lamp-post to Wilders’s terrier.

It is not clear if even Pieter Omtzigt still knows what Pieter Omtzigt stands for. He was the chief architect of the “extraparliamentary” cabinet structure, which was supposed to restore the division of duties between ministers and parliament. But in the pre-budget talks it was Omtzigt who blurred the lines by setting up a “war room” with two senior NSC ministers to tinker with the cabinet’s plans before they go to parliament in mid-September.

When a furore arose over the deportation of an 11-year-old boy to Armenia because his mother had failed to comply with asylum rules, Omtzigt commented that parliament had no business interfering in individual cases “in a normal, healthy democracy”. It was a quite astounding statement by a man who raised dozens of individual cases in parliament during his campaign to expose the injustice of the tax office’s childcare benefits regime.

Pieter Omtzigt deserves credit for injecting genuine fresh talent into Dutch politics and recruiting from outside the political bubble of The Hague. His record as a forensic inquisitor and tenacious campaigner against government excess is not in dispute. But too often his judgment has been found wanting.

Standard fodder

A case in point was his HJ Schoo lecture last week, which contrasted falling Dutch and European birth rates with population growth in countries such as Ethiopia and Nigeria. Omtzigt cannot be unaware that this kind of material is standard fodder for Great Replacement theorists, but he pointedly refused to spell out how he thought these trends were connected.

He merely said: “You can guess what this means in 30 years’ time,” with all the intellectual coherence of a YouTube warrior who claims to be “only asking questions”.

Last week the Telegraaf newspaper carried a report on the budget negotiations that gave anonymous sources – a relatively rare phenomenon in the Dutch media – a chance to vent their frustration against Omtzigt. The next day, Caroline van der Plas substantiated the reports and indirectly questioned Omtzigt’s interpretation of his own “extraparliamentary” construction.

During one of Omtzigt’s frequent walkouts, Van der Plas revealed, the other leaders sat and played cards while they waited for him to return. Nothing remained of the enthusiasm with which the BBB leader once wanted to “ be with Pieter”. Over the last 12 months Omtzigt’s contradictory and capricious behaviour has chipped away at the respect he once commanded from his peers.

His indecision is final – and, for NSC, probably terminal.

For more commentary from Gordon Darroch, check out his website Words for Press.