Mark Rutte, the long-serving Dutch prime minister who on Monday said he would leave politics after his coalition government collapsed, curated an image of an ordinary guy.
Like many of his compatriots, he rode a bicycle, not a motorcade, to work. He spurned luxuries such as a lavish office or residence. He paid his own expenses, down to his coffees.
But in truth, little was ordinary about Mr. Rutte, 56, a resilient, consensus-building operator nicknamed “Teflon Mark” who, over 13 years in office, elevated himself and his relatively small country to the highest levels of European power dynamics.
His sudden departure from Dutch politics raises questions for the Netherlands, as well as the European Union, where Mr. Rutte found a stage to advance his country’s agenda: rules-based free trade and commerce, fiscal prudence, liberal social values.
At home, the implosion of Mr. Rutte’s coalition government over a hard-line migration policy came as a shock, but insiders describe it as a tactical move that backfired, leaving the once-dominant prime minister with few options but to resign from his party’s leadership. He will remain caretaker prime minister until elections take place in the fall.
His absence from the dramatics of European Union politics will be strongly felt.
“He was the leader who signified most explicitly how a small country can play a big role in Europe and yield disproportionate influence,” said Mujtaba Rahman, who leads the Europe practice at Eurasia Group, a consulting firm.
“He worked the room, he built alliances, he signified all the things that the E.U. can and should be for smaller members: a platform for them to punch well above their weight at the European and, ultimately, the international level.”
Mr. Rutte was the unofficial leader of the bloc’s “frugal” nations — a fluid grouping of northern countries that prefer E.U. spending to be limited.
At a 2020 E.U. budget meeting in Brussels, he memorably showed up with a chunky biography of the classical pianist Frédéric Chopin. The message was he had no intention of offering more money, so he brought the book to keep himself busy.
“Our stance is well known — I don’t see what I should do here,” he told the news media when asked about the book.
Mr. Rutte stuck his neck out on matters of principle, over the past few years mounting the most significant opposition from within the European Union to Hungary’s Viktor Orban, an illiberal populist leader.
In a particularly tense meeting in 2021, Mr. Rutte told Mr. Orban he should withdraw an anti-L.G.B.T. law or think about taking his country out of the European Union, leaving other leaders in the room stunned.
But his most lasting E.U. legacy will most likely be the role he played in making billions of E.U. post-pandemic stimulus funds conditional on rule-of-law practices, another move targeting Hungary, where Mr. Orban has overseen the erosion of the justice system.
For Mr. Rutte, it was paramount that independent, robust courts could oversee how Dutch taxpayers’ money was spent through the E.U.-wide funding.
“He did Europe a favor,” Mr. Rahman said. “If this hadn’t happened, pooling more resources at E.U. level to advance other policy goals in the future would have become much more challenging. He spoke up for European values.”
In the Netherlands, Mr. Rutte’s departure from the political scene he dominated for years is opening up the race for his party’s leadership, just as leaders of other key parties are set to step down.
Mr. Rutte had been leading a four-party coalition with his center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy and three smaller parties. The government had been negotiating the terms of family reunification for refugees and whether to create two classes of asylum: a temporary one for people fleeing conflicts and a permanent one for those fleeing persecution.
Coalition partners were prepared to back the two-tier system, but would not endorse Mr. Rutte’s proposal for a two-year waiting period before refugees in the Netherlands could be joined by their children. Mr. Rutte offered his resignation to King Willem-Alexander in writing on Friday night.
His rapid decline in the final stretch of his leadership is still being parsed but, despite enjoying loyalty among the core of his party’s voters, the public mood on him soured after a scandal in which the tax authorities unfairly targeted poor families over child-care benefits and after a conflict with farmers over emission goals.
The Netherlands, known as an orderly place where things generally work, is no stranger to political upheaval or caretaker governments. In 2021, after the last elections that were triggered by another collapsed coalition led by Mr. Rutte, it took him nine months to form a government.
Jan Paternotte, the party chair of the centrist D66 party that was part of Mr. Rutte’s most recent coalition, said the prime minister’s departure was “inevitable.”
Mr. Paternotte emphasized the Dutch tradition of consensus building rather than one leader getting his or her way on a certain issue. “Mark Rutte broke with that tradition last week,” he said.
Caroline van der Plas, leader of the Farmer-Citizen Movement, a pro-farmer party that swept local elections in the Netherlands this year, said she welcomed the chance for voters to go to the polls this fall. Attje Kuiken, leader of the Labor Party, said on Twitter this weekend that “Mark Rutte is done governing.”
What Mr. Rutte will do next is a riddle, but he told the Dutch news media on Monday that he was not interested in staying in politics in any way, and dismissed the idea that he might in the future lead NATO.
Last year, he told a Dutch radio station that if he were to leave politics, he would want to be a teacher. Throughout his 13 years as prime minister, he had been a regular guest lecturer at a high school in The Hague.
“This isn’t entirely without emotion,” he told reporters after announcing his resignation. “But it feels good to pass the baton.”
