Outgoing Minister for Housing and Spatial Planning Hugo de Jonge believes the government should not have fallen. “It shouldn’t be an evening of scolding, but I think the situation the government has fallen into is unnecessary,” he said last night.
He stresses that every effort has been made to make the crisis workable and thinks he came very close. “In the Council of Ministers you have to be able to bridge fundamental differences,” she says. ‘So fundamental differences are not a reason not to cooperate with each other or to arrive at a good approach to migration. (…). That’s why I’m sorry the toilet fell.”
“We were very close”
De Jonge also doesn’t expect the fall of Rutte IV’s cabinet to cause even more chaos at the top of the CDA. “It wasn’t about that in the Trêveszaal, and to be honest, that’s the least of our problems,” he says. “The problem is that we have a huge migration balance and our society’s resilience is therefore overstretched.”
Jack
According to De Jonge, support for migration is at stake, and that’s bad news. “We simply need migration, especially for the labor market,” he continues. ‘Furthermore, we must always be able to offer people who come from far away to their own country a safe place to live. This requires gripping – without gripping there is no support.’
Furthermore, De Jonge says that outside of the asylum problem there are also “a host of other problems” looming, with problems becoming bigger if there is no toilet. “We’re going to have to do what’s needed as much as possible in the housing construction task, and I will, but really important legislative processes now have a tendency to go into a state of pause.”
Irresponsible
De Jonge therefore considers it an irresponsible choice that the government fell yesterday. ‘I think it was really pointless, because it was really possible to bridge the gaps. I think it is always possible to find a middle ground’, concludes the outgoing minister.
De Jonge remains vague about his future in The Hague. “It’s really a question for later,” he says.
Source: BNR
Fernando Dowling is an author and political journalist who writes for 24 News Globe. He has a deep understanding of the political landscape and a passion for analyzing the latest political trends and news.
