The Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, managed to plunge the kingdom into a controversy with his small telephone with buttons which he had used for more than a decade for work.
With our correspondent in Brussels, Pierre Benazet
There was a time when the Prime Minister’s little push-button phone made the Netherlands smile. Mark Rutte did not hesitate to have his picture taken with it when he showed it to his counterparts around the world. Out of self-mockery, but also to show his sense of economy and normality, qualities highly appreciated by Batavian voters, like his habit of cycling to the seat of government.
But Mark Rutte often sent text messages with his nine-key phone, a phone with limited memory that forced him to regularly delete the oldest of these texts. For everyday Volkskrant who revealed the case, the head of government therefore disregards the Dutch law on the obligation of transparency which requires that all official communications be archived in order to be able to publish them on justified request. For the past two years, this has also covered text messages sent with a phone, including SMS and WhatsApp.
The controversy is such in the political parties that the subject was debated this Thursday in Parliament. The deputies criticize Mark Rutte for having decided himself which messages to send to ministers, elected officials or civil servants. Only these texts were kept. This may be a habit, because during the child benefit scandal at the end of 2020, the Prime Minister had already been accused of having turned a blind eye to a concealment of documents by the administration.