Column | Why Rutte lies

Sometimes my head acts like a dog running enthusiastically into every side aisle. He did that again on Thursday, during the parliamentary debate about Rutte’s text messages. Hey, a prime minister who reads text messages to officials! Is this what you entered the profession as a civil servant, I wondered. And how were the messages read – by telephone or over a cup of coffee? With theatrical intonation or fast and businesslike?

Beware, said the eager dog’s owner, this side path distracts from the real issue. Namely: how bizarre it actually is that politicians and journalists routinely started fact-checking after Rutte’s statement this Wednesday. What kind of Nokia did Rutte have? Can it really only store twenty text messages? Is it true that the Nokia becomes slow when there are many messages in it? As with an unfaithful husband, all statements were run through the excuse detector.

Rutte himself also thought this was bizarre, as was apparent from his snappy outburst in the parliamentary debate. “What could be the reason that more and more Dutch people say that they no longer watch the debates on television?” he said to Caroline van der Plas, who had started about the decreased confidence in politics. “Because everything starts with mistrust, with an absolutely fundamental feeling that the case is being botched, cheated et cetera.”

Here too he was like the unfaithful husband: someone who tells unverifiable stories and then, when he encounters mistrust, says that the other one is ruining the atmosphere, with all those difficult questions.

But doesn’t the prime minister, like the unfaithful husband, owe this mistrust to himself? Where he himself likes to speak of ‘minor incidents’, there is indeed a pattern: not always of demonstrable lies, but in any case of untruthfulness. Rutte’s smoke screens and word games have managed to transform many parliamentary debates into a cat-and-mouse game between prime minister and opposition. The time he insisted he knew nothing about Fred Teeven’s recollection of his deal with a drug criminal, while four close associates were aware (2015). The time he had no memory of memos about the abolition of the dividend tax (2018). The time he did not remember being informed about civilian casualties in Hawija (2019). And of course the time he had “misremembered” that Pieter Omtzigt had not been mentioned in the formation talks (2021).

After that last quibble, a half-hearted confession followed: yes, he had not spoken the truth, but he had done so “in good faith.” Is that lying? You can have a nice philosophical discussion about that. Personally, I am more interested in the question of why some politicians so easily spread untruths. Are they sometimes unaware of the consequences?

Coincidentally, I recently came across an article about lying by the philosophers Andreas Stokke and Eliot Michaelson. Why are so many politicians spreading lies that no one believes, they wonder. Their answer: Sometimes lying offers a strategic advantage. If your plans are substantively worse than your opponent’s, it pays to sow confusion. For example, this is what Trump is doing. He knows very well that his policies are not in the best interests of the majority of his voters. It works to Trump’s advantage if voters think all politicians are lying, making an actual debate about the content impossible. Stokke and Michaelson call this a nihilistic advantage†

But this is not what Rutte does. Rutte is not out to destroy the truth. He wants citizens to trust politicians – or so he says, and there’s no reason not to believe him here. Yet his own strategic handling of the truth has the same effect as Trump’s lies: a decrease in public confidence in the existence of honest politicians.

If you want citizens to take politicians at their word, then as a politician you must also speak the truth (as much as possible). If you don’t, then you’re a free rider: you want to use a public good (in this case: trust) without contributing to it yourself. Free riders often think that their behavior has no consequences: surely that one person won’t make the difference? But whoever has ruled a country for twelve years should not make himself smaller than he is.

Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC