The acting Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, This Thursday he achieved the unanimous support of NATO allies to succeed as Secretary General Jens Stoltenbergonce the other candidate, the Romanian president, Klaus Iohannis, He has withdrawn from the race and confirmed his support for the Dutch leader.
With Romania’s passage this Thursday, the 32 members of NATO have given their support to Rutte and now the decision will be agreed upon at the ambassador level and will be endorsed by the allied leaders at the Washington summit in July. Rutte will take office on October 1, thus becoming the fourth Dutch leader in the history of the military organization.
This week both Slovakia, which had not spoken until now, and Hungary, which supported Iohannis, confirmed their support for Rutte, who had been the favorite since the end of 2023, when he made his candidacy official and was backed shortly after by the United States and the major European powers.
Mark Rutte He is a fierce critic of the Russian president Vladimir Putin and a staunch ally of Ukraine who honed his skills as a political negotiator during nearly 14 years as Dutch prime minister.
Rutte, 57, has been a driving force behind European military support for Ukraine since the 2022 Russian invasion, and has argued that Moscow’s defeat on the battlefield is vital to guarantee peace in Europe.
His opinion has been greatly influenced by the downing of a passenger plane over Ukraine in 2014, for which the Netherlands blames Russia, and for which 196 of the 298 victims were Dutch. NATO must be powerful to counter Moscow, and other EU leaders must not be naive about Putin’s Russia, he has said.
“He won’t stop in Ukraine if we don’t stop him now. This war is bigger than Ukraine itself. This is about defending the international rule of law,” Rutte told the United Nations in September 2022, seven months after the full-scale Russian invasion.
Rutte first became Dutch prime minister in 2010 and has served the longest term, before announcing last year that he planned to leave national politics.
Following the downing of flight MH17, he moved from being primarily domestically focused to becoming one of the EU’s leading negotiators, playing an important role in European debates on immigration, debt and the response to COVID-19.
Under his leadership, the Netherlands has increased defense spending above the 2% of GDP threshold required of NATO memberssupplying F-16 fighters, artillery, drones and ammunition to kyiv and investing heavily in its own Army.
Your way to replace Jens Stoltenberg, who will step down as NATO chief in October after nearly a decade at the helm, became almost certain after Romania’s president withdrew his own candidacy. Rutte already had the support of 31 countries in the alliance of 32 states.
(With information from Reuters and EP)
