Dutch coalition on the brink as VVD rebels over budget tax deal

VVD leader Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, who is also the Dutch defense minister, said her party was ambushed when its coalition partners struck a deal with an opposition party. She slammed it as a bad deal for the Netherlands, calling it a poor proposal that runs counter to the coalition agreement. If the other coalition parties vote for the package after Thursday's parliamentary debate, she said, her party will need at least a fundamental reset — though she didn't spell out what that would mean for the coalition.

Prime Minister Rob Jetten skipped a European Union leaders' summit in Ireland to attend that debate in parliament. His centrist D66 party and the center-right Christian Democrats sealed the tax package — a crucial part of the annual government budget — on Wednesday with the center-left opposition parties PRO and Volt. The parties behind the deal say it raises taxes on the superrich and cuts them for people with low incomes.

The coalition has been a risky experiment from day one, holding only 66 of the 150 seats in the lower house of parliament. If the government falls, the country likely heads to elections next year — its fifth general election in less than a decade in a politically splintered Netherlands. Jetten was sworn in in February as the country's youngest and first openly gay prime minister, after narrowly winning a late-October election with the same number of seats as Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom but slightly more votes, a result settled by a count of postal ballots.

Jetten came into office promising a new era of consensus politics after years of bickering between parties, but that has largely failed to materialize — his coalition couldn't even head off internal divisions over its own plans, while opposition parties demanded plenty in return for backing legislation. The crisis echoes a similar impasse in neighboring Belgium, where Prime Minister Bart De Wever tendered his resignation to the king after a protracted fight over the country's budget. King Philippe rejected the resignation last Friday and asked De Wever's coalition to resume negotiations.