This morning, Geert Wilders (PVV) pulled the plug on the government. It now has an outgoing status and new elections will be held. Is this good news for higher education and scientific research?

After a series of political crises and night-time negotiations, it has happened: within one year, the cabinet has fallen. Sometime in the autumn, the Netherlands will go to the polls again.

Universities hope that policymakers will once again allocate extra money to education and research. The effects of the cuts are already visible, says umbrella association Universities of the Netherlands: “Layoffs, discontinued study programmes and stagnated research. It is imperative that policymakers reverse this destructive government policy before it is too late”, a response reads.

The Dutch Student Union has something similar to say. It hopes that the fall of the government “means the end of the horrendous cutbacks, and that the next government will invest in education, that the basic student grant will go up and that enough affordable student housing will be created”.

Will they get their way? And if so, how soon?

Bruins to stick around

One thing won’t change in the coming months: the government itself. It will continue to govern with an ‘outgoing’ status. The PVV ministers are stepping down, but Eppo Bruins is the education minister on behalf of NSC and is likely to remain in office until a successor takes over.

That could easily take a year. The previous government (with Minister of Education Robbert Dijkgraaf) continued to govern for 361 days before Prime Minister Dick Schoof’s team took office. The government before that (Rutte-III with Minister of Education Ingrid van Engelshoven) had an outgoing status for 360 days.

Cutbacks

Furthermore, the cuts in education and research won’t be gone just like that. After all, they’ve already been accepted by the Senate. CDA, ChristenUnie, SGP and JA21 had made a deal with the coalition to this end.

This may only change in September, when the new State Budget is presented, but an outgoing government rarely, if ever, veers off course. Especially not in the field of education and research. If any money is freed up, this won’t happen until 2027 at the earliest, under the responsibility of a new minister.

Election promises

Meanwhile, campaigns are being launched, but what will be the stakes in the elections? Parties like D66, GroenLinks-PvdA and Volt would like to spend more money on education and research; that’s one of their spearheads.

Other parties are less convinced that additional money should go there. In the months ahead, it will be difficult to assess what these parties really want. An election promise like ‘we’re putting extra money into education and research’ is relatively cheap: it may not even plug the hole left by the current government.

Next government

And who will form the next coalition? PVV is likely to end up on the opposition benches and NSC is crushed in the polls, retaining around two seats of its current twenty. BBB will go from seven to about three. They won’t play any role of note for a while.

VVD, on the other hand, is expected to grow (from 25 to around 30 seats) and GroenLinks-PvdA, CDA and D66 are also rising in the polls. If these parties end up in a government together, it’s entirely unclear what they will agree when it comes to education and research. CDA wanted to cut education and research by about as much as the government is doing now, while D66 and GroenLinks-PvdA actually want to invest.

The compromise could be: extra investment, but mainly in economically useful programmes or, for example, research for Defence. You can already see the political battle coming, because this will put the humanities in particular in a tight spot.

Students

Recently, the student movement has proven to be a major political player. In this government period, they stopped the slow-progress penalty and, at an earlier stage, fought hard for the return of the basic student grant.

The Dutch Student Union is already doing the warmup. It wants the basic student grant to go up and enough affordable student housing to be created. These are election promises that parties are easily tempted to make.

Internationalisation

And what about the influx of foreign students and researchers? With PVV mainly intent on amplifying the ‘asylum problem’ and NSC all but decimated, it seems unlikely that the arrival of foreign students will again become a major issue in the elections.

Moreover, a bill is ready to ‘balance’ internationalisation. Now that the government has fallen, the House of Representatives can declare certain bills controversial, or postpone them until elections have been held or a new government is in place. But the Balanced Internationalisation Act will probably not be put on the backburner.

Its most controversial part has just been scrapped. The government actually wanted to subject all English-taught Bachelor’s programmes to a test to assess whether there were legitimate reasons not to offer them in Dutch instead. This announced language test created uncertainty amongst higher education institutions and last week an overwhelming majority of the House of Representatives voted in favour of scrapping it.

Other parts of the bill enjoy strong support. For example, institutions will be given more opportunities to control the intake of international students into their programmes. They’ve been asking for this for years.

Long story short

In the short term, little is going to change: the cutbacks will go ahead and so will most of the bills, presumably. What’s more, the minister will remain in office.

The elections are an opportunity to reverse cutbacks, but it’s by no means a certainty that this will happen. That being said, it does seem unlikely that education and research will face even bigger cutbacks.

Translation: Taalcentrum-VU