If no political problems arise, each cabinet serves its full four-year parliamentary term. On the occasion of the new parliamentary elections, it offers its resignation. However, political problems usually arise ‘during the journey’; political practice is that virtually no cabinet serves its four years without difficulty.
Cabinet crisis
The two reasons why a cabinet can end up in a crisis during the process are:
Mutual disagreement within the cabinet itself
The ministers cannot reach agreement on an important part of government policy. Sometimes only a few ministers belonging to the same party initially resign, after which the remaining ministers make their portfolios available. In other cases, the entire cabinet makes the portfolios available, which means that it only wants to remain in office pending the new cabinet;
Conflict with the House of Representatives
The majority of the chamber opposes a certain part of government policy, which the cabinet considers unacceptable, after which the cabinet makes the portfolios available. A common expression is that the cabinet has lost the confidence of the parliament.
Attempted restoration
In the past, an interim conflict was usually followed by an attempt to restore the fallen cabinet. The procedure followed did not differ essentially from the procedure followed when forming a new cabinet (advice, appointment of an (informer). If restoration was not possible, an attempt was made to form another coalition cabinet, sometimes a completely different one. composition. Nowadays it is seen as less correct to form a completely different coalition cabinet without a voter decision. The recent practice is therefore that the fallen cabinet is succeeded by a temporary cabinet (interim cabinet), which calls new elections and becomes outgoing on the day of these new (early) elections. This will then be followed by a cabinet formation in accordance with the procedure described above, in which the election results naturally play an important role, because it can be assumed that in their voting behavior the voters have also expressed an opinion about the conflict about which the cabinet stumbled.
The trust
We have previously used the term trust. We would now like to discuss this in a little more detail because this commonly used but not very clear term can conceal a number of important and from time to time different details.
Taken literally, trust means: belief in someone’s faithfulness. The term loyalty can then be described as: adhering to an obligation. When we say that a cabinet has the confidence of (the majority of) parliament, what is actually meant is that the majority of parliament believes that the cabinet will adhere to an obligation. And if the majority withdraws confidence, this means that the majority no longer believes that the government will or has adhered to its obligation.
Obligation
What kind of obligation and what kind of faith are meant here? To understand this, we have to go back to the cabinet formation where we explained that a cabinet can only act if negotiations between factions have formed a majority that wants a cabinet of a certain political composition to act. The cabinet should then not just be seen as a collection of ministers without more, but as a team that will implement a certain policy.
The obligation relates specifically to that policy: the cabinet has entered into the obligation to implement the policy on which the factions, which together form a majority, have reached agreement. The obligation has therefore been entered into towards those factions and has as its content the agreement of the programs that the factions have arrived at. my view on