Dutch Seal Coalition Deal Record Nine Months After Vote

Dutch political parties agreed on Monday to form a coalition government that will hand Prime Minister Mark Rutte a fourth term in office, a record 271 days after elections in March.

Four parties -- Rutte's centre-right VVD, the progressive D66, the centre-right CDA and the conservative Christen Unie -- agreed on the text of a deal that will go before parliament on Wednesday.

But the Netherlands, facing challenges including a spike in Covid cases and riots over virus restrictions, will have to wait until January for its new government while the parties select ministers.

"It's a good agreement," Rutte told reporters as he left the talks, while refusing to give further details.

Sigrid Kaag, whose D66 party won the second most seats in the March 17 election, added that it was a "nice and balanced accord".

The new coalition's policies are likely to include extending free childcare, investing billions of euros to tackle climate change and a housing shortage, nuclear energy research and road pricing, Dutch media said.

It was being billed as a "recovery government" that would help the Netherlands back on its feet after the pandemic, and to spend heavily on "problems that have not been solved for a long time," said public broadcaster NOS.

Negotiations have dragged on since the elections, taking until the autumn even to agree on which parties would form the coalition, let alone which policies they would adopt.

In late October the negotiations beat the Netherlands' previous record for coalition talks of 225 days as the parties wrangled still more.

That record was set in 2017 for the formation of Rutte's last cabinet.

Rutte and his third cabinet have stayed on in a caretaker capacity since they resigned en masse in mid-January over a scandal in which thousands of parents were wrongly accused, in some cases after racial profiling, of fraudulently claiming child allowance.

But the deal for a fourth coalition will confirm Rutte -- dubbed the "Teflon prime minister" for his ability to dodge scandals -- as Europe's second longest-serving leader after Hungarian premier Viktor Orban.

The four parties are now due to present the deal to their lawmakers on Tuesday before it goes to parliament for a debate on Thursday.

The government could be sworn in on January 10, NOS reported.

The new Dutch foreign minister is likely to be Kaag, of D66, according to Dutch media, despite the fact that she herself resigned from the same position over the Netherlands' handling of evacuations from Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August.

Current health minister Hugo de Jonge, the public face of the government's increasingly unpopular coronavirus response, is unlikely to continue, meaning that a press conference with Rutte on Tuesday on Covid could be his last in the post.

The Netherlands has been hit by its worst riots in decades this year over its coronavirus restrictions, which now include a virtual nighttime lockdown and limits on the numbers of home visitors.