Jan Pieter Balkenende Jr. ( ; born 7 May 1956), commonly known as Jan Peter Balkenende, is a Dutch jurist and

politician A politician is a person who participates in Public policy, policy-making processes, usually holding an elective position in government. Politicians represent the people, make decisions, and influence the formulation of public policy. The roles ...

of the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) who served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 22 July 2002 to 14 October 2010. Balkenende studied History and Law at the Free University Amsterdam obtaining Master of Arts and

law Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior, with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been variously described as a science and as the ar ...

degrees and worked as a legal counsel for the academic council of his alma mater before finishing his thesis and graduated as a PhD in governmental studies and worked as a professor of Christian theology at his alma mater from April 1993 until May 2002. After the election of 1998, Balkenende was elected as a Member of the House of Representatives on 19 May 1998 and served as a frontbencher and spokesperson for

Finances Finance refers to monetary resources and to the study and discipline of money, currency, assets and liabilities. As a subject of study, is a field of Business Administration wich study the planning, organizing, leading, and controlling of an o ...

and as deputy parliamentary leader. After

Party Leader In a governmental system, a party leader acts as the official representative of their political party, either to a legislature or to the electorate. Depending on the country, the individual colloquially referred to as the "leader" of a politica ...

and Parliamentary leader, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer stepped down before an upcoming

election An election is a formal group decision-making process whereby a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold Public administration, public office. Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative d ...

Balkenende announced his candidacy and was selected as his successor on 1 October 2001. For the election of 2002, Balkenende served as lead candidate and after a cabinet formation with the Pim Fortuyn List and the

People's Party for Freedom and Democracy The People's Party for Freedom and Democracy ( , VVD) is a Conservative liberalism, conservative-liberal List of political parties in the Netherlands, political party in the Netherlands. The VVD, whose forerunner was the Freedom Party (Netherl ...

formed the Cabinet Balkenende I and became Prime Minister of the Netherlands taking office 22 July 2002. The cabinet of Balkenende I fell just 87 days into its term. For the election of 2003, Balkenende again served as lead candidate and following a cabinet formation with the

and Democrats 66, they formed the Cabinet Balkenende II and continued as prime minister. This second cabinet fell on 30 June 2006 and was replaced with the caretaker Cabinet Balkenende III on 7 July 2006. For the election of 2006, Balkenende once again served as lead candidate and following a cabinet formation with Labour Leader Wouter Bos and fellow Christian-democrats, formed the Cabinet Balkenende IV and continued as prime minister for another term. This fourth cabinet fell exactly 3 years into its term. For the election of 2010, Balkenende once again served as lead candidate but suffered a large defeat and announced his retirement and stepped down as Leader on 9 June 2010. Balkenende left office following the installation of the Cabinet Rutte I on 14 October 2010. Balkenende retired from active politics at 54 and became active in the private sector as a corporate director and also works as a professor of Governance, Institutions and Internationalisation at the Erasmus University Rotterdam since December 2010. During his premiership, his cabinets were responsible for several major reforms to the education system, immigration laws and reducing the deficit following the

2008 financial crisis The 2008 financial crisis, also known as the global financial crisis (GFC), was a major worldwide financial crisis centered in the United States. The causes of the 2008 crisis included excessive speculation on housing values by both homeowners ...

. He is the fourth longest-serving Prime Minister after World War II, and his premiership is consistently regarded both by scholars and the public to have been above average. Balkenende was granted the honorary title of

Minister of State Minister of state is a designation for a government minister, with varying meanings in different jurisdictions. In a number of European countries, the title is given as an honorific conferring a higher rank, often bestowed upon senior minister ...

on 14 October 2022 exactly twelve years after leaving office.

Early life

Jan Pieter Balkenende Jr. was born on 7 May 1956 in Biezelinge in the

province A province is an administrative division within a country or sovereign state, state. The term derives from the ancient Roman , which was the major territorial and administrative unit of the Roman Empire, Roman Empire's territorial possessions ou ...

Zeeland Zeeland (; ), historically known in English by the Endonym and exonym, exonym Zealand, is the westernmost and least populous province of the Netherlands. The province, located in the southwest of the country, borders North Brabant to the east ...

in a family belonging to the Reformed faith, the son of Jan Pieter Balkenende Sr. a cereal grains merchant and Thona Johanna Sandee, a teacher. During his childhood, Balkenende was an active supporter of the Dutch football team

PSV Eindhoven Philips Sport Vereniging (; ), abbreviated as PSV and internationally known as PSV Eindhoven (), is a Dutch sports club from Eindhoven, Netherlands. It is best known for its professional association football, football department, which has pla ...

, and along with his father, he frequented many matches. He also regularly visited the local music school and theatre. Balkenende went to a Reformed Protestant primary school in Kapelle. He attended secondary school at the "Christian Lyceum for

" in

Goes The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES), operated by the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service division, supports weather fo ...

, graduating in 1974. He studied at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam where he received an MA degree in history in 1980, subsequently an

LLM A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with Self-supervised learning, self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially Natural language generation, language g ...

degree in Dutch law in 1982, and finally a PhD in law in 1992. Balkenende resides with his wife, Bianca Hoogendijk, and his daughter, Amelie, in Capelle aan den IJssel. During his tenure as prime minister, he did not use the Catshuis, the formal residency of the Prime Minister.

Early political career

Silvio Berlusconi and Jan Peter Balkenende

Aleksander Kwasniewski i Jan Peter Balkenende

Vladimir Putin in the Netherlands 25 November 2004-2

Cristina Fernandez and Dutch PM Jan Peter Balkenende

He began his career on the staff of the research institute of the CDA and as a city councilman in

Amstelveen Amstelveen () is a List of municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality and List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city in the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of North Holland, Netherlands, with a population of 95,996 as of 202 ...

. As a councilman, he proposed the Krokettenmotie, which gave council members the right to a croquette if the council went past 23:00, and it was passed. In 1992, he received his PhD with a thesis on "Governance regulation and social organisations" (Overheidsregelgeving en maatschappelijke organisaties), which was strongly inspired by the Communitarian ideas of Amitai Etzioni. One year later in 1993, he became an extraordinary professor of Christian-Social Thought at the Free University of Amsterdam. Balkenende first entered the

House of Representatives House of Representatives is the name of legislative bodies in many countries and sub-national entities. In many countries, the House of Representatives is the lower house of a bicameral legislature, with the corresponding upper house often ...

on 19 May 1998 while the CDA was in opposition. He became the CDA's financial spokesman and was also involved with social affairs, justice, and domestic affairs. In this role, he advocated a substantial reduction of the national debt and sound public finances. He was elected Chairman of the CDA parliamentary fraction on 1 October 2001, succeeding Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. On 3 November 2001, he was appointed lead candidate for the CDA in the tumultuous May 2002 parliamentary elections. These elections restored the CDA's former position as the largest political party in the House of Representatives.

Prime Minister of the Netherlands

First cabinet

On 4 July 2002, Queen Beatrix asked Balkenende to form a new government after the general elections following the resignation of Prime Minister Wim Kok. The coalition cabinet included the Pim Fortuyn List (LPF) party, whose leader (

Pim Fortuyn Wilhelmus Simon Petrus Fortuijn, known as Pim Fortuyn (; 19 February 1948 – 6 May 2002), was a Dutch politician, author, civil servant, businessman, sociologist and academic who founded the party Pim Fortuyn List (Lijst Pim Fortuyn or LPF) in ...

) was assassinated just days before the election. It collapsed after just 87 days in office because of internal conflicts within the LPF that destabilised the government.

Second cabinet

After early elections in 2003, Balkenende formed his second government with the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), the liberal

(VVD) and the progressive liberal D66. Once again leader of a centre-right coalition, Balkenende's policies centred on reform of the Dutch public services, social security, pre-pension facilities, public health, reducing crime, a tough immigration policy and historically large cuts in public spending. The measures gave rise to large public anger and bad results in opinion polls for his CDA party. While his party remained the largest Dutch delegation in the

European Parliament The European Parliament (EP) is one of the two legislative bodies of the European Union and one of its seven institutions. Together with the Council of the European Union (known as the Council and informally as the Council of Ministers), it ...

after the European elections, beating the general expectation of a huge loss in parliamentary seats, the party suffered strong losses during Dutch municipal elections of 2006, losing their position as the largest party in many municipalities. Despite his unpopularity among Dutch voters (polls in 2006 showed that only 26–33% of the voters had confidence in him as prime minister), his position as leader of the CDA remained stable. In the beginning of 2006, some CDA members tried to replace Balkenende as leader with Agriculture Minister Cees Veerman. Veerman did not accept the proposition and offered his support to Balkenende. Balkenende's popularity recovered since then, surpassing that of his main competitor Wouter Bos in the autumn of 2006. By then, 53% preferred Balkenende as Prime Minister of the Netherlands while 40% preferred Bos. The switch in public opinion is sometimes explained by the steady recovery of the Dutch economy during the last year of his administration and the positive effects of the reformed policy of the Balkenende cabinet, combined with declining confidence in Bos as a good alternative for the position of prime minister. On 1 July 2004, Balkenende took up the rotating presidency of the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are Geography of the European Union, located primarily in Europe. The u ...

Third cabinet

On 30 June 2006, the Democrats 66, the smallest coalition party, withdrew its support of the government over the way Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk had handled the crisis around the naturalisation of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a member of the House of Representatives. Balkenende resigned for the second time as Prime Minister of the Netherlands, announced early elections and presented his third government a week later. This

rump cabinet A rump cabinet is a Cabinet (government), cabinet from which one or more Coalition government, coalition partners have withdrawn and which has minority support in parliament. Netherlands In the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Netherlands a rump cabine ...

, formed of a minority coalition of CDA and VVD, stayed in office until the elections of 22 November 2006.

Fourth cabinet

Though his old coalition partners, VVD and D66, fared badly in the parliamentary elections of 2006, Balkenende managed to defend the dominant position of his CDA. Needing alternative coalition partners to form a new majority government, he formed a social-Christian coalition with the Labour Party (PvdA) and the orthodox-Protestant Christian Union. The

Fourth Balkenende cabinet The fourth Balkenende cabinet was the Executive (government), executive branch of the Politics of the Netherlands, Government of the Netherlands from 22 February 2007 until 14 October 2010. The Cabinet of the Netherlands, cabinet was formed by ...

was formed after Balkenende was appointed ''

formateur A formateur (French for "someone who forms, who constitutes") is a politician who is appointed to lead the formation of a coalition government, after either a general election or the collapse of a previous government. The role of the formateur i ...

'' by Queen Beatrix on 9 February 2007. His cabinet was announced on 13 February and was scheduled to be in office until 2011, but it fell in the early morning of 20 February 2010 as the result of disagreement between the majority of the parliament and the coalition partners CDA and PvdA over the extension of the Dutch ISAF-mission in

Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. It is bordered by Pakistan to the Durand Line, east and south, Iran to the Afghanistan–Iran borde ...

. In contrast to the formation of a new caretaker cabinet with full responsibility (Balkenende III after the fall of Balkenende II), Balkenende IV continued as a demissionary cabinet, a caretaker cabinet with limited responsibility. Balkenende government opposed Ukraine and Georgia becoming NATO action plan members at 2008 Bucharest summit. "Ukraine is seen by Russia as part of its own historic and cultural domain," Dutch politician stated.

2010 election and resignation

Despite serious criticism by former prime ministers from the CDA, Balkenende was the Christian Democratic Appeal lead candidate for the Dutch general election of 2010. Balkenende raised mild controversy during his campaign for the 2010 Dutch elections. While appearing in a television show, Balkenende was asked by a female presenter what parties he would most likely form a

coalition A coalition is formed when two or more people or groups temporarily work together to achieve a common goal. The term is most frequently used to denote a formation of power in political, military, or economic spaces. Formation According to ''A G ...

with. Balkenende first gave evasive answers, then when asked again by the presenter, responded saying "U kijkt zo lief" (English: "You look so cute"). The comment was regarded as

sexist Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but primarily affects women and girls. It has been linked to gender roles and stereotypes, and may include the belief that one sex or gender is int ...

and criticised by several people, including Opzij chief-editor Margriet van der Linden and

GroenLinks (, ; GL) is a Green politics, green List of political parties in the Netherlands, political party in the Netherlands. It was formed on 1 March 1989 from the merger of four Left-wing politics, left-wing parties: the Communist Party of the Neth ...

leader Femke Halsema (who stated that "

he prime minister He or HE may refer to: Language * He (letter), the fifth letter of the Semitic abjads * He (pronoun), a pronoun in Modern English * He (kana), one of the Japanese kana (へ in hiragana and ヘ in katakana) * Ge (Cyrillic), a Cyrillic letter cal ...

deserves a knee to the groin" (in Dutch: "een knietje verdient")). Balkenende apologised for the comment later. On 9 June 2010, Balkenende resigned his position as leader of the CDA as well as his seat in the newly elected parliament, taking political responsibility for the CDA's disappointing election results in the 2010 general election.

Other issues

In 2004, during his second cabinet, Balkenende was diagnosed with necrotising fasciitis. He was treated through surgical debridement and made a full recovery after several weeks in hospital. On 4 June 2005, the Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs Karel De Gucht said in the Flemish newspaper ''Het Laatste Nieuws'' (The Latest News) that "Balkenende is a mix of

Harry Potter ''Harry Potter'' is a series of seven Fantasy literature, fantasy novels written by British author J. K. Rowling. The novels chronicle the lives of a young Magician (fantasy), wizard, Harry Potter (character), Harry Potter, and his friends ...

and a petty rigid bourgeois mentality". This comparison caused a small diplomatic controversy, and the Belgian ambassador had to apologise to Ben Bot, the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs. Retired deputy prime minister Hans Wiegel commented he preferred Harry Potter to '' Manneken Pis''. Balkenende has a close relationship with the Dutch people from

Suriname Suriname, officially the Republic of Suriname, is a country in northern South America, also considered as part of the Caribbean and the West Indies. It is a developing country with a Human Development Index, high level of human development; i ...

and the

Netherlands Antilles The Netherlands Antilles (, ; ), also known as the Dutch Antilles, was a constituent Caribbean country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands consisting of the islands of Saba (island), Saba, Sint Eustatius, and Sint Maarten in the Lesser Antilles, ...

. He has visited several Keti Koti celebrations in recent years. Balkenende's

nickname A nickname, in some circumstances also known as a sobriquet, or informally a "moniker", is an informal substitute for the proper name of a person, place, or thing, used to express affection, playfulness, contempt, or a particular character trait ...

s were "JP" and "Harry Potter", among others. He was a member of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands and, since 1 May 2004, a member of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands.

Honours and decorations

National honours

Order of Orange-Nassau ribbon - Knight Grand Cross

Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Orange-Nassau (23 November 2010)

Foreign honours

* : Commander of the Order of Leopold * : Grand Cross of the Order of the Southern Cross * : Grand Cross of the Order of Bernardo O'Higgins * : Grand Cross of the

Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany The Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (, or , BVO) is the highest state decoration, federal decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany. It may be awarded for any field of endeavor. It was created by the first List of president ...

* : Companion of the Order of the Star of Ghana *

House of Habsburg The House of Habsburg (; ), also known as the House of Austria, was one of the most powerful Dynasty, dynasties in the history of Europe and Western civilization. They were best known for their inbreeding and for ruling vast realms throughout ...

: Honorary Knight of the Order of St. George * : Grand Cordon of the Order of Independence * : Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg * : Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of PolandDecoration of former Dutch Prime Minister H.E. Jan Peter Balkenende
– website Embassy of the Republic of Poland in The Hague * : Grand Cross of the Order of the Star of Romania * : Commander Grand Cross of the Order of the Polar Star

Awards

* Golden Honorary Medal, of the municipality

(Netherlands, 30 May 1998)

Honorary degrees

* Honorary doctorate in laws, Hope College (

Holland, Michigan Holland is a city in Ottawa County, Michigan, Ottawa and Allegan County, Michigan, Allegan counties in the U.S. state of Michigan. Located in the West Michigan, western region of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, Lower Peninsula, the city is si ...

, United States, 7 September 2012) * Honorary doctorate in human letters,

Hofstra University Hofstra University is a Private university, private research university in Hempstead, New York, United States. It originated in 1935 as an extension of New York University and became an independent college in 1939. Comprising ten schools, includ ...

( Hempstead, New York, United States, 22 May 2011) * Honorary doctorate in sociology, Yonsei University (

Seoul Seoul, officially Seoul Special Metropolitan City, is the capital city, capital and largest city of South Korea. The broader Seoul Metropolitan Area, encompassing Seoul, Gyeonggi Province and Incheon, emerged as the world's List of cities b ...

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the southern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders North Korea along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, with the Yellow Sea to the west and t ...

, 27 April 2010) * Honorary doctorate in systems, design and management, Keio University (Tokyo, Japan, 27 October 2009) * Honorary doctorate in theology, Károli Gáspár University of the Hungarian Reformed Church (

Budapest Budapest is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns of Hungary, most populous city of Hungary. It is the List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, tenth-largest city in the European Union by popul ...

Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...

, 10 October 2005)