Wopke Bastiaan Hoekstra (; born 30 September 1975) is a Dutch politician. He served as second Deputy Prime Minister of the Netherlands and Minister of Foreign Affairs in the fourth Rutte cabinet between 10 January 2022 and 1 September 2023. He has also been Leader of the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) since 2020. Hoekstra had previously served as Minister of Finance in the third Rutte cabinet from 2017 to 2022. He is nominated to take on the role of Frans Timmermans as EU Commissioner, being responsible for climate action; a petition has been started against Hoekstra's nomination due to his past work for Shell and his decisions that backed oil explorations in the Netherlands.
Early life
Hoekstra was born in Bennekom, Gelderland, and studied law at Leiden University from 1994 and obtained his LLM degree in 2001. He also studied history at this university for one year, in which he received a propaedeutic diploma in 1997. During his student days in Leiden he was president of the fraternity Minerva. He took elective courses in law and economics at LUISS in Rome in 2000, and obtained an MBA degree at INSEAD in Fontainebleau and Singapore in 2005.
Before he joined the government, Hoekstra was a partner with the consultancy firm McKinsey and chairman of the supervisory board of the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam. Until 2006, he worked for Shell in Berlin, Hamburg and Rotterdam.
Political career
Early beginnings
Hoekstra was the treasurer of the CDA-affiliated foundation Eduardo Freistichting and board member of the local CDA association in Amsterdam. Ahead of the 2010 elections, Hoekstra was offered a spot on the party's candidate list for the House of Representatives, but he did not accept it, preferring to continue working at McKinsey.
In December 2010, it was announced that Hoekstra was a candidate for the Senate election of 2011, for which he was indeed elected, and sworn in on 7 June 2011 as its youngest member. Membership of the Senate is a part-time position, and therefore Hoekstra continued as consultant with McKinsey. On 6 December of the same year, he gave his maiden speech during the debate on a tax-related topic. In the Senate, he stood out as the party's spokesperson for pensions. He was not reluctant to deviate from the party line on a number of ethical issues: he was the only CDA senator to vote in favour of a ban on civil servants refusing to marry same-sex couples (weigerambtenaar) and to vote in favour of legal status for lesbian parents (meemoederschap). He was reelected in 2015. Ahead of the 2017 general election, Hoekstra helped writing the CDA's manifesto.
Hoekstra was nominated by the parliamentary press in 2013 as 'political talent of the year' and in 2016 he was the second-youngest person in the De Volkskrant top-200 of influential Dutch people. In 2016, he was one of the lead architects of the party platform.
Minister of Finance, 2017–2022
Hoekstra was appointed Minister of Finance in the third Rutte cabinet on 26 October 2017, succeeding Jeroen Dijsselbloem.
At his first meeting with other EU Ministers of Finance in Brussels in 2017, Hoekstra expressed scepticism about eurozone reform, saying that budgetary discipline in other eurozone states was necessary first. Hoekstra reiterated his reluctance on eurozone reform at a meeting of the financial council of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany in 2018, warning against reforms initiated by Germany and France without the support of other member states or the public. Furthermore, at a visit to his German counterpart Olaf Scholz in March 2018, Hoekstra explained that he is reluctant about plans for an eurozone budget, an eurozone finance minister and a common deposit insurance scheme. After Germany and France had outlined a series of eurozone reforms in June 2018, Hoekstra led a coalition of twelve other member states in opposition to such reforms, which would later be referred to as the New Hanseatic League. In January 2019, Hoekstra criticised the European Commission for its decision not to launch a disciplinary procedure against Italy over its deficit and debt, stating "It’s a missed opportunity to do the right thing for the long run", a concern later repeated by Prime Minister Mark Rutte at the World Economic Forum.
During his time in office, Hoekstra oversaw the government's purchase of a stake in Air France KLM equal to that of the French government to increase its influence in the carrier's business operations in 2019. That same year, led negotiations with the German government on the possibility of buying a stake in grid operator TenneT.