Demissionary cabinet
type of caretaker government in the Netherlands
A demissionary cabinet (Dutch: demissionair kabinet) is a type of caretaker cabinet or provisional government in the Netherlands.
Overview
The Dutch demissionary cabinet continues the current government after a cabinet has ended. This can either be after completion of the full term, between general elections (when the new House of Representatives is installed) and the formation of a new cabinet, or after a cabinet crisis. In both cases the prime minister hands in the resignation of his cabinet to the Dutch monarch. The monarch will not accept full resignation until a new cabinet has been formed. Between the moment in which the prime minister hands in the resignation and the monarch installs a new cabinet, the cabinet is labelled demissionary. As a demissionary cabinet is considered a continuation of the previous cabinet, it is not counted as a new cabinet (e.g. Balkenende IV did not become Balkenende V when becoming demissionary).
By constitutional convention, a demissionary cabinet has fewer powers than a conventional cabinet. Besides organising elections, the main aim of a demissionary cabinet is to take care of ongoing business until the new cabinet comes into power.
“Demissionary cabinet” enters the record as type of caretaker government in the Netherlands. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Demissionary, cabinet and type can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 12, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5255440. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Demissionary cabinet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.