What was the Point of this Excercise?

Dutch Prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende announced to  Queen Beatrix that his cabinet resigned over the phone (man! that does seem to be a trend these days, doesn’t it? Prime ministers making such large announcements and/or requests to their figure head superiors over the phone. Yeesh!). Yes, this coalition fell two days shy of its’ third year in power.

The Dutch Coalition Government had voted in favor of pulling the troops out of Afghanistan in August 2010 last October, but Balkenende’s center-right Christian Democratic Party had not endorsed the vote.  Finance minister and leader of the second largest party in the coalition, Labour, Wouter Bos demanded the Prime minister rule on this once and for all.  When they failed to reach any kind of agreement, Bos announced he was pulling his  Labour party out of the coalition.

With the breakdown of the coalition,  the 2000 Dutch troops will be going back home in August 2010 anyway.

With elections that could take place in the mid year, it would seem that either yet another coalition government will be formed or according to Reuter’s, a potential minority Christian Democratic government being support by Right leaning  Freedom Party led by Geert Wilders, an Islamophobe who is against the Afghan mission.

Here is a  list of potential players in Dutch politics and their main political parties.

With the inevitable departure of Dutch troops from Afghanistan and the next election yielding either pretty much the same type of coalition government or minority government led by Christian Democratic Pary, what was the point of  PM Balkenende’s  hold-out from that October vote on the extension of Dutch presence in that senseless war?