Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced his resignation Monday after his coalition government failed to agree on austerity measures needed to bring the Dutch budget into conformity with the European Union's recently agreed-upon deficit limits.
Budget talks in the Netherlands broke down after Geert Wilders' euroskeptic Freedom Party abandoned negotiations over the weekend.
"The news from the Netherlands drives home the fact that this crisis is no longer a crisis of the periphery. It is often portrayed as the core counties versus the periphery, as the North versus the South, but the Netherlands is a core country in the North," said Raoul Ruparel, head of economic research at Open Europe, a think tank focused on the future direction of the European Union. "If the Netherlands gets into trouble, and if its government is seen to be a casualty of the euro crisis, then it drives home the idea that this is a crisis of the eurozone as a whole, of the European Union as a whole, versus a crisis of a few countries whose economies ran away from them."