Europe’s longest serving leader after Angela Merkel, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte plays a paradoxical villain in the EU’s latest budget cliffhanger: lambasted for thwarting the bloc’s ambitious recovery fund, he is nonetheless cherished for holding eurosceptics at bay.

When France’s Emmanuel Macron won Chancellor Angela Merkel over to the idea of collective EU borrowing, breaking with decades of German economic orthodoxy, advocates of greater solidarity across the 27-nation bloc felt they had finally topped Mount Everest.