Did Netherlands PM clean up after spilling his drink at G20 summit in Delhi? Fact Check

The G20 summit was held in the national capital, Delhi, on September 09-10. One video allegedly from the summit is going viral on social media. The viral video shows the Prime Minister of the Netherlands spilling his drink and cleaning it up himself.

The PM of Netherlands- See and learn what he is doing after his mistake during G20 meeting.👍. pic.twitter.com/xFZeXzXumt

— Sudarshan Dhital (@drspdhital) September 14, 2023

The video is also doing rounds on WhatsApp. The video claims that:

“It happened in G-20 summit New Delhi 2023, The PM of Netherland had a Tea cup in his hand, fell by mistake. He didn’t call volunteers to cleanup. Please see what happened next. This is a lesson to our Nation Political People.”

The video has also been shared here, here, and here with the same claim.

Digiteye India received a WhatsApp request to fact check this viral video.

FACT CHECK

The Digiteye India team used inVid, a video verification tool, to divide the video into multiple keyframes. We used one of the keyframes and ran a reverse image search on Google. One result led us to a video dating back to 2018.

We used keywords, narrowed our search to 2018, and ran a custom Google search. One of the results led us to this article by ABC News. The report was from June 5, 2018, and showed the Netherlands PM cleaning up his spilled tea by himself. It stated that Mark Rutte accidentally dropped his cup at the Dutch Parliament building. He acted quickly and mopped the floor rather than leaving it to the housekeeping staff. While he was cleaning, the cleaning crew cheered him on. The report had added pictures which looked similar to the ones in the video.

We ran a similar search on YouTube. One of the results led us to this video by Euronews. The video titled, Watch: Dutch PM Rutte applauded after clearing up own coffee spill, shows the same video as was used in the viral claim. The video dates back to June 5, 2018.

Hence, the old video is being circulated again with a false claim in the context of G-20 meeting.

CLAIM: The Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, spilled his drink at the G20 Summit in Delhi and cleaned it by himself.

CONCLUSION: The video is from 2018 and it shows Mark Rutte cleaning up the spilled drink at the Dutch Parliament.

RATING: Misinterpretation –