Let me put it another way : you have a couple forced to marry by their parents , one is not happy because he works more and earn more , and the whole money goes into a joint account . The unhappy one goes to his own parents and convince them to secretly buy part of the house to they live in to put pressure on the other spouse. . Now everybody do not trust one another and this is supposed to help the marriage ?
I am not sure the KLM staff remembers that AF was close to collapsing a few years back , AF447 did not help. . Any airline can go down nowadays, and KLM staff should realise that if AF goes down , they will likely go down too. Nationalism is not the answer anymore. Helping AF gets to the level of KLM is the answer, Not nationalism . The Dutch may think they have made a great coup yesterday , but knowing the French mentality, this will be counterproductive .
Sad day in fact.

If it was the other way around people in France would cheer the goverment, they would go on the street to celebrate. The French goverment has a lot of power within the AFKL Group and in Holland KLM is too big to become Sabena 2. 300000 households are living from Schiphol and the Dutch goverment showed it's theeth. It's just protection of the Dutch market. The French have invented this. When everything is at ease again it's likely these shares will be sold again and hopefully the French gov will too.
KLM should never merged with AF anyway, this was waiting to happen. The biggest surprise is that a Canadian triggert this... He's the fool who gives pilots a 7% increase on their paycheck within no time while at KLM it was cut by Elbers and with more hours working for the Dutchies. This is no way to run a business profitable by Smith and try to steal departments from KLM. The best thing for KLM is to look for a different partner something they should have done long ago. Air France won't be Swissair 2 because the French goverment will put in money and don't care if that's allowed or not. That's the only way Air France will survive without KLM.

Better check your sources next time then cause you're wrong

I hazard a guess that Elbers "refused" (allegedly) to become AFKL CEO last year, not because he did not want, but perhaps he was not yet fully ready at the time. In other words the most recent event (the Dutch gov't buying shares of AFKL) would have been in preparation for quite some time ... order of 1 year perhaps?

Everybody in KLM has had a pay rise, this month a rise of 1%.

Nope: he said he would accept if they would keep the same two CEO set up with Leo van Wijk and the then AF CEO. This worked well but also kept enough distance between the companies. It has been KLM's fear for years that there will be a full integration and that the french part of the company will burn all the KLM reserves and profits...

You mean the Dutch are going to leave the EU in the end ? :E

PS : Seen your pseudo here I could not resist the smile of the analogy with the real Aston Martin share price that went down 21% today. Sorry for you , really . Price for leaving the EU perhaps . Nationalism again ..

Can't believe there were so many shares floating on the open market and that they could be bought without skyrocketing the price, so the question is, who sold those shares to the Dutch government?

There are always shares floating and available if the price is right. Investing parties (unlike strategic investors) make their shares available if they (or their computer algorithm they use!) feel that the price offered is better than what it is worth. This was clearly shown by the share price increase needed to make them available to the market and the immediate fall in the price when the story came out. :)

As already said, KLM tried many opportunities in the past; however, it never worked. So, the reason is likely on the Dutch side as the considered opportunities were not all French or in the same country....
Just as a reminder, KLM and the Dutch Government were very happy when Air France accepted to buy KLM some years ago; if not, KLM would not be here anymore.

Very true, I remember the discussions back then and why it failed with BA, the "preferred" partner.
Anyway I hear this morning that both French and Dutch Finance ministers are going to have a face to face meeting today to clarify a the situation. Hopefully hey will succeed and Ben Smith will stay ..

The dutch government buying a stake is mostly to do with the development of the KLM route network. The fear is that due to political pressure additional hub traffic (new destinations and increased frequencies) will be concentrated through CDG instead of AMS. For OD traffic from AMS these routes (which aren't viable without hub traffic) are an important part of making the Netherlands attractive for international companies. This is also why the moving of fleet planning and route development to France is such a sensitive issue.