Following a corporate career and a decade in the Dutch Senate and House of Representatives, Hoekstra served as Minister of Finance in the third Rutte cabinet from 2017 to 2022 and Leader of the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) from 2020 to 2023.

Hoekstra took elective courses in law and economics at LUISS in Rome in 2000, before he obtained an MBA degree at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France and Singapore in 2005.

Hoekstra was also chairman of the supervisory board of the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam and ambassador for the Prinses Maxima Centrum for pediatric oncology.

[13] In January 2019, Hoekstra criticised the European Commission for its decision not to launch a disciplinary procedure against Italy over its deficit and debt, stating "It's a missed opportunity to do the right thing for the long run",[14] a concern later repeated by Prime Minister Mark Rutte at the World Economic Forum.

[17] Since 2018, Hoekstra has been chairing a newly established, informal grouping of small northern and Baltic EU member states – Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania and the Netherlands –[18] to find common cause on the direction of eurozone reforms.

[20] In 2019, Hoekstra joined forces with his counterparts of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Latvia in pushing for the establishment of new EU supervisory authority that would take over from states the oversight of money laundering at financial firms.

[24][25] On 11 December 2020, a day after Hugo de Jonge announced his resignation as Leader of the Christian Democratic Appeal, the party's board unanimously nominated Hoekstra to succeed him.

[28] On 5 October 2021, Paul Tang, a Dutch centre-left MEP who chairs the European Parliament's tax committee, argued that Hoekstra should symbolically stay out of the EU tax-haven decision.

[31][32] In August 2023, it became known that Hoekstra would receive the Dutch nomination as climate commissioner for the EU to succeed Frans Timmermans, who had withdrawn from the position to become the leader of the joint GroenLinks–PvdA alliance.

[35] He was the EU's main negotiator at a United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP) in Dubai the following month, at which participating countries agreed to shift away from using fossil fuels.

[36] Hoekstra later complained that Chinese state-sponsored manufacturers were flooding the European market for renewable energy products such as solar panels, electric vehicles, and electrolysers, and he said that action had to be taken.