Rob Jetten, a former junior athlete, was pictured last month in a sports magazine running merrily past the Dutch prime ministerial office in The Hague. The 38-year-old could be forgiven on Thursday for wondering when he will get the keys.
Such is the nature of Dutch politics that confirmation will not come for weeks or even months. But after a general election in which Jetten’s liberal-progressive D66 party made huge gains, he appears almost certain to be the Netherlands’ next prime minister.
Speaking to an ecstatic crowd of supporters on Wednesday night, Jetten said the backing for his pro-European, pro-climate party marked the end of the far right’s stranglehold over Dutch politics – and showed the rest of Europe that the centre can hold.
“We have turned the page on [Geert] Wilders,” he said as crowds waved the Dutch flag. The mainstream parties, he added, had proved it was “possible to beat the populist movement and to beat the extreme right”.
Democrats 66 was formed in 1966 by a group of dissatisfied Dutch activists in the Hotel Krasnapolsky in Amsterdam for every Dutch person “unsettled by the serious devaluation of our democracy”.
For many voters, the words seem to have resonated particularly strongly nearly six decades later after the first national government in which Wilders, the leader of the far-right, populistFreedom party (PVV) was at the centre of power.
That government collapsed after just 11 months, with Wilders pulling the plug in a row over his draconian anti-immigration plans which his three partners described as confected and “super-irresponsible”. The experience appears to have proved to be a salutary lesson for some of his supporters, with the PVV’s number of seats apparently falling from 37 to 26 – the same as Jetten’s D66.
As all the other main parties have ruled out working with Wilders, whichever of D66 and PVV comes out on top, it looks almost certain Jetten will become prime minister.
“I always thought he had it in him,” said Frank van der Endt, the chair of the D66’s national talent committee, on a jubilant night with 700 campaigners in Leiden.
Those who know Jetten well say he is “the real deal” – a genuine optimist not afraid of a tough debate and a down-to-earth pragmatist who can unite a splintered political scene. He worked as a manager at the ProRail national track network before going into politics and met his partner, the Argentinian hockey player Nicolás Keenan, in a supermarket. He would be the Netherlands’ first out gay prime minister.
After not quite breaking through under Sigrid Kaag, D66’s former leader, in 2021, the party learned from the populist toolkit with a simple Obama-esque “yes we can” (“het kan wél”) message.
“The democratic centrist parties have a tendency to make their message very cerebral, whereas populists make it emotional, exciting, with a clear hero – themselves – and a clear enemy: the political elite,” said Roy Kramer, the author of Why Wilders Does Win, at the October conference. “I say: start with common sense with the people in the middle.”
That was the tone of the campaign and although some doubted whether the party of civil servants could be a volkspartij (people’s party), Jetten was the one to try. An appearance on the TV gameshow The Smartest Person introduced Jetten to millions. In debates he was polished and ruthless when attacking Wilders.
“Rob has an incredibly positive story,” said Eindhoven’s deputy mayor, Robert Strijk, on election night. “And I think that is what the Netherlands has been yearning for after the past years where everything was negative, criticism, hate. He came with hope.”
Jetten said in a speech that he needed to unite the country where divisions had grown between those with overpriced assets and those struggling to find a home and where there was a battle for the densely populated space.
Speaking after exit polls that initially gave D66 the most seats, he said: “We might be the biggest in these results, but we know that millions of Dutch people today chose other parties.
“I feel a great responsibility in the period ahead, not just to be there for the D66 voter, but for all of the other Dutch people who made the effort to go to the polling booth and make use of their democratic duty … and that means leadership from all of the political forces in that political middle to seek cooperation.”
His words were generous and collaborative: the anti-Wilders rhetoric. He also kept to the optimism of his campaign, talking not just about what was going wrong in Dutch society but everything that was going right: low national debt, a well-functioning economy and relatively low unemployment, despite a housing crisis and low trust in politics.
D66’s former party chair, Victor Everhardt, said: “He has a story, a vision – and we need someone who can lead us to the future. And that’s why we have the slogan het kan wél … yes, we can.”
Only time will tell if Jetten can, or not.
First Appeared on
Source link
