Are there, also in the Netherlands, politicians you trust, not even so much for what they say, but how they do it? Last week I wrote about Trump’s self -in love, and especially: how those sheet stals, narcissistic presentation is busy conquering the political world. The question of whether Trumps really see him as an example, or especially fearing for his whimsical power, can hardly be answered. Power corrupts and presidential, American power does that exponentially.
Following the ‘peace article’ by Willem Schinkel, a week ago in NRCI tried to come to a psychological profile from Putin. It is significant that I cannot ‘read’ the Russian leader at all. His face is flat, also due to cosmetic procedures, but what is more: as transparent as Trump is, Putin is so unpairable. A perfect Enigma. The inscrutable leader fits with an undemocratic country. You can’t even attribute Putin a Pokerface, because such a person tries to hide his feelings. At Putin the question is: are they then?
Willem Schinkel can argue for “de-escalation” and “focused on peace” in order to “come up with what the other motivates.” But from Putin’s mouth only comes the official propaganda, which thus overwrites Schinkel: “In the case of Russia, those centuries of Western European attempts to conquer Russia.” Justifiably Tommy Wieringa registers de Volkskrant: “I get no further than the disastrous invasion of Napoleon in 1812 and that of Hitler in 1941 – not what you call” centuries -long attempts. ” Was Will Putin? Schinkel apparently knows.
It is almost impossible for Westerners to regard colonialism differently than as self -criticism, and no matter how understandable, such an attitude blindly makes Russian colonialism. That blindness too is a frightened form of self -delusions: as bad as the West is, nobody else succeeds.
Now closer to home: oddly enough, Trump is psychologically most like the murdered Pim Fortuyn; For both, I overturned to see the immediate desire a little less of their whimsical self. My ideal politician is not an open book, it must also be possible to close again. We are not friends, I can at most vote for such a person.
Now we Dutch, especially since Fortuyn, know the idea that the modest presentation is suspected, because an expression of ‘false modesty’. Let’s face it: dogs can be false, for the time being, modesty is not biting.
Of course the politician uses a public face, nobody goes into politics without being able to add anything. The politician has to get up for the speech while the rest of the table stays. It doesn’t work without a urge. But the most powerful man on earth who always says: “I am the most powerful man on earth,” you have to avoid.
Because we live in a coalitie country, and that is how we detonate the Egomaniac style of Wilders alone, I want to nominate two politicians that I keep high on that shaky scale of credibility: Jesse Klaver and Henri Bontenbal.
The first arrived in his third place on the list of GroenLinks-Pvda and let Timmermans take the lead, and Bontenbal took over a bankrupt store without immediately throwing everything in the total ‘sale’.
Both have a style that is fried democratic. And sometimes it even happens that the self -reflection wins the political bluff for a while.
Stephan Sanders is an essayist.