Two Limburgers who again were the protagonists in the general political considerations: the aggressive borching of the North Limburger Geert Wilders contra the professoral thoughtfulness of the South Limburger Frans Timmermans.
They once dealt with each other as young politicians, but there is nothing to notice. Timmermans has sometimes told about that past, never Wilders. Reason to suspect that Wilders has received a greater personal aversion from Timmermans than the other way around.
This history makes their confrontations in parliament all the more interesting. Also this week Wilders scolded his fellow countryman’s skin again, he characterized him as a job hunter who had abandoned his losing PvdA by leaving for ‘Brussels’. He had done that at Rutte’s request, Timmermans responded.
Timmermans was one of the few party leaders who went into the counterattack. He criticized the immigrant hatred of Wilders (“We don’t have a men’s problem in the Netherlands, but an immigrant and Islam problem,” said Wilders) and his lack of self-criticism. “Don’t deliver anything and blame the others,” said Timmermans, “You are the runaway … Too cowardly to take responsibility.” Wilders: “You helped the Netherlands to the Philistines.”
Wilders is in his element as long as he can generalize and magic with figures about immigrant misconduct, which he receives from his favorite expert Dr. Jan van de Beek (“Doctor van de Beek” he calls him), previously accused by migration experts such as Hein de Haas and Leo Lucassen “.
As soon as Wilders has to leave that path in the debate, he becomes vulnerable. Timmermans made good use of this by attacking his behavior in the matter of the sick children in Gaza. Wilders believes, like the VVD and the SGP, that those children should not be brought to the Netherlands for expert treatment. According to them, that must happen ‘in the region’.
Timmermans denounced the unclearness of that setup. Why did other countries do not want to take care of children and the Netherlands? Timmermans urgently asked Wilders to give up his resistance in the interest of those children. Wilders then starts to look Norser and mess with his papers – a political animal that smells the danger: here he threatens to be put away before the people, his Dutch people, as a cold, powerful man.
Timmermans has always shown himself with the fate of Wilders as a threatened politician. He now also called it “terrible” that satirics like Arjen Lubach do not dare to make jokes about Islam, as Lubach admitted in a podcast itself. Yet Timmermans is not pessimistic about Islam in the Netherlands – he had noticed how Muslims could make hard jokes.
Timmermans casually said that he himself reports “weekly” reports for death threat. Maybe he and Wilders should drink that beer from the past. And then toast on one, what will we call it as neutral as possible … New Netherlands?