She does not follow in her father’s footsteps, but she rushes past them like an express train. Without any political experience, Sjoukje van Oosterhout, daughter of Emmer mayor Eric, is about to get a seat in the House of Representatives for GroenLinks-PvdA. “I have a huge drive to make a difference.”
32-year-old Sjoukje is in tenth place on her party’s election list. With the current seat polls, it seems that she can no longer avoid a place in The Hague politics. “I think it is a very different world,” she said in the Radio Drenthe program Cassata. “I have to learn to make compromises.”
Making compromises is exactly what she didn’t do in her previous career. In recent years, she led a team from Milieudefensie, which took major polluters such as Shell to court. “In court, I ensured that Shell, one of the most powerful companies in the world, had to change its course. I now hope to achieve that in The Hague.”
The passion to bring about change partly comes from her upbringing. “I grew up in East Groningen (Borgercompagnie, ed.), in an earthquake zone. What you saw there is that profit is preferred over people. That people are so overlooked and abandoned. That has driven me in everything I have done so far.”
It is not entirely surprising that climate becomes her spearhead in the House of Representatives. “You see that things are going backwards instead of forwards in many areas. You also see this with climate policy, the chance that we will achieve the climate goals is less than 5 percent. I thought: this has to change.”
There is a big difference between litigating against Shell and sitting as a representative in the House of Representatives. Her father Eric’s first reaction to her intention to enter politics in The Hague was: ‘Are you sure?’ “That is mainly due to all the negativity and hatred that you receive as a politician. Especially as a young woman,” Van Oosterhout explains.