There are so many debates now that the winners escape me. After SBS, RTL4, NPO, children, farmers and Christians, the districts now also have their own debate with the party leaders. What I learned from ‘The Debate of the South’ is that Jimmy Dijk (SP) compared Geert Wilders (PVV) with Bassie van Bassie & Adriaan. Wilders like Bassie lingered more than the plans of various parties in the field of healthcare and housing.
I attended a meet and greet by Geert Wilders at Food & Drinks De Vliegende Hollander on the famous Volendamse Dijk, just a PVV street in a PVV village. I wasn’t the only one: all the media were there. You can do a lot in a campaign, like most party leaders who sometimes only campaign with themselves, but you can do little or nothing like Wilders and then everyone will come. The effect will be the same. What was striking was that the media mainly focused on the eccentrics, such as an artist who previously followed Pim Fortuyn.
They were not floating voters who had come to De Vliegende Hollander, their opinion has been fixed for months and no debate can or could change that, so they did not watch it. Geert Wilders had come to remind them that they have to vote on Wednesday, and in return he treated them to free fish and beer. In return he received typical Dutch pictures of traditional costumes, fishing boats and Dutch flags and that has proven to work well with our voters. We love ourselves very much and the tricolor apparently belongs to that. In addition to right-wing extremists, Rob Jetten (D66) and Henri Bontenbal (CDA) also like to pose with a Dutch flag nowadays, but nowhere as much as in Volendam and the surrounding area.
None of the journalists heard anything new in that fish shop, no one expected to hear anything new in advance and yet everyone wanted to be there only to find out together that they had heard nothing. If they wanted to map the PVV support base, then let them do so, because an experienced fisherman could catch as many quotes as he wanted.
An image that stuck: a German journalist (ZDF) who bent down to push a microphone under the nose of a woman with a bowl of free kibbeling on her lap and then asked her about the well-known route. It almost made me happy, Dutch journalists are certainly not inferior to their European colleagues.
Marcel van Roosmalen writes a column on Mondays and Thursdays.
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