Rutte who deletes text messages and a senator who attacks parties anonymously

And so it turned out this week that The Hague’s desires for more transparency also evoke new seclusion. Good intentions that do not automatically bring the good cause closer.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte had to hear the news of in the Chamber de Volkskrant explain that for years he emptied his text inbox every day after forwarding relevant messages to his officials.

This was legally defensible. In 2019, the Council of State determined that the text and app traffic of drivers is in principle public, while the Archives Act offers drivers the freedom to determine for themselves which messages they keep.

But the fact that this prime minister, after years in which numerous ministers wavered because of withheld information, decided on his own what was destroyed, also found his own party vulnerable.

This simply no longer fits in the ideal image of an open and transparent government. Also because Rutte has an ambiguous reputation on this point: one time very open, the other completely closed. After the Allowances affair, he wanted to disclose all – state secret – minutes of the Council of Ministers about this scandal: he valued openness so much. But during corona he met almost weekly at the Catshuis, where no minutes were even taken.

It partly explained the suspicion in the House – and he should have saved his reaction, an attack on the distrust of parliament, for another moment.

Yet the issue of openness and transparency is not all about him. The growth of electronic communication in The Hague is enormous: the Inspectorate for Government Information and Heritage estimates, for example, that every year 1 billion emails dealing with the state. So everywhere, in parties and ministries, people want to subordinate openness to control over the facts.

If only because they find one aspect of their work even more important than openness: success.

I recently wrote here about a group employee of the BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) ​​who attacks journalists with an anonymous Twitter account, even after they have been threatened. Revealed in 2017 NRC that also Think had anonymous accounts at the time.

Because you also see ambiguity in The Hague on social media: the same politicians who demand openness from the government often go there anonymously to fight their competitors.

It even applies to one of the longest-serving members of the Senate, Niko Koffeman (64), senator of the Party for the Animals since 2007. A man who is ascribed a lot of influence in his party.

Koffeman has been very successful in society: he launched the idea of ​​the PvdD, devised the campaigns in the successful years of the SP, did the same for animal rights organisations, leads the Fauna Protection, co-founded the Vegetarian Butcher (sold for millions to Unilever), and was month in NRC with his new company, Those Vegan Cowboys, which is working on plant-based cheese.

People with experience in the PvdD tell how the party initiated the opening of dozens of ‘follow’ accounts on Twitter in January 2011: @volgzwaan, @FollowSheep, @FollowDog, etc. The aim was innocent – “more animal news” – and limited success : many accounts are barely active.

But one account, @FollowZwijn, still stands up for animals and the PvdD – and attacks competing parties.

2014, with a photo of a Canada goose: “There are politicians from CDA & PvdA who think of gassing when they see this.” 2018: “Former treasurer GroenLinks opts for hunter green.” 2019: “As far as Stientje van Veldhoven (then D66 State Secretary, ed.) is concerned, eight times as much poison in the ground is now permissible #PFAS.” 2017: “There is a politician who has been drawing attention to the climate problem for eleven years: Marianne Thieme.” 2021: “The hunters had (-) a member of D66 as a lobbyist in The Hague for years and thought they had made their lobby untouchable.” 2021: “Even D66 goes further in its demands to halve the livestock than GroenLinks.”

Screenshots of app and mail traffic between well-known PvdD members – content and names I omit for source protection – showed that they regard @FollowZwijn’s tweets as tweets from Koffeman. They also often waited with retweets for “Niko” to take the lead.

Criticism of other parties is of course legitimate, but: why does this have to be anonymous? Tuesday I asked Niko Koffeman for an interview. But the man who, for example, advocated public registration of all lobbyists in the senate in 2019, did not need to be open about himself on this point: “I have nothing to say about this.”

Yet his behavior is not stupid from a purely political point of view: the fact is that party self-promotion has less influence on hesitant voters than support from an apparent outsider. Especially if parties want to disprove the standpoints of competitors. Knowledge is then power – and openness a burden.

That’s how the political brain works. Talk to top officials and it’s often about government officials who hate competing information. Civil servants make long rounds of ‘social partners’ to arrive at policy options. This already takes time and patience. Then the minister chooses one option – and he usually doesn’t have to think about it if the discussion starts again afterwards.

So in ministries they know that these are times when ministers want to suppress facts. “Openness is nice, but hurry up better,” I once heard a top civil servant say.

And those who, apart from these incidents – SMS deletions, anonymous accounts, misplaced policy options – want to know how the political-administrative complex actually thinks about openness and transparency in government, should look around for an hour on the website of the Government Information and Heritage Inspectorate.

It has been making itself since the report A demented government? (2005) is concerned about the lack of ‘sustainable digital accessibility of public sector information’, and noted in its last annual report, in 2021, that even sixteen years later, ‘it is often unclear which (digital) information is stored and which is destroyed’.

In other words: while almost every party is now adopting the ideal image of an open and transparent government, it has been clear for years that this ideal is completely unattainable with the enormous increase in digital data.

So it was good that the Inspectorate was often quoted this week in the – very justified – emergency debate about Rutte’s text messages, but the fact is that last year’s annual report did not lead to the same emergency debate.

Ergo: the political indignation about the lack of openness in government is mainly politically motivated and is less about the lack of openness itself.

And so politics has imprisoned itself in an ideal image of openness that it often undermines. It leads to openness as a pose, openness without memory, openness without archive: openness that looks good but is unfortunately often fictional. For he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

Of course, this does not mean that all authorities, administrators and politicians involved are of bad will. The aspiration for more openness is serious, and enough politicians and civil servants recognize that things must also change in their own circle.

For example, this week, after PvdD senator Niko Koffeman refused my request, I asked party leader Esther Ouwehand whether she was aware of Koffeman’s involvement in that anonymous account.

She agreed, adding: “I find it undesirable for MPs to tweet anonymously.”