Henri Bontenbal was quite embarrassed in the talk show Khalid & Sophie, says TV analyst Victor Vlam. “Deliberately not at the table? I would not have accepted it as a CDA!”
It was the main topic in last night’s Khalid & Sophie: developments in the war between Israel and Hamas. This was discussed by, among others, Frans Timmermans, the party leader of GroenLinks and PvdA. And who did we see sitting somewhere in the shadows behind him in the audience stand? CDA party leader Henri Bontenbal.
‘Very painful’
Bontenbal would have been on the air anyway as part of the regular party leader round in Khalid & Sophie, but was not allowed to sit at the table during the main topic of the show, while his political rival was there.
Actually, this is just a disqualification and therefore very painful, according to the well-known TV analyst Victor Vlam. “Henri Bontenbal was not allowed to talk about Israel at Khalid & Sophie, while rival Frans Timmermans was allowed to talk about it for 20 minutes. I would not have accepted it as a CDA,” he writes X.
‘Not senior enough’
CDA expert Pieter Gerrit Kroeger thinks that is not too bad. He points out that this was not a party leader debate or something like that and that Timmermans is also a former Minister of Foreign Affairs. “He spoke here par excellence in his field. There was no need to tap Bontenbal as neither a specialist nor a prime minister candidate.”
Victor has mixed feelings about it. “I fear for the CDA that the aftertaste for voters is that Bontenbal is not ‘senior’ enough to discuss complicated topics such as Israel. (…) Israel is the biggest topic of the campaign at the moment. You want to have a say in that.”
Loss of face
No one at the CDA really likes this, Victor thinks. “To sit in the audience as a spectator with your biggest rival while he is allowed to orate freely… That is a huge loss of face for Bontenbal.”
Didn’t Bontenbal also have the space to say something when he finally sat at the table? “I agree. But the editors deliberately did not put him at the table. (…) Bontenbal should have taken more initiative. But he wasn’t at the table and that made it a lot harder to interrupt.”