Only a few months into his employment as a minister and then the only member of the cabinet still present to take care of the affairs of all thirteen other colleagues. It happened to Erwin Nypels (D66) in the first week of August 1982 as a result of the ministerial holiday schedule. All ministerial documents that needed to be signed arrived on his desk.
As long as that goes well, officials and colleagues of Nypels joked when they heard about the temporary sole rule he came to have. After all, his immense drive for action was well known. It was not without reason that Nypels had announced after his appointment as interim Minister of Housing in the Van Agt interim cabinet that he did not consider himself a ‘minister of current affairs’. Civil servants were put to work to write down a vision of the future for public housing, even though a new cabinet was on its way.
Erwin Nypels died last Sunday at the age of 91. If he went for something, he went for it 100 percent. “Successful initiative legislator, persistently working to ensure roofs over heads and pensions after work,” said House Speaker Dolman when Nypels said goodbye to the Binnenhof in 1989.
Actually he was a kind of Pieter Omtzigt avant la lettre. Nypels also wanted to know every detail and continued to ask questions that others had long since stopped asking. “The velvet jackhammer,” he was called by officials at the Ministry of Housing.
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Pension break
Interest in pensions, also such an agreement with Pieter Omtzigt. In the 1980s, Nypels was the man behind the initiative law that was intended to put an end to the infamous pension breach that ensured that a change of job or loss of work would lead to a deterioration of pension entitlements.
Nypels was an excellent legislator, but not the man of the big flamboyant political story, like Hans van Mierlo
Afterwards he continued to work for pensioners. For example, he waged a years-long struggle to regulate the participation rights of pensioners in pension fund boards. Something that ultimately succeeded in 2013, not after an initiative law partly based on his ideas had been significantly amended. “It was messing with a population group,” Nypels concluded in his own special way websitewhere he kept a close eye on all developments.
Nypels was something of a technician, an excellent legislator, but was not the man of the big flamboyant political story like someone like Hans van Mierlo. He could tell it all beautifully and visually, while Nypels, originally a business economist at the PTT, was more involved in the implementation. He came into contact with politics in the 1960s as chairman of the JOVD, the liberal youth movement related to the VVD. Because it was not possible to move the VVD in a more liberal direction, he joined the initiative group of 36 people that would spawn the Democrats 66 party in Amsterdam at the end of 1966.
In the early House of Representatives elections of 1967, Nypels thought he was in an unelectable sixth place on the list of candidates, but the success of the new party was so great according to the standards at the time that he was immediately elected.
Nypels was a great supporter of his own social liberal sound. He therefore clashed with Van Mierlo over his ambition to merge with the PvdA into a progressive people’s party in the early 1970s. However, nothing ever came of that plan due to opposition from the PvdA.
Fidelity
When D66 was on the verge of death in the mid-1970s, Nypels made attempts to establish a new social liberal party, in which he also involved people from DS’70. This also failed and Nypels stayed with D66. His short-lived interim ministership was not continued because D66 remained outside the cabinet. When he left the House of Representatives in 1989, he became chairman of the trade union for secondary and senior staff for several years.
He remained loyal to his party all these years. Nypels was present at almost every party conference, sharing his experiences, especially with young people, in the corridors. He wrote down his experiences a few years ago in a book with an appropriate title: Turtle in the Binnenhof.
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