Dilan Yesilgöz, party leader of the VVD, wants to “fix problems”. She says it a few times in her very first speech as party leader at a conference this Saturday in Rotterdam. And also afterwards, in a long line of interviews. She is concerned with “the very ordinary problems of very ordinary people.” It sounds solid and that seems to be the intention. While her predecessor Mark Rutte liked to call the Netherlands “a cool country”, she believes that “there is still some room for improvement”.
Unlike Rutte, who always spoke from memory at conferences and walked around the stage, Yesilgöz stood behind a lectern with a text at hand. The fact that there was a lot of movement around the presentation of her as party leader was because the VVD had decided that all 79 candidates in front of her would walk across the stage to the hall, accompanied by loud music from behind the scenes. One candidate MP clearly found this easier than the other. There were candidates who showed up cheering and waving, there were also those who, laughing shyly, did not know how quickly to get to their seats. Mark Rutte sat in the front row. He shook hands with the lowest candidates, while he clapped and smiled encouragingly at the other.
‘More and more patronizing’
Dilan Yesilgöz gave a classic, right-wing VVD story in which it revolved around the “hardworking Dutch people”. She said that for her, freedom equals oxygen, “and we are in danger of losing it.” Yesilgöz sees “more and more patronizing” and said: “The Netherlands must again become the country where the government does not treat people as victims, but believes in their strength. A country that does not keep entrepreneurs small, but ensures that they can grow.”
Yesilgöz was fiercely critical of the political culture of recent years, of which she herself was a part. “Where politics could have played a unifying role, that is where you saw the most division. Politicians were mainly concerned with themselves or even stoked the fire. That must be over now.”
In her story she also referred to MPs such as Pieter Omtzigt, a major electoral competitor of the VVD with his New Social Contract, and SP member Renske Leijten, but without naming them when she said: “For too long we have been blind to what went wrong in the government, until some colleagues opened our eyes. They forced us to face the facts.”
Watery compromises
Yesilgöz’s VVD seems to have estimated that voters are not interested in other parties being attacked in this campaign. In any case, the new party leader did not do that. She emphasized the themes of migration and economics. She called the concerns that citizens have about the high numbers of asylum seekers “rightly” and said that the VVD does not want to continue “making watery compromises” on asylum in the next cabinet. “We cannot continue to muddle through for years to come.”
There is a part of the party that likes to hear it all, and is also very satisfied because, unlike Rutte, it no longer excludes the PVV as a government partner. But on Saturday, in the Van Nelle Factory, there are also VVD members who don’t want any of it. Yesilgöz now only says that the VVD wants to hear the election stories from all parties and only then will figure out how to proceed. “I am not yet forming coalitions,” she said after her speech.
Yesilgöz took plenty of time on stage to thank Rutte. “While the world was storming, Mark Rutte was always there. Mark, the Netherlands owes so much to you.”
Party chairman Eric Wetzels was the first to stand up, followed by the rest of the room: to clap long and hard for Rutte.
Very little changed in the election manifesto at the conference. The JOVD was unable to legalize soft drugs, and the VVD Liberal Green network had no chance with the idea that the reduction in excise duty on petrol should be abolished. VVD members also failed to get the maximum of 130 kilometers per hour back in the election manifesto. Nearly two-thirds of the members in the room voted against this.
What will still be included in the election manifesto: supervision of slaughterhouses and livestock farming must become stricter. And the ban on ‘unnecessary physical interventions on animals’, such as cutting the tails of pigs, will be better enforced as far as the VVD is concerned.