Lots of bite and chew metaphors in the episode of College Tour with Pieter Omtzigt in the spotlight. In the open-air theater of the University of Twente, he was introduced as the CDA’s pit bull, the file-eater who got stuck in unjustly unpaid childcare benefits. It ended in what he likes to call it the “surcharge scandal”. “Because it’s not an affair.”
The Rutte III cabinet stumbled over it, but Pieter Omtzigt did not come out unscathed either. He was sitting at home with a burnout, meanwhile a ‘position elsewhere’ was devised for him without being asked, there were long debates in the House of Representatives about him without him, his list of grievances about the “disordered relations” in his party was leaked. and they certainly did not recover.
The position that suited him best in that ‘weird year’ of illness was that of referee at the Enschede football club RKSV Emos, where his children also played. Two youth members of the club, giggling, doubt the straightness of his passes in a previously recorded video, but that doesn’t say anything about his straightness.
Referee, flags, whistle, stop play, award penalty kicks. Again perfect metaphors for his political work. He himself starts with 2019, when the ‘coalition top’ proposed to the ‘CDA top’ to make him State Secretary for Finance, as a replacement for Menno Snels, the first government official who had to leave the field when the Supplements ball started rolling. . “Pieter has criticism, so Pieter should do it,” said Omtzigt. “Did you immediately say no?” asked Twan Huys. “Yes.” He apparently prefers to function as a linesman on the sidelines.
In stoppage time sometimes decisive decisions are made. Just think of referee Serdar Gözübüyük who awarded a penalty kick in the very last minute of extra time on Sunday, so that Feyenoord-PSV did not end in 1-2, but in a draw. Pieter Omtzigt decided to return to the Chamber after his injury time, but he does not know yet whether he will remain single-minded or set up his own party. His supporters and perhaps future teammates appear in the stands at College Tour to sit. One, two, three students of public administration tell the audience that they write ‘Pieters’ legislative proposals and public administration professor René Torenvlied of the University of Twente provides him as an ‘independent scientist with ideas for a good cause’.
For a moment, Omtzigt is speechless, namely when the first question from a student from the audience is not about a political issue, but about him. How did he overcome his burnout and whether he has any tips for students who also have a similar impasse? For months he was asked twenty times a day how he was doing, but all this attention to his well-being still seems to make Omtzigt uncomfortable.
Wife Ayfer Koç says nice things about him in a video message, Telegraph-journalist Wouter de Winther mildly critical. The two politicians by whom Omtzigt, in his own words, was definitively put off, say to the College Tourreporters either do nothing (Kajsa Ollongren), or they act hyper-sympathetic (Mark Rutte). Omtzigt’s involvement in the face mask affair of party colleague Sywert van Lienden is played out in a smooth one-two punch.
Twan Huys rounds off the interview with new metaphors. He speaks of a politician who “takes things by the hand”, who in the event of “resistance digs harder” until the “truth is on the table”. But, he asks, wasn’t the price he had to pay too high. Yes, it was equally difficult, says Omtzigt. But that is the toll on “one who opens his mouth.”