JA21 is on ‘Provincietour’ and in Den Bosch, on Friday evening, Joost Eerdmans will talk about Thierry Baudet. It wants, he says, “all reptiles to be killed.” The JA21 members in the room have already been listening for 45 minutes and there is not much laughter yet. But they like this.
For JA21 it started with Baudet, the party came in 2020 after a split from Forum for Democracy. On the provincial evening I hear that Baudet is “crazy”, “confused”. Then they would rather talk to me about something else: nuclear power plants, which they are very much in favor of, or migration, which they want to stop. Do I know how many houses there are too few in North Brabant?
In more than four months the elections for the Provincial Council will be held and in The Hague the FVD and PVV are doing their best to stand out. JA21, with three seats in the House of Representatives, is hardly heard and although that hardly seems to matter – in the Polling Pointer JA21 has about ten seats – in Den Bosch party members say they think it’s a pity. But riots, fuss? Nor are they waiting for that. During the drink, two JA21 members tell Annabel Nanninga, leader of the House of Representatives, that she has founded a “decent party”. “We would like to sincerely thank you.”
About seventy men, ten women come to the JA21 evening. I’ll be the first to arrive and stay until the end, and speak to two ex-soldiers, a tree seller, an MBO nursing student, a retired shipbuilder, an IT specialist, the commercial director of a healthcare company, a former nurse . They previously voted for the FVD or the CDA, also known as the VVD. One even on D66. “We are all ideological refugees,” says the commercial director, Marc Benninga.
They are not suspicious at all, they all want their name in the newspaper. They like to belong to an anti-migration party, with an aversion to wind farms and any idea they see as woke. With politicians they don’t think they should be ashamed of.
But who they might not love very much yet. Eerdmans, Nanninga, MEP Michiel Hoogeveen and the Brabant party chairman Willem Rutjens receive a somewhat perfunctory applause in Den Bosch. During the intermission there are sausage rolls. On stage I hear so much that is not good with Rutte IV, politics, the Netherlands and Europe, and in such a cynical tone that at the end of the evening I think: NO21 could have been done. But when Eerdmans says that the cabinet should exchange D66 for them, the audience starts to cheer. JA21 wants to participate.
With the beer afterwards Marc Benninga says that „a little more Make America great again and Yes, we can” might have liked, yes. “It was now a lot of ‘Jetten is an idiot and Hugo de Jonge is a dick’.” He is startled when I write it down, JA21 people like to be neat. “I’m not saying that, are you?”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of November 1, 2022