Mark Rutte steps out of the elevator in the House of Representatives, together with Sigrid Kaag he walks through all opposition parties to seek support for the budget, and on this Tuesday afternoon they have just returned from their conversation with Geert Wilders. “Now we have to,” says Rutte, “over there.” He points to the left. They have to go to the right.
The House of Representatives has been away from the Binnenhof since the summer of last year, and in the temporary building on Bezuidenhoutseweg you could still see MPs and employees looking around confusedly just before Christmas. The elevators don’t go up to the ground floor, the corridors that lead to them are sometimes long, sometimes short, with angles that are not ninety degrees. As befits the brutalist architectural style.
On Tuesday I only see doubts in Rutte and Kaag, but they hardly ever get further than the debating chamber on the first floor. Even SGP employee Menno de Bruyne, who had shown tens of thousands of visitors around the ancient Binnenhof and kept getting lost in the new building, walked through the corridor with a group of SGP members during the May holidays. To practice, he said. After that, everyone could sign up with him again via Twitter for a tour.
In the hallway of the SP and BIJ1, it seems the fight over the gender neutral toilets who wanted BIJ1 to have been won by BIJ1. There are no more notes on the toilet doors with ‘men’ and ‘women’ on them. If you look closely, you can still see that ‘gentlemen’ was scratched on one door. And I hear that people often pee on the toilet seat. A problem for many employees was the conference bell, which sounds loud and shrill in every room during votes and plenary debates. It was softer after the May holiday. But a week later it was louder again. During the first debate after the holidays, with Kaag about the corona recovery fund, the MPs in the restaurant were so busy talking to each other that they did not hear the bell and Kaag stood in front of an almost empty room for a while.
There is as yet no solution at all: the noise. GroenLinks had started testing the building beforehand and had discovered that most of the walls appear to be made of paper. Jesse Klaver was given a room at the end of the hallway, where the walls are partly made of concrete. But there too: when I look out the window next to his room on Wednesday afternoon, I hear him say ‘thank you’ to someone over the telephone and hang up.
MPs now think it’s through the ceilings. The Central Government Real Estate Agency, owner of the building, is investigating. Menno de Bruyne also mentioned the problem to the group of SGP members, furthermore his explanation was mainly about politics and architecture.
Last week he put a photo on Twitter of the new building, with lots of concrete, steel and blue sky: the tours started again. No one signed up.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 19, 2022