Laura Bromet, Member of Parliament of GroenLinks-PvdA, swam in the Caribbean Sea. It was summer, 2021, and in addition to her, MP Alexander van Hattem of the PVV and Don Ceder, Member of the Lower House of the ChristenUnie. With many more MPs, they were on an official working visit and for days they had gone from one room to the other. Until Laura Bromet had come up with: “I am once in my life on Bonaire, and I have not even put a little in the ocean.”
In a 45 -minute break, the three of them ran to the beach, along the highway. That lasted fifteen minutes. They stayed in the water for fifteen minutes, Don Ceder had a snorkeling, and ran back.
Almost always foreign working visits bring MPs closer together and sometimes you can see that in the meeting rooms, outside the debates: PVV people who first kept aloof from the rest are now laughing hard at jokes from other MPs. In 2020, PVV member Dion Graus and Selçuk Öztürk, then still Member of Parliament, had the very cozy together on the Grüne Woche, the agricultural fair in Berlin. They just didn’t want to take a picture together: in The Hague, DENK and the PVV did fierce and hostile to each other in just about every debate.
On Sundays, two groups of MPs travel to Brussels at the same time. The parliamentary committee that deals with foreign trade and development aid, with PVV member Dennis Ram, Daniëlle Hirsch from GroenLinks-PvdA, Ria de Korte from NSC, D66’er Mpanzu Bamenga and Aukje de Vries of the VVD. And four members of the European Affairs Committee: VVD member Thom van Campen, Isa Kahraman of NSC, Laurens Dassen from Volt and Caroline van der Plas of BBB, who is chairman of the committee.
At the hotel, Sunday evening, Van der Plas says that she had met Laura Bromet from GroenLinks-Pvda on a previous working visit as “someone who can laugh a lot”. “I had only seen her in the debates.” This time she wants to get to know Daniëlle Hirsch better. “We are often talking about the sour, left corner in the room, but I don’t think that’s right. So I hope she will come to have a drink later. “
But in the cafe opposite the hotel there are only MPs from PVV, VVD, NSC and BBB in the evening. They have to laugh a bit about it, they know that it also doesn’t hurt to get to know each other better for their own coalition. Laurens Dassen will arrive at midnight. Daniëlle Hirsch not, Van der Plas calls it “very unfortunate.”
Looking for fraternization in Brussels with GroenLinks-Pvda, Van der Plas in The Hague loses his own MP: Lilian Helder, who gets angry. Van der Plas hears it from NSC member Isa Kahraman, in the elevator of the European Commission. “Hûh, what?”
She doesn’t want to say anything about it, the other MPs understand that. “Fucking you, Caroline,” says Thom Van Campen, in the taxi bus on the way to the train. She sighs. And nods.