The VVD members of the ‘Liberal Green’ party network are different from other VVD members. For their New Year’s reception in Utrecht on Wednesday evening, they have not chosen a place where you can park your car. They meet near the station, in an upstairs room. There are posters of plants on the wall and there is a tree with huge green leaves. Made of plastic, yes.
Liberal Groen, with about a thousand members, can be seen as a counterpart to the right-wing conservative VVD club Classical Liberal. That is much smaller, but also much noisier. In order to read the letter that Liberal Green chairman Bram Cool sent to the House of Representatives two weeks ago, you have to ask a lot of questions and wait until the letter reaches their site stands. Liberal Green ‘requests’ the VVD members in The Hague to stick to the climate ambitions in the election manifesto. The PVV wants to put all climate plans “through the shredder”.
There are about thirty members at the evening in Utrecht. It is one day after the VVD members in the Senate said that they are in favor of the dispersal law, which the VVD in the House of Representatives is against, and there is an atmosphere of crisis in the party. But at Liberal Green they seem to have decided, just like VVD leader Dilan Yesilgöz, to act as if nothing is wrong. A “chocolate fight”, that’s all it is: VVD members who disagree with each other throw chocolates from their “local chocolatier” into each other’s mouths. One VVD member says, without my asking, that there is “no unrest at all” in the party. “There is so much nonsense in the newspaper. Especially in NRC.”
In Utrecht I am concerned about the concerns in Bram Cool’s letter. In The Hague you hear from the VVD that the formation now revolves around the rule of law, Europe and the rest of the world, public finances. Yesilgöz sent the members an email about it on Friday. Climate was not on her list either.
Perhaps it is because of their intention to stand up for the VVD in these difficult times. It could also be a coincidence or really as they see it: most people I speak to on the evening say they are not worried. The PVV, I hear, is, just like the VVD, in favor of nuclear energy and NSC and BBB also have sustainable plans. Alies ter Kuile (34), who co-wrote the election manifesto, thinks that the VVD is already so green that it will not make any concessions on climate and sustainability. Nick Ottens (35), board member of Liberaal Groen, heard Yesilgöz say that in an online meeting: it was a “red line”. He thinks she means it.
And perhaps the VVD members of Liberal Groen are not so different from other VVD members. If there is no other option than with the PVV, Nick Ottens says: “Then we should now arrange things properly with asylum and migration.”