Femke Halsema wants to remain mayor of Amsterdam for another six years and are the only ones who are strongly against this The Telegraph and Annabel Nanninga from JA21. Who would have thought that six years ago?
At a meeting where all kinds of virtuous Dutch people were presented with royal honors, I was addressed sympathetically by such a Dutchman. How on earth did I think that Halsema could make a good mayor of Amsterdam? That nasty, stubborn, self-righteous person couldn’t be taken seriously, could he? That was a disaster for Amsterdam, wasn’t it? I asked him what he based his judgment on and was only told similar character descriptions; no facts. That was not unusual in those years when Halsema’s name came up, even in circles of the better educated Dutch.
Gradually those sounds faded away. After a rocky start and a controversial failure to intervene at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in 2020, appreciation for Halsema increased. She guided the city through the corona period, she held her own in the municipal council and she was open to the residents. Het Parool wrote this week: “At the end of 2019, 37 percent of Amsterdam residents had (very) a lot of confidence in the mayor, in May 2020 this was 52 percent. This summer, a survey by O&S showed that more than half of residents believe Halsema should continue as mayor. With a score of 6.3, the mayor is also doing better than the rest of the city council, which scores 5.8.”
These are convincing figures for the mayor of a difficult, extremely critical city. No figures yet to rest on your laurels, but a mayor of Amsterdam can never do that. What strikes me most is that De Telegraaf’s continuous campaign against Halsema has still been unsuccessful. That newspaper had two clearly marked targets in recent years: Femke Halsema and Sigrid Kaag. They had to be destroyed. Misogyny? The accusation is obvious, but De Telegraaf is not conducting a smear campaign against Dilan Yesilgöz and Caroline van der Plas, is it? Moreover, the newspaper has recently added a very male target: Frans Timmermans. The week after he was elected party leader of GroenLinks-PvdA, De Telegraaf published three negatively tinged articles every day on its website under headlines such as: “Sly, but easily offended and not averse to power politics”, “We will not miss him”, “ Timmermans is not green, he is a powerful driver of deforestation”, “Timmermans on criticism of redundancy pay: ‘Have to pay my rent’.” A smear campaign becomes hilarious when the smear campaigner can’t handle losing. That happened on Wednesday when De Telegraaf responded to the news about Halsema with an article under the headline: “Six years on: Mayor Halsema always wants to be right.”
I won’t argue that Halsema likes to be right, but name me someone who hates that. However, there is one subject on which Halsema should not continue to be right: the establishment of an erotic center to relieve the Red Light District. It means great disaster for local residents and it will not help the Red Light District. This ill-fated plan could become the pitfall for a mayor who was on the right track, but took a wrong turn.
A version of this article also appeared in the September 15, 2023 newspaper.