A word I didn’t hear enough on election night: charisma. Yet Rob Jetten has been the embodiment of it in recent weeks. D66 owes it the biggest victory in its history. It was not the economy that was decisive, as the well-known political phrase goes, but the personal appearance of a party leader.
What we now know: charisma can be learned. Never before in his political career did Jetten have as much charisma as he does now. In fact, D66 preferred to choose Sigrid Kaag as party leader in 2020 because more was expected of her electorally. Jetten swallowed his loss and waited for a new chance.
Jetten was always a good, articulate politician, but not a striking one – hence the choice of D66 at the time. As party leader of D66, he suffered a major loss in 2023, but this week he was able to take spectacular revenge. There was a lot to worry about, especially Wilders’ avoidance behavior, but we also saw a reborn Jetten: confident, aggressive when necessary, such as against Wilders, but above all positive and focused on cooperation.
And lo and behold: he had suddenly become charismatic. Much more than Frans Timmermans, the big loser of these elections. Jetten became a kind of Dutch John Kennedy, like the one who defeated the experienced Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential race. Fresh, handsome, energetic, optimistic. Like Nixon, Wilders did not make it in the debates with Jetten, he faded into a sour, grumpy man.
Timmermans does not have much to blame himself for. He ran an almost flawless campaign, not losing a debate. But the prejudices against him, eagerly fed by the right for many years, were too strong. He had to push up against a wall of stark rejection. His qualities – intellectual depth and verbal skills – seemed to work against him.
I’ve always been amazed by that. Timmermans was not the left-wing, dogmatic ironmonger he was taken for, he was a nuanced thinker in the tradition of predecessors such as Max van der Stoel, whom he admired, famous for his commitment to human rights.
Perhaps he and the party should have anticipated that rejection and opted for a younger successor, but he had so much political experience and knowledge that the choice seemed obvious to him. On Wednesday evening he had the good sense to immediately announce his retirement. It was immediately the best speech of the evening.
His defeat was promoted by an undeniable development in Dutch society (and not only there): a broad-based rejection of the left and an advance of the right and the extreme right. See the favorable results for JA21 and FVD and the seat numbers with which PVV and VVD were still able to maintain a reasonable position. We may soon have a government with Joost Eerdmans instead of Frans Timmermans. Their names end the same, other than that I don’t see any similarities that make me happy.
GroenLinks-PvdA and the smaller left-wing parties are against the tide, and it will remain that way for the time being, even though Timmermans predicted “better times” in his speech. My big question is whether he and I will ever experience it.
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