In the summer of 2010, formation talks with the PVV also failed once. VVD leader Mark Rutte, who had won the elections, wanted to work with Geert Wilders. But not the CDA. Rutte went to talk to Job Cohen, who led the PvdA at the time, and Cohen thought Rutte meant it. Until the CDA wanted to go with Wilders. The PvdA was the break number.
Job Cohen is now 76, he has just recovered from heart surgery and on Wednesday evening, one day after the formation stalled in The Hague, he is holding a reading in Houten. The title is: ‘The future of the progressive movement in the Netherlands’. There are about three hundred people in the Aan de Slinger theater, almost all of them over sixty. Many know each other from the PvdA or GroenLinks, and otherwise from Amnesty Houten, the environmental working group, the walking club, the church. They all hope that the future of the left in the Netherlands is as bright as the screen behind Cohen. But do they still have confidence in it? There are many questions, no one sounds cheerful. There is hardly any laughter.
In the theater café afterwards, Cohen says that there is also “a lot to worry about.” “The wars, the polarization, the anti-Semitism that is increasing.” He found the GroenLinks-PvdA election results “downright disappointing”. This time, Cohen also says, reminds him of the 1930s, with the emerging NSB. Cohen believes that the PVV resembles this: “Because of their views on Article 1 of the Constitution.” The left-wing story, he had said in the audience, must again be about “fair sharing”, about freedom, equality and brotherhood. “And sisterhood.” He had been critical of the PvdA, which had “embraced” neoliberalism in Rutte II. And about the House of Representatives faction of GroenLinks-PvdA “with only highly educated people”. “Why,” he said, “should people who have been practically trained, the professionals, have confidence in that?”
“The PVV,” he says after his lecture, “does have those people in the faction.”
Job Cohen was State Secretary twice and Mayor of Amsterdam for nine years. And only party leader for a very short time. “It didn’t work, then you better stop.” Wilders, he thinks, has not changed since 2010. “If he notices that you have no defense, he will tackle you. He did not do that with my successors, Samsom and later Asscher. But I wasn’t calm enough, I didn’t think what he said was honest.”
Cohen had promised a long time ago to give the lecture in Houten. Otherwise, he says, he might have said no. In 2022 he had selected the candidates for the Senate, but then the party board wanted them another list. Cohen sighs and laughs. “That went completely wrong.” Now he does nothing for the PvdA. Does he perhaps have any advice for Frans Timmermans, not to also become the break number in the cabinet formation?
“Do nothing. Wait. But Frans knows that.”