Formally, the ties with Roermond have been severed: the chain of office has been completed, the key to her apartment has been handed in. Emotionally, Rianne Donders is still deeply connected with the Hanseatic city. “It was the right decision to leave,” she says over a cappuccino on a terrace, a week after she left. “But I feel like I’ve let the well-meaning down.”
For almost eight years she was mayor of the city that before her arrival was inextricably linked to the all-powerful Jos van Rey, the man who was convicted of corruption as an alderman. But in Roermond, an irrevocable conviction does not mean a one-way ticket to political oblivion.
Since then, Donders had to deal with Van Rey as a councilor, leader of his own party, and after the elections in March this year as alderman. “He successfully converted his conviction into victimhood,” she says. The former VVD member became more than the largest with his Liberal People’s Party.
Worse, according to Donders: Van Rey ‘infected’ political culture with his style. Other councilors have come to see the behavior as normal. The result: an intensely rotten administrative culture in which suspicion reigns, populism dominates and basic decency is often lacking. “Shut up!” Van Rey added during a council debate.
Her biggest problem is to bring the infection up for discussion. Donders: “Self-reflection is not its strongest point.” At the end of last year, she had had enough. She wrote an open letter addressed to all concerned. Without naming Van Rey and his party, she warned of the consequences if politics becomes the ‘plaything of the loudest screamer’. The urge to profile takes precedence over the public interest. She sighs at the memory of her letter. “I had been working on it for months.”
Her writing did not lead to the necessary reflection, but to her departure. The narrow coalition majority, led by the People’s Party, recently informed it that it had no need for self-evaluation. Donders knew enough: nothing changes in Roermond. She called her husband. “I said, ‘It’s done.'” When they returned home to Eindhoven, they drank a glass of red port. In a broken voice: “The power of the number in Roermond is greater than the power of the whole.”
It is tempting, she says after two hours of talking, to see Roermond as an exception. Yes, the examples of populism and clientelism are there for the taking. “Plans in Roermond are so broadly formulated that you can actually build anything there.” But she knows other municipalities where uninhibited populism leads to the same problems. “We are naive about what is going on in our country,” she says firmly. “If we don’t want our democracy to be demolished, we will have to actively resist now.”
Hugo Logtenberg is editor of NRC.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of November 9, 2022