For then Chamber President Wim Deetman (CDA) the debate could have been a little more lively. Boo? Gladly! Let’s do it a little more like the British! Hear, sir! That was in 1995. The coveted boo didn’t materialize, but what has been making steady progress since then is a sound that stenographers invariably note in the acts as: ‘(rolling on the benches)’.
A decade later popped up Fidelity agree with the statistics. upset the newspaper noted that there were only two drum beats in 2006, 33 times in 2007 and ‘no less than 61 times’ in 2008.
On Wednesday, fifteen officially registered drums took off from the Chamber benches. Fifteen! In a meeting! Deetman will have enjoyed it, but the current chairman Vera Bergkamp (D66) already broke the first hammering PVV fists: “Dear colleagues, a little quieter please.”
After the incident with Thierry Baudet, the criticism was that Bergkamp intervened too late, only when the offended cabinet took off.
Yet you can also see our controlled debate culture as the cause. Debates are hermetically regulated. Within an allotted time, everyone in turn reads his indignation from his note. The number of interruptions is strictly rationed. MPs became bookkeepers. “Miss, does this question count towards my interrupts?” It gives the debate the liveliness of a match where the referee blows the whistle as soon as someone has too many possession of the ball.
Eleven years ago, the weekly ‘question hour’ changed format. To make things more lively. The opposite happened: it became a procedure of questions submitted in writing in advance, measured, fitted, which politicians have started to use as a stage to profile themselves. Airtime for political YouTube videos.
Our arena is numb. Spontaneity and vibrancy are stifled in the protocol’s morphine. How do you break through that? Only with the heaviest pain stimuli. To sue the cabinet. Personal attacks.
If we were really debating, with all the emotions, without cutting off the booing, without immediately extinguishing every roll, then Baudet’s first booze would have already been booed, there was already a platoon of counter-noise at the interruption microphones. He’d gotten a beer shower at any decent student debating club.
Now everyone was lulled to sleep. Bergkamp: „I give the floor to Mr Baudet of Forum for Democracy. He has promised me not to provoke any interruptions, so that makes a difference.” Baudet: “That’s right. I can finally just tell my story for once.”
Nodding obediently, without any counter-sound, everyone lets the madness overwhelm them. And only when the pain breaks through the anaesthetic, does one walk away deeply hurt. A living arena would taunt, ignore or pelt him with gallons of beer.
Christian Weijts writes a column here every Friday.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 23, 2022