Column | There can always be someone with a knife

VVD member Christianne van der Wal, Minister for Nature and Nitrogen, was “not disappointed at all”, although a majority of VVD members at the congress had just voted against her nitrogen plans. She also did not “feel” that the party was not behind her.

The clean, false pretense of politics: if you stand barefoot among angry peasants one day, you can’t walk among your own people the next?

The elections to the House of Representatives are now a year and three months ago and whoever of the new MPs you ask: things are going very well. And if they are not on the list of candidates next time, they are almost certainly ready for something else.

In the summer of 2016 SP member Tjitske Siderius said in The Stentor that you should always look over your shoulder at the Binnenhof. Someone may be standing with a knife. She herself had only been a member of parliament for about two years and, she said, wanted to get out of that ‘snake pit’.

It seemed unusually honest: such a harsh world was not for her. She is now an alderman in the Gelderland town of Hattem, for the PvdA and GroenLinks, and on a terrace in Dalfsen, where she lives, she says that with that snake pit she mainly meant the SP faction. She had really disliked the way the SP members treated each other. “There was constant fighting.” But if she had felt that the party wanted to put her back on the list in 2017, she might have gone ahead. “I had a mission.” The SP no longer wanted her.

She felt miserable for a long time because of what she had experienced in The Hague. “You can say it damaged me.” She had canceled her SP membership and heard nothing more from the party. Until early last year the Rutte III cabinet fell over the allowance affair. Bee On 1 Felix Rottenberg of the PvdA had already mentioned her once, de Volkskrant wrote a column about her: in 2014 she was the first member of parliament to realize that families were being destroyed and asked for an investigation in a motion. That was voted out.

On the day the cabinet resigned, she received a text message from the SP chairman: she had ‘dedicated herself’ to the victims, how did she experience this day? Tjitske Siderius thought it was strange. But in the evening she saw Jinek that Renske Leijten started talking about her, the next day another SP member put the motion from 2014 on Twitter. The party made a good impression with her.

She doesn’t think she’s done so well at all. She believes that the entire House of Representatives should be critical of itself. Also the SP. “But there they always think they are right.” She is now a member of the Labor Party. In The Hague, she says, there may also be a ‘battle’ in that party. “I will stay close to the IJssel.”