The CDA is not doing well, Hugo de Jonge also sees that. “But all large, traditional popular parties are having a hard time.” It’s Saturday, late afternoon. The CDA congress in Nijkerk is almost over and we are standing at the podium. Just behind Wopke Hoekstra, who is about to give his speech. Hoekstra looks nervous and that seems logical to me: from research by One today On Friday, only 43 percent of CDA voters trust him as party leader. The CDA, now with 14 seats in the House of Representatives, is on about eight seats in polls.
And Hugo de Jonge, Minister for Housing, calls his party big?
At one o’clock in the afternoon De Jonge had arrived in Nijkerk and by four he had been photographed twenty-two times with a party member. A woman has called out to him that he is “a topper”. He was listened to in two overcrowded halls. A bicycle repairman from Eindhoven who is being bullied in his apartment building because he is gay, is sure after the first performance that De Jonge will come to help him. “He is now calling the alderman.” In the second room, an 88-year-old man, with violently trembling hands, had told about life on his own, his wife had died. De Jonge had briefly touched the man’s hands.
At the podium I asked De Jonge how he saw the score of BBB in the polls: is that party the biggest electoral threat to the CDA? De Jonge shook his head and started talking about the large popular parties. According to him, many people are insecure: about the climate, migration, geopolitics. “They sometimes cling to the story of the flanks. From parties that only say hello to their own supporters in debates in the House of Representatives.” CDA founder Piet Steenkamp already said, according to De Jonge: “We, the CDA, are opposed to that polarization.”
In The Hague there are also other CDA members who talk about their party as if it is still big and powerful. Even PvdA members sometimes still have that. Perhaps it also makes sense: if your party has been so great for so long, when do you allow the realization that that time has passed, and may not come back?
At the congress there are party members who feel that the CDA has lost “its soul”: the countryside. But I don’t come across one who thinks BBB will supplant their party. According to the CDA members in Nijkerk, BBB is „one issue”. They also see no threat in ex-CDA member Pieter Omtzigt. I hear from some that he is not founding his own party, from others that he is unfit to lead a party.
By ‘big’, Hugo de Jonge says when I ask further questions, he means: „The CDA should be bigger. I really think so.”
Now the voters.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of November 8, 2022