Corona fuss haunts BBB: growing pains or poor screening?

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The fact that things are going wrong at the BoerBurgerBeweging this campaign is part of the growing pains of the relatively young party, party leader Caroline van der Plas recently said in NRC. That was just after BBB took action against the redundancy pay of GroenLinks-PvdA party leader Frans Timmermans, while Mona Keijzer, its own prime ministerial candidate, also appeared to receive redundancy pay. “All kinds of things will probably go wrong,” Van der Plas predicted. She was right: this Wednesday it was announced that number thirteen on the list of candidates for the House of Representatives elections will not take his seat if he is elected. This concerns 35-year-old Jasper Rekers, an entrepreneur who works as a teacher at a university of applied sciences.

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<p>Caroline van der Plas: “The VVD has abandoned that whole idea and has moved to the left.”</p><p>” class=”dmt-article-suggestion__image” src=”https://images.nrc.nl/DhEHYYIr63qXf-tbmJvdNH4csK4=/160×96/smart/filters:no_upscale()/s3/static.nrc.nl/bvhw/files/2023/10/data106259755-acf4b8.jpg”/></p><p>During the corona crisis, Rekers posted all kinds of curses against politicians on the anonymous Twitter account Verzet op Links for two years, according to research by the ANP news agency. For example, Rekers called former Minister of Health Hugo de Jonge (CDA) a “child molester”, Prime Minister Mark Rutte “an NSB member” and other politicians “pharma whore” or “Nazi bitch”. Rekers announced on Wednesday via BBB that the tweets date from “a dark period in his life”. “I was seriously concerned about developments in society and that had an effect on my state of mind.”</p><p>BBB only knew about Rekers’ anonymous tweets when ANP started asking questions, the party wrote in a statement. The party calls his resignation now “inevitable” given the content of the messages. “This is not what you want, this really does not fit our ideas at all,” says Henk Vermeer, secretary of the House of Representatives faction. He says that all candidates were asked in job interviews about sensitive private issues or statements on social media and that Rekers did not mention the anonymous tweets. “That weighs very heavily on us.”</p><p>According to Vermeer, better screening of candidate MPs could not have prevented the incident. An external research agency has screened all candidates for BBB and everyone was asked to provide a statement of conduct (VOG). “But these tweets were completely anonymous,” says Vermeer. “If anyone can explain to me how we could have prevented this, I would love to hear it.”</p><h2 class=More fuss

It is not the first time that BBB politicians have been discredited due to their social media use, and it has often been related to corona. For example, Groningen deputy Henk Emmers came under fire for liking tweets suggesting that the pandemic had been staged and the vaccines do not work. He could stay on. Groningen Member of Parliament Kor Schipper withdrew in June when it emerged that he had insulted journalists on X and that he believed in conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum. In Flevoland the first BBB director was killed for a different reason: deputy Jurie van den Berg was not functioning.

BBB has to hope the bad news is over with the election being exactly four weeks away. The party has fallen sharply in the opinion polls in recent months compared to the big gains in the Provincial Council elections in March. Party leader Caroline van der Plas is suffering from the competition from Pieter Omtzigt and does not seem to be in great shape in the campaign: during the first TV debate at College Tour last Sunday she spoke surprisingly little. Henk Vermeer remains sober about it. “At Omtzigt, the party chairman also had to resign. Every party encounters these kinds of things.”

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