That the corona crisis is in a different phase is apparent on Saturday in Rotterdam, where D66 and GroenLinks almost simultaneously kicked off the campaign for the municipal elections on 16 March. To begin with, for the first time in a long time, these are gatherings with an audience. With 150 guests, D66 dares to go a lot further than GroenLinks, where 30 people are in the room. But the live streams from empty halls seem to be a thing of the past.
Corona also seems to be a side show to have become: the parties want to discuss all those other important themes as well, such as housing, the climate or inequality of opportunity. And D66 and GroenLinks appear to have something else in common: the campaign strategy. Both Sigrid Kaag and Jesse Klaver emphasize on Saturday that cooperation with parties such as FVD and PVV is undesirable. “GroenLinks will not participate in a municipal council together with the extreme right,” Klaver told his audience during the party congress in Ahoy. “And I call on my fellow party leaders to draw the same democratic line.”
‘Wrong flags and a torch’
A few hours earlier, Kaag takes the stage in the Schiecentrale, with exactly the same message. When she starts to speak, she laughs, because she suddenly realizes that she forgot to take off her mask. Moments later, the tone is serious again. “Extremism carries false flags or a torch on the street. In the House of Representatives it wears a tie. With a few seats, it often paralyzes the parliamentary order. And now it is knocking on the doors of council chambers in all parts of the Netherlands.”
Also read: Poll: voter floats with council elections in sight
Does D66 want to conduct a ‘negative’ campaign in the coming weeks? “Certainly not,” says Kaag after her speech. “We are for the rule of law.” According to her, it is about the question “in which city you want to wake up”. Parties, says Kaag, must “not after the elections, but before” show color about possible cooperation with FVD and PVV. She implicitly refers to the Provincial Council elections of 2019: when VVD and CDA in North Brabant started working together with FVD.
Does VVD leader Mark Rutte sometimes listen in? On a campaign in Leiden, he says that same afternoon that his party will not cooperate locally with FVD and PVV.
left-wing collaboration
GroenLinks is struggling with yet another collaboration: that with the PvdA. During the meeting in Ahoy, the board says it willingly wants to investigate whether the ties with the social democrats can be further deepened. But two motions calling for much closer cooperation in municipalities and provinces were discouraged and voted down. They sound ‘sympathetic but go a little too far for us’, says party chairman Katinka Eikelenboom, who was re-elected on Saturday.
At D66 there are also four ministers on the podium. The Minister for Legal Protection, former mayor of Almere Franc Weerwind, was already an active D66 member before the parliamentary elections, the rest were not. Ministers Robbert Dijkgraaf (Education) and Ernst Kuipers (Public Health) and state secretary Gunay Uslu (Culture) later became members when they were asked for their posts. Dijkgraaf says with a laugh that he has sometimes given “a lecture” for a D66 group. As a ‘hazing present’, they are given a bright green D66 scarf which they turn on without further ado.
Electorally, Kaag and Klaver are in each other’s way. For example, in the parliamentary elections in Rotterdam, D66 became the largest party in the city, and just like elsewhere in the country, this was partly at the expense of GroenLinks. The municipal elections will be a test for both parties: GroenLinks, which only has eight seats in the House of Representatives, must show that it can find its way back to voters again. D66 must show that last year’s big win was not an incident. Member of parliament Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, also campaign manager, calls the “starting position” of his party good. He points to favorable polls on membership at the end of 2021: 31,800. The highest ever.
No infighting
The two progressive parties clearly have no intention of fighting each other. Kaag agitates against the “inciters and extremists who exploit feelings of fear and rancor for political gain”.
Clover uses almost the same words and draws a comparison with the storming of the Capitol after incendiary texts from then-President Trump. “Don’t let it get to that point in the Netherlands,” he says. “We want to negotiate housing policy and improvement of social facilities after the municipal elections. Not about the rules of the democratic constitutional state. They are fixed.”
Also read: The digital gang of Forum for Democracy
Sjoerdsma says that everything has already been tried with extreme right-wing parties: they have been ignored, tolerated or even embraced. D66 now wants to ‘stand up and offer a reply’. Does that work? “It’s all we have.”
Kaag does call for a “sharp distinction” to continue to be made between hateful politicians and “the people who listen to them”. She understands that those people “feel abandoned by a society where success has too long been presented as a choice. Where there is too much poverty, discrimination and loneliness.”
When asked, Klaver says that his party does not exclude any cooperation with FVD or PVV from now on, for example if those parties submit motions in the House of Representatives. If they are good motions, GroenLinks will not be ‘a priori against’. As far as Klaver is concerned, there will be ‘no cordon sanitaire’.