“So we’ll soon have Mr. Van Ojik?” the messenger asks Member of Parliament Bart Smals (VVD), while placing name plates on the tables of the Thorbeckezaal.
“Van Ojik, yes,” says Smals, who will chair the planned committee meeting on the GGD.
“Uh, Van Ojik? No, Van Ooijen! His name is Van Ooijen.”
“Secretary of State, right?”
“Yes, State Secretary Van Ooijen.”
It is not only the House of Representatives and members of the House of Representatives who still have to get used to the new faces that have regularly appeared in the House of Representatives for the past month. Most new ministers also have to find their way in the first weeks after being sworn in. Both physically – where is which fraction? – as in parliamentary language and procedures.
“I’ll be there in the next one” things Let’s go back to that,” Ernst Kuipers (D66) said to a question in his second corona debate as Minister of Health.
State Secretary Vivianne Heijnen (Infrastructure and Water Management, CDA) was also still errant at the beginning of February. When she was first given the floor in the plenary hall, she walked from her cabinet chair to the lectern for members of parliament, next to the chair’s table. A messenger who rushed to her promptly directed her to her own lectern in section K. “Well then I’m going to stand here”, said Heijnen with a shy smile. “Also fine.”
The Rutte IV cabinet has no fewer than eighteen new ministers. Ten of them have no work experience at the Binnenhof. They were health care administrators or professors, consultants or mayors, and on January 10 they entered a different world for them. Of course they will have followed national politics and know their most important party members – although a few had yet to become party member. Sometimes they already had some contact with ministries or members of parliament because of their previous job, but they had never heard of many customs in The Hague.
Also read this article: Who are the striking newcomers in Rutte IV?
That cabinet members formally address each other with you in the Council of Ministers, for example. Or that they sometimes have to sit for hours after a parliamentary debate, because a cabinet member has to be present during the votes.
“I was very nervous”, Gunay Uslu (D66) looks back on her first debate. “It was really scary.” The new State Secretary for Culture and Media did not make her debut in the House of Representatives, but in the Senate. There she submitted the purchase of Rembrandt’s painting on January 18 The Standard Bearer to defend. Uslu (D66) regularly had to answer senators. “I’ve only been secretary of state for a week.”
Henk Staghouwer (ChristenUnie), Minister of Agriculture, acknowledged in his first committee meeting in the House of Representatives that he had “slept less well”. “It was about fertilizers, which is technically quite complicated,” he says two weeks later. “Then you are up against heavyweights like Jaco Geurts (CDA) who have been following the file for years.”
In the end, Staghouwer reviews, he survived the debate well. “But in the first half hour I had some red cheeks.” Afterwards he received a compliment by app from Gert-Jan Segers, his party leader of the ChristenUnie.
A coach for new VVD members
The four government parties deliberately opted for a relatively large number of outsiders – new impetus had to be created. That does require the necessary attention to properly guide ministers with little experience in The Hague. Each party has its own working method.
Segers acts as a confidential adviser at the smallest coalition partner, the ChristenUnie with three ministers, says State Secretary Maarten van Ooijen (VWS), the youngest in the cabinet at 31 years old. “You can always go to him to share your doubts.”
He will receive more practical advice about his new position from Carola Schouten, the experienced minister and deputy prime minister. “During the first council of ministers, I texted her about how that works with the forms of address. That you speak through the chairman and formally call your colleagues by their last name and position.” As an alderman in Utrecht, he was not used to that.
The VVD, the largest governing party with eleven ministers, seven of whom have no cabinet experience, has devised an extensive, almost professional induction programme. On Thursday evening, during the weekly dinner of VVD ministers, state secretaries and party leaders, the first weeks are dominated by the new colleagues.
At this so-called ‘ministerial meeting’ they mainly exchange experiences, says Dennis Wiersma, now Minister for Primary and Secondary Education, who was State Secretary for Social Affairs for a while in the last months of the previous cabinet. “We ask the new colleagues how things are going. What they encounter in their department.”
The VVD has come up with something else. New ministers who need this can get an outside supervisor, someone who has cabinet experience but is no longer walking around the Binnenhof. Former ministers such as Stef Blok, Henk Kamp or Edith Schippers are on the list. “You can choose someone yourself,” says Christianne van der Wal, the party chairman of the liberals, who was allowed to become minister for Nature and Nitrogen. She won’t say who she asked.
“I get Klaas Dijkhoff!” says Micky Adriaansens enthusiastically. “I was looking for someone different from me.” While she sees herself as someone with administrative experience, she sees Dijkhoff as ‘superpolitical’. The new Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate does not yet know exactly what coaching will entail. “I still have to call him.”
introductory talks
At other parties, new ministers found a confidant with experience in The Hague on their own initiative. After the call from Segers in December, Maarten van Ooijen immediately consulted ‘his’ mayor in Utrecht, Sharon Dijksma. “As a former Member of Parliament and State Secretary, he knows The Hague like no other, so I asked: ‘What is going to happen to me?'”
The most important advice from PvdA member Dijksma to date was about monitoring a healthy private-work relationship. “Keep a close eye on your agenda from day one. Otherwise you will not see your children at all in the coming years.”
On his first working day at the department, Van Ooijen, who lives in Utrecht with his young family, agreed with his secretariat that in principle he goes home at six o’clock every day, so that he can put his children to bed. “That has worked out reasonably well so far, but unfortunately not every day.”
Gunay Uslu actually only knew one person who knows his way around The Hague well: Alexander Rinnooy Kan, former SER chairman and former senator for D66. She sat on the supervisory board of the Eye film museum for a few years with him and they are good friends. “After my husband, he was the first person I called when I was asked,” she says. “We immediately went for a long walk to talk about life in politics.” They still have a lot of contact, says Uslu. “Alexander was involved in that debate in the Senate.”
One thing is high on the agenda for all new cabinet members in their first weeks: an introduction to the members of the House of Representatives that they will be dealing with in the coming years. The initiative lies with the minister or his political assistant, the reception is usually in the House. “I’ve already visited almost everyone,” says Staghouwer. “I recently had almost eleven thousand steps on my counter on one Chamber Day.”
Both the ministers and the MPs agree on the purpose of these informal introductory meetings: just to find out who you are dealing with, what everyone’s motivation is and which issues someone finds really important in the coming years. Political affairs are not done yet. “You shouldn’t make the first conversation too difficult,” says SGP leader Kees van der Staaij, who has had hundreds of conversations with ministers since his entrance into the House of Representatives (1998).
Although Minister Van der Wal calls the first conversations with MPs helpful in her intention to find “very broad support” for her nitrogen policy. “Collaborating with the House starts with getting to know each other.”
Warm welcome and cold shower
According to Van der Staaij, the aim of a first meeting is to shorten the lines between the cabinet and the parliament. “The minister wants to know what is going on, the MP how you can raise your concerns.” Usually, with that first cup of coffee, 06 numbers are exchanged. And Van der Staaij took advantage of his chat with Van der Wal to point out a farm near a Natura 2000 site. “That farmer is concerned about her nitrogen policy.”
Most ministers received a friendly welcome at their first parliamentary debates. At the debut of Robbert Dijkgraaf (D66), both opposition and coalition members urged to give the new Minister of Education a “warm welcome” (Kauthar Bouchallikht, GroenLinks), “Wisdom, strength and blessings” (Roelof Bisschop, SGP) and to express the hope for a ‘constructive cooperation’ (Stephan van Baarle, Denk). Some MPs immediately followed this in the debate by a somewhat colder political shower. For example, Harm Beertema of the PVV said: “When it comes to the politician Dijkgraaf, as an opposition leader I am in a different position. D66 is ideologically our strongest opponent.”
There was certainly no warm welcome in the plenary hall for one new state secretary. CDA member Marnix van Rij immediately came into conflict with the financial spokespersons of just about all political groups on 2 February. It was about the cabinet’s first major setback: the line that the Supreme Court recently drew through the controversial capital yield tax. That leaves a hole in the national budget of possibly tens of billions.
A day earlier, Van Rij should also have appeared in the House of Representatives. During the weekly question time, he was asked whether the excise duties on petrol could not be lowered. In his closing speech, Van Rij said dryly that he had thought that his baptism of fire ‘would be tomorrow’. Chamber president Vera Bergkamp with a false smile: “We brought it forward a day.”
Also listen to our podcast The Hague Affairs: ‘The initiation weeks of Rutte IV’