When they are the long NRC-Reconstruction about the fall of the Mayor Koen Schuiling, Mayor Koen Schuiling, was first shocked. “What a tunnel vision in the police and the judiciary.” But at the end of the day, the party leader of the VVD in the Groningen city council was more cheerful. Perhaps the journalistic investigation could mean a breakthrough for her party colleague and mayor. “How beautiful, I thought. I now have good hope that the right will prevail. That Koen Schuiling will have a reparation.”
In September 2024, he was mayor of Groningen for five years, Schuiling felt compelled to announce his resignation. Earlier that year he had received a penalty decision for violation of honor and had opposed it. But when he hears that the Public Prosecution Service does not honor the resistance and want to bring the case to court, Schuiling will withdraw his defense. He himself announces his departure and he is granted honorable dismissal. On December 17, the appeal will be made in his criminal case.
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The reconstruction showed how many misunderstandings, procedural errors, prejudices and unfounded assumptions to giving that investigation. The article elicits Groningen politicians, who respond by phone, almost unanimously the word ‘shocking’. “As a politician you have to listen to court, but it is painful and sad,” says Jalt de Haan, party leader of the CDA. “This piece really sheds a different light on the case,” says Joren van Veen, party leader of the PvdA in the city council. He underlines that “Koen” has been a good mayor for Groningen. Very approachable for councilors, very visible for the citizens. De Haan saw how Schuiling, mayor of VVD-Huize in a municipality-dominated municipality, “kept its back straight and gave himself against the normalization of drug use.”
And, which is not obvious for a mayor of the city of Groningen: Schuiling was also loved in the Ommelanden, as the immediate surroundings and smaller municipalities around the city are traditionally called.
Jacobs-Setz and Van Veen both refer to the speech that Mayor Jaap Kuin van Pekela gave at the farewell of Schuiling in October 2024. Kuin called his colleague as a “Supreme mayor” and said: “You were mayor of Groningen, but you were also there for us. For the Ommeland.” Kuin swore that he would in any case not remove Schuiling from the joint mayor app.
Fame
As head of the Security Region, which is larger than the municipality of Groningen, and as a regional mayor of the Northern Netherlands, who represents municipalities in the northern provinces, to make shelter with dragging files that made him national awareness: the asylum reception, with the neighboring Ter Apel as a focal point, and the damage caused by gas, with Loppinning, with Loppinning, with Loppinning, with Loppinning, with Loppinning, with Loppinning, with Loppinning, with Loppinning, with Loppinning, with Loppinning, with Loppinning, with Loppinning.
According to Jacobs-Setz, the fact that the directors and other stakeholders were happy with his interference was hung together with his way of performing: “He could radiate that he did not take over, but that he would help you.” What may have helped with that sympathy, Van Veen suggests, that Schuiling lived as a mayor with his partner outside the city himself – with dispensation of the city council. Few that knew that, Van Veen thinks, and it would not have called his reputation. “There has never been any doubts about his connection with the city.”
We all have our prejudices, consciously or unconsciously. If they play a role, it can lead to unequal treatment
Not many people from Groningen also knew that Schuiling was homosexual, says Peter Killestijn, board member of interest group COC Groningen & Drenthe. He was “impressed” of the NRC article and worried about the suggestion he read in the words of the Groningen police chef Martin Sitalsing: that the orientation of Schuiling may have played a role in judgment over the unclear events-was shelter in his car, as he said, or did he only have?
Killestijn emphasizes that he never got the impression in the COC “that the police or justice in the north thinks so”. And that shouldn’t, he says. “But we all have our prejudices, consciously or unconscious. If they play a role, it can lead to unequal treatment. It is precisely the government with its exemplary function that should be alert to that.”
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