Femke Halsema aspires to a second term as mayor of Amsterdam. In a letter to the city council this Wednesday, she wrote that it would be “an honor for her to serve our beautiful city for another period.” She would like to “continue to work for a free, undivided, safe and proud city.”
Halsema has been mayor of Amsterdam since 2018; her first six-year term expires in the summer of 2024. The reappointment of a sitting mayor by the council is usually a formality. Halsema’s appointment was a double first at the time: she is both the first female mayor of Amsterdam and the first from GroenLinks. Since the Second World War, the highest office in the capital had been continuously held by male PvdA members.
In her first term, Halsema fought against the unliveability in the Amsterdam city center through crowds and party tourism, including through smoking and alcohol bans in the Red Light District and an ‘erotic center’ in Amsterdam South or North – a proposal that was widely accepted. encounters resistance. Halsema also initiated long-term master plans for the less prosperous parts of the city outside the A10 ring road, which had received little attention from the city council for years. In 2021, she was also the first mayor in the Netherlands to apologize for the role in her municipality’s slavery past.
Turbulence
The first years of Halsema’s mayoralty were characterized by considerable turbulence. She had to deal with the disruptive consequences of drug crime, including the assassination of lawyer Derk Wiersum and crime reporter Peter R. de Vries. The Black Lives Matter demonstration on Dam Square on June 1, 2020, Halsema faced a storm of criticism from across the country: although the corona rules were massively violated, the Amsterdam security triangle did not intervene.
In her letter to the council, Halsema writes that “the past few years have been impressive, educational, intense and sometimes difficult, especially for my immediate environment who have made sacrifices for this.” As mayor, she faced threats and campaigns against her person in right-wing media. Revealed in 2019 The Telegraph that her minor son had been arrested in possession of an alarm pistol. This later turned out to be a disabled revolver that Halsema’s husband, filmmaker Robert Oey, had kept at the official residence. Halsema and Oey have been divorced since last year.
For her second term as mayor, Halsema is formulating a new task for herself: a “revision” of the “complicated” system of permits and complaints procedures of the municipality of Amsterdam. “Too often I experience that local government is an obstacle that is difficult to overcome instead of a loyal ally,” she wrote to the municipal council.
Halsema also writes that as mayor she “inevitably made mistakes”. Carrying out the office “requires not only decisiveness and decisiveness, but sometimes also restraint and moderation: I had to train myself in the latter qualities.”
Also read: the profile in NRC of Femke Halsema’s first five years as mayor