Sometimes a photo is a gathering place, a complaint box, a protest bulletin board for the grievances of the moment. The photo above is a good example. He represents everything I don’t like about the image of the Netherlands that is now, or actually has been for a while, being created by politicians for whom opportunism is the guiding principle in every situation and who seem to be mainly concerned about the image. About how they come across when they don’t do what they say they do.
The photo was taken by Freek van den Bergh after the speech of Ukrainian President Zelensky in the House of Representatives last Thursday. The following Saturday it was featured in this newspaper. Justly. It is truly a miraculous image, which continued to gain weight in the days that followed. That’s how it is.
We see four men. From left to right: Jennes de Mol, the Dutch ambassador to Ukraine, Maksym Kononenko, the Ukrainian ambassador to the Netherlands, Foreign Affairs Minister Wopke Hoekstra and Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Zelensky’s speech has just ended. He must have impressed Kononenko, whose homeland has been overrun by Russian troops for a month. Hoekstra, almost two meters long, bends over to the Ukrainian ambassador, who according to photographer Van den Bergh is ‘indeed quite small’, grabs him by the upper arms and gives him a fatherly look.
Mark Rutte, also a Joris Driepinter, still towers above it on the right. At the time, it was standing on a raised platform, says the photographer. The hand holding his phone looks like a coal shovel from the angle of the camera. Both Rutte and De Mol, left of Kononenko, seem to be staring at a point on the floor, as if they are embarrassed by the situation.
Smart ass
I have tried to look at the photo as positively as possible. Hoekstra’s look, Kononenko’s grasping as if he were a toddler in need of comfort – isn’t that a very nice and well-intentioned gesture? Rutte’s shyness, that smiling looking away – that’s quite touching, isn’t it? And besides: this is a snapshot, isn’t it, maybe it’s all just unluckily timed. It will not work. All I see is hypocrisy, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
At first it almost made me laugh. This photo could be a nice meme, a little balloon could come out of Hoekstra’s mouth with some cringe-inducing explanatory text. And then something like ‘Pompiedompiedom, don’t forget to order new All Stars this afternoon, tralala’ at Rutte. Not fair, no, but imaging doesn’t always work in your favor.
But when the cabinet subsequently reported through Hoekstra that it had hardly imposed sanctions on rich Russians, while it had been talking about this for weeks, sanctions this, sanctions that, and then only on Monday, five weeks after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, a special sanctions coordinator was appointed to sanction the sanctions – then this photo was rapidly colored with annoyance and shame for the image of the Netherlands that arises in this way. A self-satisfied know-it-all who sympathizes with you, but who is also always busy making a profit somewhere.
That was probably not what Hoekstra and Rutte were aiming for when they warmly bent over to the Ukrainian ambassador. Nor is it their fault that they are so terribly tall, and Kononenko so short. But this is the image that stuck. And it still grows with my embarrassment.