Peter de Vrij swallows a throat candy, clears his throat, slides open the microphone with his thumb and shouts: “The municipal elections are on March 16. Are you going to vote too? Vote Labor Party, list 9!” A woman passing by looks up in shock. It is Saturday morning in Den Helder, because of the cold still quiet on the street. Until the PvdA party leader and alderman raises his voice.
While driving through the city, De Vrij shouts the same text every minute. Short and sweet, he practiced it this week. The sound car seemed to De Vrij, a roguish sixties, a nice idea: “because of the Covid” there was little else to organize. “In the sixties I saw all parties driving around with sound cars. Now we are the only ones.”
In the meantime, he raises his hand to someone, because after numerous presidencies at associations and foundations and oh yes, he was also Prince Carnival eight times in a row, well, “you do something sometimes, don’t you”, he now knows everyone. And everyone him.
De Vrij was born and raised in Den Helder and has always been a Labor Party member. Just like his grandfather, his father and now his children. “The PvdA, the VARA and the trade union. That’s how it went.”
Demise
But since De Vrij became a councilor in 1994, ‘I have observed the decline’. Then he was one of the eleven councilors, now there are only two and maintaining that “is good”. Then there were at least two hundred members, now about half and the only advantage of that is that “we now have less arguments about the list, because in the past those were real massacres”. And of course, says De Vrij, what the PvdA did during the Rutte II cabinet was not good. Just as he now “doesn’t like all that woke stuff” and the migration could also be a bit sharper, by the way. But it is still his party.
Also read an article about the campaign in Utrecht: To the left, to the right: D66 must be the largest
Shouldn’t De Vrij convince voters by proclaiming that as an alderman he helped families out of the financial shit in recent years, that the poor neighborhoods are being tackled? Driver Bertus, who drives his sound car throughout the Netherlands, shakes his head: „If you start talking at the beginning of the street, you are only finished at the end of the street. Nobody hears that.”
There is another reason. De Vrij: „You have to motivate people above all to vote. A PvdA member really knows that he is going to vote for us.” Still, it makes sense, the sound car: “Campaign should also be fun.” And maybe, he thinks, there will be someone walking on one of the countless streets through which the car travels who think: ”Die De Vrij is such a nice guy’, I’ll vote for that anyway’.”