When Renske Leijten appears at the interruption microphone, ministers know: pay attention. In her seventeen years for the SP in the Chamber, and especially since the Supplements scandal, Leijten built up a reputation as one of the sharpest opposition politicians, someone who rarely settled for the first answer.
It gets a little quieter at the interruption microphone, because Leijten stops. On Saturday, she unexpectedly announced at a party council of the SP that she is leaving immediately. “It’s time to go back to real society and start organizing people there,” she said.
Leijten is done with politics in The Hague. The Hague, she said in her farewell speech, is “poisonous” and “slow”, she is done with all the attention for imagery and power politics. “It was always that I came home with energy, even if I came from far and wide, if I had been among people. And it was always that I came home with a lack of energy when I had been to The Hague.
Strong debate
Still, The Hague suited her well. Leijten was a student and assistant for then party leader Jan Marijnissen when she became a Member of Parliament in 2006, aged 27. She has been in the House of Representatives continuously ever since, never finishing her thesis – on the methodology of feminist literary criticism.
Leijten made a name for himself as a fierce MP. She was also called ‘angry’ or ‘ferocious’, although she was not always happy about that terminology, she said in 2012 in NRC. “Passionate? Yes. Angry? Certainly. But without losing my temper.”
In her own view, something else played a role: being a woman. “Your voice goes up an octave, you start talking faster – and then it’s fish wives behavior right away. That is literally said to you. When men debate vigorously, it is simply a vigorous debate.”
When Leijten spoke about healthcare, the first two SP laws were passed. As a result, for example, the tendering of household care in the Social Support Act (Wmo) was no longer mandatory.
Nevertheless, her fighting spirit regularly remained without political results, as often happens with the fate of the SP. She had been campaigning against market forces for years, but her party did not benefit when the subject gained wider interest. With her idea for a National Care Fund, a health care system without insurers and without deductibles, she collected more than 250,000 signatures. It remained politically hopeless.
Persistent in the benefits file
Leijten did manage to achieve important results in the benefits file. She grew out of one of the critical, tenacious MPs who managed to expose the Supplements scandal, together with Pieter Omtzigt – initially still from the CDA – and Farid Azarkan from Denk. Leijten was very concerned about the victims of the tax authorities’ ruthless fraud policy. She had personal contact with many of them.
It became clear, partly thanks to Leijten, that this was not a small group. In the summer of 2019, the SP opened an online hotline for ‘wrongly stopped childcare allowance’, after the then State Secretary Menno Snel (D66) was unable to find out how many victims there were. Within a few weeks, just under three hundred families had registered.
Leijten was also there when the Supplements scandal, in which tens of thousands of victims have now been acknowledged, became the subject of a parliamentary inquiry committee in 2020. The final report of that committee, Unprecedented injusticeforced the Rutte III cabinet to resign.
Leijten’s position in the benefits file did not only consist of bold critical questions to the government. For example, with a successful personal lobby at Snel’s successor, Alexandra van Huffelen (D66), in November 2020 she managed to get 8,500 families to receive a Christmas bonus of 750 euros. “People can now finally buy a decent Christmas tree again, organize a nice meal and also buy presents for the children,” was her motivation.
Kinnesinne
Leijten stood her ground in this case as well. The resistance of the opposition was by no means always harmonious. Leijten, Omtzigt and Azarkan seemed united in the plenary hall, while in the wings there was sometimes a lot of mutual irritation and resentment. In the early years of the affair, the three fought over who would ask the first difficult questions or who would take the initiative for debates and motions.
Leijten also took this position when the role of the House of Representatives was discussed. When the Finance Committee of the House of Representatives discussed the plan for a parliamentary inquiry in 2019, Leijten, like Omtzigt, opposed the proposal to also look at the role of the House itself. She thought that was a diversionary maneuver to keep the responsible ministers out of the wind.
At the end of 2020, another parliamentary committee, which investigated the wider implementation problems at the national government, concluded that poor legislation from the House of Representatives was causing problems. When the House only debated this report a year later, Renske Leijten objected behind the scenes to the committee being invited. When NRC wrote about it, Leijten boycotted the journalists.
Loyal to the party leadership
As sharply as Leijten criticized the cabinet, her support for the party leadership is so loyal. Within the group, Leijten often spoke the highest word, sometimes more than Lilian Marijnissen, who has led the SP since 2017. She also supported the tough action against Rood, the youth club of which she herself had once been chairman. The SP dumped Rood in 2021, when the movement took on an increasingly strong communist signature.
Yes, politics is hard, she said in the NRC interview in 2012. And that’s okay too. “It can be fun, and sometimes it is, but if you do it for yourself, go to the football club. We are changing the world.”