The party leaders at the table seem to have forgotten that the second RTL television debate on Sunday evening should mainly revolve around the voter. People in the audience talk about their problems with housing: they have a house that is too big (Marieke), or it is too small (Ferdy) or they don’t have a house yet (Thijs).
Rob Jetten of D66 then looks at them for a moment and then starts talking about his village and the problems there. PVV leader Geert Wilders does not look at the voters in the stands at all, he mentions migration and says: “We must give houses to the Dutchman who now has to live with his parents until he is thirty or forty.” Lilian Marijnissen of the SP wants to “stop sticking plasters”, her election slogan, and starts talking about market forces. Caroline van der Plas, who prefers not to build on agricultural land, believes that the “existing housing stock” should be used better and makes an issue of the sustainability requirements in housing construction. According to Esther Ouwehand of the Party for the Animals, “the real elephant in the room” is livestock farming, which means that much land is unavailable for houses.
And then it is Dilan Yesilgöz of the VVD, last. She turns to the people who have told their story and says that she feels bad for them that they cannot find a better home. She can “very well imagine” that they “want to move on with their lives.”
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It is the third major TV debate before the elections on November 22. The leader of the party that has been at the top of the polls so far, Pieter Omtzigt, is not there and Frans Timmermans of GroenLinks-PvdA has also canceled. That is why Ouwehand and Marijnissen were still allowed to participate. Marijnissen seizes that opportunity with both hands: she attacks the VVD in particular, she interrupts others, talks over them, sighs and gestures a lot. Ouwehand is noticeably quiet, she is waiting for her turn.
Problems in healthcare
After the commercial break it is about healthcare, and then suddenly all the party leaders know that it is not about them and their mutual differences. Bea from Zoetermeer has said that she has moved in with her demented mother and Rob Jetten calls her mother “extremely sweet”. He says that he knows from his own experience that informal care can “put a heavy burden on your life.” Wilders calls it “very nice what Bea does for her mother.”
Healthcare, all the party leaders at the table know, is the subject that Lilian Marijnissen wants a lot of attention for, her party has many plans for it. In the campaign she has often talked about the care community center that has been built in her hometown of Oss, where the elderly can live in their own neighborhood. Created by the SP. Dilan Yesilgöz says she thinks that’s great, and Jetten also had prepared a compliment about that, he says.
It makes it more complicated for Marijnissen to be indignant about what she believes is wrong in healthcare. That part of the debate is mainly about bureaucracy in healthcare. Almost everyone agrees that this must urgently end. Only Yesilgöz believes that the government should also look at itself: those rules were devised, she says, to avoid risks. Marijnissen then starts about the nursing homes that “have been abolished by the VVD and the PvdA” and about the power of the health insurers. So it is now the case, she says, that a new indication must be requested for everything. When “Mr. Wilders falls” or “Mrs. Van der Plas” is not doing well.
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She gets a round of applause from the audience for it. But Yesilgöz does not want to respond to it. She says that she has watched “all the debates of the past twelve years” between Marijnissen and Mark Rutte. “I really don’t want to replay that here.” She wants to talk about technical solutions in healthcare. Van der Plas shouts: “Bea’s mother won’t be helped by a robot!” Wilders believes that Yesilgöz should be clear: “What are you going to do for Bea and all the other Beas in the Netherlands?”
VVD and PVV to work together or not?
RTL presenter Renze Klaver wants to know what the situation is between the party leaders of VVD and PVV: do they want to work together after the elections, as Yesilgöz initially seemed to intend, or is that door closed, as was the case in the radio debate at the beginning of November seemed to be. Then she said to Wilders: “You are destroying the country.”
Yesilgöz starts, as she often does this campaign, about the PVV voters whom she does not want to exclude. Wilders says: “I think we can agree on a lot of things.”
Afterwards, Van der Plas says that she found it uncomfortable that they were talking about people sitting behind them. She had walked over to them during the commercial breaks, she says. “Next time they should just sit there with a chair in between.”