How can you know that JA21 is rumbling? Exhibit A presented itself in the form of an urgent letter addressed to the party board by a group of concerned members in late March, pleading to democratize the party and broaden its course. Among the signatories were not the least: Members of Parliament, senators, MEPs and two of the three members of the House of Representatives.
Exhibit B was the board’s response that followed. Or rather: from the exasperated secretary, Simon Slooten. If he doesn’t like something, say members and former members, the secretary can get quite unpleasant. Even now, Slooten is displeased: he calls three of the signatories of the letter, including two senators, and lashes out fiercely. Slooten himself admits that he “certainly spoke with some emotion” with one of them. “I thought it was a pity that, given the warm relationship, they had not called me with their grievances themselves.”
Such calls are just the tip of the iceberg, with critical members warning that the party is on a dead end. This Saturday, when the party is having a conference in the Amersfoortse Prodentfabriek, some of them want to confront the board.
Thus, two years after its foundation, JA21 is getting exactly what the party feared from the start: hassle. LPF and FVD fought themselves to the bottom and thus lost their chances as a serious driver party. JA21, which was founded at the end of 2020 by Joost Eerdmans and Annabel Nanninga on the smoldering ruins of Forum, wanted to prevent that scenario at all costs. Right of the VVD and decent, that was the intended formula, without mutual bickering.
Now that dreaded hassle is still there. The results of the provincial elections, far behind the BoerBurger Movement, were disappointing. In recent years, little has come of the hoped-for role as a right-wing partner for the coalition parties of Rutte IV. And a small group determines the party course.
Concerned JA21 members are afraid that their party will make itself irrelevant with this course. “The party has become a job machine for Joost and Annabel and their pallbearers,” says Ted Dinklo, until recently a Member of Parliament for JA21 in Utrecht. “I never noticed any interest in the province. Those three seats in the House of Representatives, they thought that was fine at the top of the party.”
Not loyal enough
Dinklo was not selected again for the list of candidates in the parliamentary elections, in his own words because he was “not loyal enough”. To their surprise, other candidates also dropped out, or they already felt unappreciated and dropped out themselves. “We have not been sitting on our hands for four years in the States,” says Gert-Jan Ransijn, who led the JA21 faction in Flevoland. “I know what is going on in my province, but they ignore it completely,” says Johan Almekinders, former party leader in Overijssel.
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There is also dissatisfaction about the way in which the Limburg list was compiled. A year before the elections, the party concluded a gentlemen’s agreement with a party of former FVD members. That party, Samen Voor Limburg, would continue under the JA21 flag. Until the party leadership suddenly put forward a new party leader. The Limburg politicians withdrew from the party in anger.
Dinklo, Ransijn and Almekinders signed the letter to the board. The departing party chairmen of JA21 in Utrecht and South Holland also did the same. Many letter writers have the idea that the party could score much better.
However, JA21 must first mature, is their criticism. For example, due to the current rules, new board members can only be nominated by the board itself. As a result, the incumbent party directors, together with founders Eerdmans and Nanninga, are practically untouchable, say the critics.
I think JA21 is already a PVV model internally
Johan Almekinders former Member of Parliament
Today’s problems can partly be traced back to the turbulent birth of JA21. When FVD seemed to implode completely, JA21 quickly managed to bind a large group of representatives, with Nanninga and Eerdmans as leaders.
At the same time, a small group within the party gained a lot of power. In an effort to avert the chaos that tore apart earlier fast-growing right-wing entrants, they created a party with little room for countervailing power. The fear was that too much membership democracy would make JA21 unstable, susceptible to mutinous members who could take over the party with minimal membership numbers.
Two years and five thousand members later, there is still no question of a developed party, a growing number of JA21 members are now complaining. Attempts to democratize the party have been stifled and meanwhile the ‘temporary chairman’ of that time, Adrien de Boer, is still in place, although he promises not to complete his term.
The party leadership insists that the young party cannot do otherwise. “We are a start-up,” said Joost Eerdmans recently The Telegraph. Eerdmans, who leads the JA21 parliamentary group, is also the only member of parliament who did not sign the urgent letter. He found it “very negative”. The writers don’t understand that. “I think the official response from the board shows that it is indeed a positive letter with constructive proposals,” says Nicki Pouw-Verweij, one of the authors of the letter. In that official response, the board promises that it will work with most of the proposals. That’s how people reacted earlier, critics scoff. Then nothing happened to it.
The skepticism of the critical members is reinforced by the substantive course. The election campaign was mainly about immigration, with a touch of nuclear power. It recently resulted in a small political success when coalition parties CDA and VVD helped a majority vote in favor of a JA21 motion to investigate asylum reception in countries such as Rwanda. But where is the deepening of other subjects, the critics wonder.
“It is so empty,” says one of them. “We have become far too involved in the show, instead of naming that we are in a show. Caroline van der Plas and Pieter Omtzigt do, which is why they are so successful. We are not system critical.”
“I think that JA21 with its party structure is already a PVV model internally,” says Johan Almekinders. “And externally, with this content, it is also starting to look more and more like the PVV.”
At the congress in Amersfoort this Saturday, it will become clear how much support the critical members receive with their proposals. And whether the party leadership can prevent JA21 from going down in history as yet another quarrel.