They appear everywhere: party leaders and their attempts to distinguish themselves. Timmermans imitated Balkenende in the RTL debate by accusing Jetten of ‘joking’. In 2006, it was the CDA Prime Minister who called PvdA leader Bos a spinster. “You’re not being honest,” he said.
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Yeşilgöz had also come up with another slogan. After Klaver’s pitiful ‘eel populist’, she came up with ‘care populist’ to portray Timmermans and SP party leader Dijk as irresponsible spending princes. It is all so transparent and small, while the voter knows that everyone has to vote and therefore cannot be honest.
Toothache puts things into perspective
Anyone looking for perspective can contact: Toothache. An election quiz that magnifies compartmentalization in the hope of reducing contradictions. Camp ‘left’, led by Hanneke Groenteman, fought against team right, led by Mark Baanders of Powned.
The program breaks clichés, because the right is often the left, and vice versa. For example, Baanders made a plea against poverty, and the left-wing Simon van Teutem was an opponent of an overly extensive healthcare package, a hobbyhorse of the left.
I like watching it because it is so much better than Jack van Gelder, who wants to be right-wing, but is in Orange Sunday made a mistake (again) by confusing measures against global warming with policies to reduce nitrogen.
Jack also compared former D66 leader Kaag to a witch who might return on a broom when D66 takes over. That was sad. Yet the witch joke was more digestible than the condescending tone that Hanneke Groenteman adopted. Groenteman cannot stop considering himself superior.
Hanneke’s distorted worldview
She believed that the left consisted of ‘good people’ and the right consisted of bad people. That was meant to be funny, until an SP member with jewels showed up in the compartmentalized spirit section. Of course that wasn’t possible.
In the world of the salon-left, SP members walk around in rags and probably with rotten teeth in their mouths. Jack van Gelder is sad and doesn’t know any better. Hanneke Groenteman always thinks she knows better and that is even sadder, especially because the left team rarely wins from the right Toothache.