From her villa in Hierden in Gelderland, Minister Christianne van der Wal (Nature and Nitrogen, VVD) overlooks a mobile police post, armored turnstiles and behind it a large, inverted Dutch flag with a banner: “No future without farmers!” The neighborhood can be closed off with roadblocks to fend off new tractor protests. Everywhere in the village you see the blue-white-red of angry farmers.
Van der Wal takes her work home with her – there is no escaping it.
Since her infamous nitrogen card from June, Christianne van der Wal-Zeggelink (48) has been the most discussed minister in the cabinet. A video in which she spoke barefoot with angry farmers in front of her home in June went viral.
It has the heavy task of reducing nitrogen, which will have far-reaching consequences for industry, traffic, construction and livestock farming. The peasant protests continue this political summer recess: this week, highways were dangerously blocked and cleanup companies intimidated. “Unacceptable,” Van der Wal tweeted.
Stop word: cool!
In twelve years she managed to reach the center of power, and she is sometimes mentioned as a possible future VVD leader and prime minister. For this portrait of Van der Wal spoke NRC with more than twenty (former) colleagues, friends and acquaintances. How did Van der Wal come into the cabinet and what kind of director is she?
Read this interview with Minister Christianne van der Wal: Minister Van der Wal about nitrogen problem: ‘Soon we will no longer be able to drink clean water from the tap’
She has the optimistic, energetic appearance of Mark Rutte and the catchphrase is “cool!”. But Van der Wal is less savvy verbally and more of a doer than a thinker, say acquaintances. She has an open attitude and says she likes to enter into ‘a conversation’ with critics, such as with farmers’ organizations next Friday and Johan Remkes as an ‘independent discussion leader’. At the same time, Van der Wal is known as a steadfast director who goes for her goal.
“She’s just a determined lady,” says CDA member Peter Drenth, fellow deputy when Van der Wal was in the Gelderland provincial government. “And you have to come up with good arguments if she wants to go off her path.” She is open to a different route, says Drenth, if that approach ‘achieves the same goals’.
Van der Wal’s rapid managerial career went along two tracks. First of all through local politics: she became party leader for the VVD in Harderwijk in the municipal elections in 2014, then alderman for economic affairs and tourism, and from 2019 she was deputy for the province of Gelderland.
Track two ran through party politics. From 2016, Van der Wal was on the board of the national VVD. She became party chairman at the end of 2017, when her predecessor Henry Keizer resigned after a financial scandal surrounding his crematorium company.
She owes her ministerial post to her loyalty to party leader Rutte, thinks Member of Parliament Wybren van Haga, former VVD member. “Under Mark, loyalty takes precedence over quality,” he says. Van Haga himself was expelled as a VVD member in 2019 via a phone call from party chairman Van der Wal after violating integrity rules.
Nonsense, responds Annemarie Jorritsma, party leader in the Senate of the VVD. “I saw very quickly after I got to know her: she will become a minister one day. Yes, Christianne continues to grow.”
As party chairman, Van der Wal attended the political summit in The Hague every week, the ‘ministerial consultation’. Jorritsma, technical chairman of that consultation, discovered Van der Wal’s administrative talent there. “She is very good at maintaining contacts and seeking support. She never lets anything slip, doesn’t escalate anything. If someone disagrees with her or gets angry, she will call that person.”
Sharp story
Van der Wal wanted to “shake up” the VVD after several integrity issues concerning party prominent figures such as predecessor Keizer, says Klaas Dijkhoff, who was chairman of the party in the House of Representatives in those years. The party had to innovate and rejuvenate. The VVD had to “become more fun”.
Thus the annual party congress was transformed into a ‘festival’. That was laughed at, Dijkhoff says, but it worked. “It became more accessible. More young people came again.” For older party members, a lounge area with chesterfield sofas remained.
Van der Wal also tried to stimulate the VVD in terms of content. In April 2019 Dijkhoff presented a ‘discussion paper’ about the liberalism of the VVD. A tug to the left, or at least the political center, according to critics. Van der Wal had stimulated him to write a sharp story, says Dijkhoff: ”Don’t look for a compromise too quickly’, she urged me, ‘let people have trouble with it’. She just wanted to seek discussion.”
As party chairman, Van der Wal also looked for talent inside and outside the party – it was her portfolio as a board member in the years 2016-2017. In doing so, she emphatically strived for a better mix: of age, social background, regional descent, and especially in the male-female ratio.
That was done with some compulsion, says Mirjam de Blécourt, who was elected to the Senate in 2019. “She instructed the party’s selection committee to have as many men as women at the top of the candidate lists.” This has been achieved for the Senate, the House of Representatives and the European Parliament. You can also see it in the Rutte IV cabinet: six female VVD ministers and five male members. De Blécourt: “Christianne has worked hard for that.”
Fortunately, not all members look back on Van der Wal’s party chairmanship. Just when she was pressing for renewal, a group of critical VVD members united in the ‘Klassiek Liberaal’ group, which now has about a hundred members.
Reinier Geerligs, committee member in the Rijssen-Holten city council, is one of them. “After 12 years in power, we are concerned about our liberal roots,” he says. According to Geerligs, Van der Wal has listened too little to what he calls “concerned VVD members”. “She has failed to address the slumbering discontent in the party.”
This dissatisfaction was reflected at the last VVD congress in June, according to Geerligs, when the discussion among members ‘popped’ again. A narrow majority of 51 percent then voted against the nitrogen policy of the cabinet – and therefore of their ‘own’ minister Van der Wal. The nitrogen dossier is ‘not going well at all’, says Geerligs. “She brings her plans very enthusiastically and optimistically, but it goes too fast and is too thoughtless.”
Dream: the conservatory
Van der Wal comes, as she herself expresses it in interviews, from a “Christian-liberal nest”. She was born in Oldenzaal near the German border, raised in Castricum aan Zee. She describes her parents as “typical VVD members”, who both worked in health care. Her mother urged both daughters to become economically independent.
Van der Wal played the cello and dreamed of going to the conservatory after high school. It became a study facility management in Diemen, later she also obtained her teaching certificate.
She worked for a few years in her husband Piet van der Wal’s company – a wholesaler of care beds – but eventually chose a career of her own. She wanted to participate. Van der Wal applied for the board of the Christian VCO primary school in Hierden. Then the public administration beckoned. With a fourth child on the way, Van der Wal became a councilor for the VVD in Harderwijk in 2010.
She is not the only one in her family who is politically active. Both her son Justus and her father Hendrik Jan Zeggelink were on the electoral list of the VVD in Harderwijk during the municipal elections this spring (places 16 and 19).
Pretty decent vlogger
Van der Wal was quite an appearance in local politics. An extroverted woman who spoke a bit dignified, made vlogs and had big plans. As an alderman, she has built Harderwijk into a residential city and a tourist attraction: a Hanseatic city with a city beach, says VVD party leader Menno Doppenberg. PowNews came to interview her in „the Saint-Tropez of the Veluwe”. Doppenberg: “She sees that as an opportunity for Harderwijk.”
Not all ambitious plans got off the ground. A design for a glass cafe on the Vissershaven was met with protest from residents. The ‘park villa’ project is still dragging on: a residential tower on the water, which had to be much higher than the zoning plan allows. But under Van der Wal, the VVD did win seats, which they have now lost again.
Even then, Van der Wal manifested himself as a progressive liberal, who was not afraid to snub Christian Harderwijk. She caused a stir with the plan to bring Pink Saturday to Harderwijk – which remained a plan. After the municipal elections in 2018, she preferred to manage with D66, also to introduce Sunday shopping in Harderwijk. The VVD eventually went ahead with coalition partner the ChristenUnie, but a compromise was made: 26 shopping Sundays a year, with the shops only opening at 12 noon to respect church attendance.
Ironically, Van der Wal now forms a team with an Agriculture minister of the Christian Union: Henk Staghouwer. She is just lucky that she has Staghouwer next to her as a lightning rod, you also hear in political The Hague. Because Staghouwer received broad criticism from the House of Representatives for failing to offer farmers a clear ‘future perspective’.
brave decision
As provincial administrator in Gelderland for, among other things, the economy, innovation, mobility and aviation, Van der Wal made a competent impression on States members. “A problem-solver,” Luuk van der Veer of the Party for the Animals calls her from the opposition. “Not bad.” Van der Wal often used the word ‘mission’, he knows.
One of her last decisions as deputy was sensitive. Gelderland withdrew from the widening of the Rhine bridge in Rhenen at the end of 2021, partly because the estimated costs (140 million euros) became too high. With that decision, Van der Wal showed her courage, said the Gelderland King’s Commissioner John Berends during her farewell. Gelderland and Utrecht had each already spent 1.7 million euros on the project – and Utrecht wanted to continue expanding.
Read the article: Provinces can barely get started with the nitrogen crisis due to a lack of clarity from the cabinet
Now all provinces have the difficult task of working out Minister Van der Wal’s nitrogen targets in one year. Deputies call it brave how they defend hard policy for farmers for nature conservation, according to a tour. “Certainly for a VVD minister,” says deputy Anita Pijpelink from Zeeland. “When she had just been a minister and I heard her say this, I said to my civil servant: wow, these are literally sentences that I also use as a PvdA deputy.”
At the same time, many provincial administrators were disappointed with Van der Wal’s nitrogen map, which caused unrest and confusion: clumsily communicated.
Her spontaneity sometimes works against her, says deputy Harold Hofstra from Flevoland (ChristenUnie), involved in buying out farmers from the Interprovincial Consultation. Van der Wal, for example, announced a second purchase scheme that would be “wildly attractive”. As a result, farmers who were already negotiating the first settlement dropped out and waited. Hofstra: “She means well, but it turns out differently.”
“I’m afraid that here and there she gives the impression that she does not fully feel what effect it has in the country,” says the Groningen deputy Johan Hamster (ChristenUnie). On the other hand, she “doesn’t bring a nice message” yet “with dedication,” he says.
Reducing nitrogen appears to be an administrative all-or-nothing mission. If Van der Wal’s approach is successful, she will prove herself to be a minister who can handle complex, sensitive tasks. For Annemarie Jorritsma, Van der Wals The Hague years have only just begun. “She is on my list of potential successors to Mark.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of 30 July 2022