‘Were you afraid?’, Twan Huys asks Christianne van der Wal, a guest at . on Sunday evening College Tour. Huys refers to the moment that dozens of farmers stood in the driveway of the nitrogen minister last summer. The images are well known: Van der Wal barefoot, briskly shaking hands with farmers who were so worked up by the debate about their sector that they had thrown overboard any form of decency or democratic awareness.
No, she was not afraid, says Van der Wal: in her work she tries not to be distracted by ‘flies’ – opinions, riots. Huys shows a video in which Wopke Hoekstra once again refuses to express his support for the coalition goal of halving nitrogen emissions by 2030. When he then tries to elicit a sharp quote about her fellow minister, she says: ‘These are the flies I was talking about.’
Christianne van der Wal is the type of woman who often holds high positions within the VVD – the type of Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the type of whom you can see how she opens a bottle of Chablis at home after a long day full of angry farmers and annoying ‘flies’. with the announcement that mom has deserved that once in a while. Those kinds of women create peace of mind – for me anyway. Those who can occasionally leave their work for what it is to be with the family The smartest person I personally would rather entrust a complicated file to politicians who radiate that they never do anything but work – the VVD has plenty of that too.
But that feeling is undoubtedly due to my non-agricultural oat milk bubble: the people about whom Van der Wal decides can probably not let go of their work at all at the moment. Bee College Tour they had thought about that too – that the students at the School of Journalism, where the program was filmed, may not feel much personal urgency about the nitrogen debate. That is why a few livestock farming students had also flown in.
One of them, a farmer’s son named Sam, thought that Van der Wal is “damaging it for all farmers.” With a trembling lower lip he fired at the minister the unfounded claims that have been heard for months from the agricultural sector – that nitrogen is a ‘problem invented by The Hague’; that without farmers we have ‘no food’ (while 70 percent of Dutch farm products go abroad).
As Sam, with tears in his eyes, addressed the woman who has been giving his father sleepless nights for months, the girls behind him had to hold back their laughter. Van der Wal did not – he assured him that ‘bullying away farmers’ is not on her agenda. That’s how it comes across, Sam thought. She understood. ‘Everyone wants clarity, and at the same time that clarity is what you don’t want to hear.’
That glass of Chablis, later that night – she deserved it again.