New era: ministers talking about threats and the impact | Politics

keep silent. Keep small. Everything under the guise: what you give attention grows. That is how Jan Pronk (PvdA) dealt with the threats directed at him in his time as minister. In the 1970s, Pronk had to go into hiding with his family twice due to threats from ‘Moluccan corners’. “I’m an old-fashioned politician, but I don’t think you should make a fuss about it,” he says. Threatening letters were ‘kept away’ from him by officials. And whatever reached him, he tried to shake off. “If you start to take any notice of it, you can no longer work.”

But times have changed. Keep silent, politicians don’t do that anymore. Kaag said this week during the recordings of College Tour, which will be broadcast this weekend, that she doubts whether she will continue as D66 leader now that she is often threatened. Her daughters fear she will ‘end up like Els Borst’, who was killed by a confused man for her euthanasia stance. “It only has to go wrong once,” said daughter Janna. “I actually want her to find another job.”

Kaag struggles with the mechanism that if you admit that threats affect you, those with malicious intentions will get their way. But she thinks the discussion needs to be held. “The climate is so poisoned, we have to stop that sliding scale. What kind of society do we want to be?”

It was Kaag himself who gave the go-ahead for a new era in October 2021 in which threats are discussed. In the court in The Hague, she sat down to personally tell judges what the threats from a man who called himself ‘X’ online had done to her. He had written that one day he would ‘injure Kaag so much that she is either dead or can never perform her duties again’.

Also listen to our podcast Politics Close, and subscribe via Spotify or Apple:

The D66 leader remarked at the session that she feels a ‘responsibility’ to ‘contribute to breaking the pattern in which intimidation and threats to public persons appear to be tacitly accepted’.

Just like Geert Wilders, Kaag has been a prime target for some time. A man showed up at her house with a flaming torch. Walking the dog undisturbed is no longer an option. Following Kaag, Minister Hugo de Jonge (CDA) said yesterday, plagued by the threat since corona, that there could be “a limit if you don’t want it to affect your family”. And earlier it was lost on minister Christianne van der Wal (VVD) that if one of her children told her to stop working, she would do so.

Sigrid Kaag gets emotional during the broadcast of College Tour (video):

Now threats to politicians are of all times, but the size has increased: after all, a tweet or message on Instagram is sent in no time. This week, the Public Prosecution Service said that a record number of reports were made last year, 1125, a doubling compared to a year earlier. A number of threateners also reported to the court on Monday. The image: lonely, often unemployed, but above all frustrated by corona measures, men who reached for the keyboard on a whim.

But will the discussion, which Kaag already tried to start in court, be conducted?

The attempt to have the discussion about threats did not lead to change. The number of online threats therefore skyrocketed in the year that followed, but a debate about etiquette in politics after that did not help. The number of heated debates in the Chamber did not decrease. In fact, in a debate at the end of the year, the cabinet even walked away when Baudet lashed out at Kaag for suggesting that she might have been recruited as a British spy in her student days.

So solutions are not yet within reach. Despite Kaag’s outpourings, the police posts in front of the homes of a number of ministers will not be closed in one-two-three.

Watch all our videos about politics here: