“Sorry.” Lilianne Ploumen’s voice breaks when a journalist asks her on Tuesday morning in the House of Representatives whether she will miss the Chamber work. “Yeah, I’m definitely going to miss it.”
Earlier that morning, she announced that she would resign as party leader and as a member of parliament. She feels that the leadership of the party is not a good fit for her, she wrote in a statement. That she is not “proficient enough” in the plenary debate.
“You are just less good at some things,” Ploumen summarized to the assembled press on Tuesday.
Her decision comes as a surprise to many party members. She is known as a political survivor and as a party leader who would have liked to become party leader herself.
The latter happened in January last year, when Lodewijk Asscher resigned as PvdA party leader because of his role as minister in the Allowance Affair. Ploumen became the first female leader of the PvdA. The Limburg native immediately had a tough task: with two months to go until the national elections, the PvdA polled only slightly higher than the historically low nine seats with which the party was sitting in the Chamber at that time. Ploumen was unable to pull the party out of the doldrums, but did manage to maintain the nine seats.
left-wing collaboration
PvdA and GroenLinks (eight seats) decided to act as one group during the formation negotiations. After the formation, Ploumen and GroenLinks leader Jesse Klaver announced a further collaboration. Ploumen was strongly in favor of it. The bond between the two left-wing parties was clearly visible during plenary debates. Then Klaver and the PvdA leader would regularly consult, chat and laugh with each other.
Also read: How are the merger plans between PvdA and GroenLinks going at the local level?
On Tuesday, several journalists asked Ploumen whether “the left-wing cooperation” had anything to do with her resignation, because there was division within the PvdA faction. She denied, saying that her resignation had been “completely” her own decision.
I thought it was a highlight to be able to be for or against something every Tuesday
Before she became a Member of Parliament in 2017, Ploumen was party chairman (2007-2012) and Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation (2012-2017). Under Ploumen as trade minister, the CETA agreement was concluded, a controversial EU trade agreement with Canada. When it was debated and voted on at the beginning of 2020, the PvdA turned out to be against the treaty. Ploumen did not appear during the debate. She came under a lot of criticism from the House.
She was criticized within her own party when she lashed out hard at the then PvdA party leader Job Cohen in 2011, who resigned four months later. According to Ploumen, he was too much “swept up in the dynamics of The Hague” and he had to be “much more visible”. She seems to be blaming herself for the same thing now.
In an interview with NRC in 2017, Ploumen said the decision to say that about Cohen was the “hardest decision” she’s ever made. She said that being tough is something she taught herself, that her upbringing emphasized being nice. As so often she told about her father, the milkman. “My father was a small tradesman, a milkman, and then you earn your money by being nice.”
Fighting for ‘women’s affairs’
As a member of parliament, Ploumen mainly fought for the ‘women’s cause’. She could argue about that. Just last month, together with GroenLinks, she managed to convince a majority of the House of Representatives to vote in favor of a private member’s bill that should make it possible to also provide the abortion pill via the general practitioner.
It is not enough for Ploumen, she says in the entrance hall of the Chamber building. She would have liked to have been a leader who also knows how to fight for other themes.
Also read: ‘Great doubts’ among abortion doctors about the abortion pill at the doctor’s office
What will she miss most? The moods. “I thought it was a high point to be able to be for or against something every Tuesday, to raise my hand. Then the decisions come. Then you see as a voter that it matters who you vote for.”
She won’t live to see it again, because before the polls even started on Tuesday, she was picked up by a friend who took her home.