“Leveling is a party.” The ink of the coalition agreement of cabinet Rutte II has not yet dried when Hans Spekman, party chairman of the PvdA, manages to persuade his coalition partners of the VVD with those four words. It is Spekman in full: honest, outspoken, standing up for the interests of the less fortunate. But in all its emotion perhaps not so tactical.
The criticism, not only from the VVD but also from members of his own party, is not unfounded. Still, Spekman stands his ground. in the evening at news hour he says that he did not make his statement to hurt VVD members, but that he ‘sincerely’ thinks that an income of twice the average can give up something for a construction worker or teacher. To no avail. Just over a week later, the means-tested health care premium, the most painful measure for higher incomes, is off the table.
Spekman has fared considerably more successfully in recent weeks. As director of the Youth Education Fund, he managed to arrange 5 million in government funding for breakfast at five hundred schools with a relatively large number of ‘vulnerable students’. After an 11-year-old student at his Rotterdam school passed out because he hadn’t eaten for a whole weekend, Spekman managed to position himself as an advocate for this group of children. Thanks to his good contacts with Minister Carola Schouten (Poverty Policy), he converted the media attention into tangible results.
Development opportunities
As early as February 2018, Spekman became the first director of the Youth Education Fund, which helps to increase the development opportunities of children growing up in poverty. No further career for him in Dutch or Brussels public administration, such as PvdA contemporaries Diederik Samsom and Jeroen Dijsselbloem.
In a conversation with the makers of the documentary series Classes he compares the fate of the children for whom he works with that of the drug addicts, who slept in the Hoog Catharijne shopping center during his time as an alderman in Utrecht. ‘They were very visible, right next to the central station, but in fact 90 percent of the population walked past them and deliberately looked in a different direction. As if it didn’t exist. The same is happening in the neighborhoods and schools in the cities.’
shaky leadership
Spekman’s period as party chairman between 2012 and 2017 is not known for being particularly successful. Within a month of taking office, party chairman Job Cohen throws in the towel. A double interview with Spekman, in which the party leadership, in the opinion of some MPs, is too close to the SP, is the last straw for Cohen’s already shaky leadership. The parliamentary elections six months later are a success under Samsom, but Spekman later admits that the PvdA gives too much away too quickly in the subsequent formation.
As an alderman in Utrecht and a member of the House of Representatives, Spekman had already made a name for himself as a passionate and ideological advocate of the social-democratic cause. Under the duo of Spekman and Cohen – the folk boy and the intellectual – the party must turn left again and become the people’s party it once was. The coalition with the VVD, with not Cohen but Samsom as leader, ultimately makes that impossible; voters are running away from the social democrats even harder than they used to.
Spekman is trying to turn the tide by organizing a party leader election in the run-up to the elections to the House of Representatives in 2017. It turns out to be a painful and personal battle between party leader Samsom and challenger Lodewijk Asscher, without the substantive discussion that Spekman wants so much. Under Asscher, the PvdA suffers its biggest election defeat ever, from 38 to 9 seats. Spekman’s head is on the chopping block.
Poverty and disease
It is also a turbulent period personally, Spekman says later. Three weeks after the election defeat and his resignation, his sister Anneke dies of cancer. His other two sisters already died of that disease, as did his father, when Hans was 1 year old.
His mother raises him and his three older sisters in poverty. “She changed her knickers so she could dress me up just a little bit,” he recently told the newspaper Dutch daily newspaper. “We had to get it better than them.” Social democracy runs in Spekman’s family; his father founded the division of PvdA predecessor SDAP in his native village of Zevenhuizen.
In the early years he does his work as director of the Youth Education Fund in relative anonymity. The illness of his wife Muriël, who will be diagnosed with lung cancer with metastases in 2019, keeps him from his work. She eventually recovers miraculously.
With the corona pandemic and high inflation, Spekman’s work has only become more urgent ever since. “I can lose my heart one hundred percent here,” he says in September in a radio program Nails with Heads. “I don’t have to make any compromises. I can stand up for the group I have the most heart for: children who grow up in poverty, whom I wish the same as what I wish my own children.’
3x Hans Spekman
Complementing his ‘leveling up is a party’ statement: ‘Why is it necessary for people who already have it right to improve every time? While in recent years we have asked very great sacrifices from people at and just above the minimum wage, and from people on benefits.’
About why the PvdA started ruling so quickly with the VVD in 2012: ‘After the right-wing cabinet VVD-CDA-PVV, there was an enormous eagerness to actually make a difference for people. In hindsight, I should have hit the table hard with my fist.’
“We are a thoroughly segregated country. That’s not even bad intentions from someone who is in another school, but that’s how we are. I hope that the people who have it all a little better stand up and help those other people. That is desperately needed.’