She loves Sinéad O’Connor, she comes from Tilburg, she was not a party member until recently, she has a doctorate in law, she once lived voluntarily for a month on social assistance benefits. And she will be Frans Timmermans’ running mate.
The choice of the relatively unknown Esmah Lahlah as number two on the GroenLinks-PvdA candidate list for the House of Representatives elections is striking. GroenLinks leader Jesse Klaver is number three on the draft list presented on Friday afternoon. The members of GroenLinks and PvdA will be allowed to vote on the (order of) the list in the coming weeks.
Esmah Lahlah (Helmond, 1979) is considered an administrative talent, but has no national political experience. The councilor from Tilburg has only been a member of GroenLinks for two years. Previously, she was an independent councilor in the same city. She was named by the magazine in 2021 Domestic Administration voted Best Local Administrator.
After she was asked by GroenLinks to become party leader in 2021, she managed to achieve an unexpectedly large victory in the municipal elections of March last year. Against the national result (7.5 percent of the votes), GroenLinks became the largest party in Tilburg with more than 20 percent.
Pepper chips
Her political profile fits well with the campaign topics of GroenLinks-PvdA. As councilor for Social Security, Equality of Opportunity and Talent Development, Lahlah is a fervent advocate of social themes and combating poverty. In order to experience deep poverty herself, she lived on social assistance benefits for a month in 2021. She skipped lunch and sometimes ate “pepper chips for dinner,” she said NRC.
In addition to ambitious climate policy, social security is the major theme with which party leader Frans Timmermans is entering the election campaign. Lahlah already contributed to the election manifesto in recent months.
Lahlah is an administrative talent, but has no national political experience
When she first became a councilor in 2018 – before that she worked as a lecturer in victim science at Tilburg University – Lahlah consciously said she was not a member of a political party. “I belong to no one and at the same time I belong to everyone. That freedom is very nice,” she said in an interview with it A.D. Three years later she said she felt at home with GroenLinks – there was interest from several parties. In the Brabants Dagblad she called climate and social security her most important themes. “The earth is getting warmer and people are getting poorer.”
GroenLinks-PvdA has expressly sought diversity for the candidate list, in terms of male-female ratio, age and socio-cultural background. The choice for Esmah Lahlah in second place is therefore less remarkable. She described herself earlier this year in the GroenLinks organ The Left Cheek, as someone with not seven, but twelve check marks: “Woman, Muslim, mother, headscarf wearer, sister, daughter, victim, ethnic profile, outsider, colleague, competitor, foreigner. It’s all me.”
He recognized himself in the late singer Sinéad O’Connor: “I am just as alone as Sinéad when I resist or speak out too much.”
Second newcomer
It was agreed that after Frans Timmermans two GroenLinks would be in places two and three election regulations which was drawn up in July. It describes in detail how the mutual relationship between the two parties is arranged. First of all, each party has the right “to fill half the number of places on the list of candidates.” Dual members must indicate “on behalf of which party” they want to be on the list. Secondly, it has been agreed that the party that does not provide the party leader may take the next two places on the list. From fourth place onwards, PvdA members and GroenLinks alternate.
The second notable newcomer in sixth place is former union director Mariëtte Patijn, a member of the PvdA. At the beginning of 2018, she resigned as vice-chairman of the executive board of FNV out of dissatisfaction with the lack of cooperation within the top of the union. There had been a deep management crisis for some time. Nowadays Patijn (1966) works as a project leader for the Labor Inspectorate. For the previous House of Representatives elections, in 2021, Patijn co-wrote the PvdA election manifesto. She is a daughter of the late Schelto Patijn, the former mayor of Amsterdam and former Member of Parliament for the PvdA in the years 1973-1984.
Of all the sitting MPs from GroenLinks and PvdA who have reapplied, a place has been filled in the top twenty: seven from the PvdA and – in addition to Klaver – six from GroenLinks. Kati Piri and Lisa Westerveld are in fourth and fifth place. The rest of the top ten – numbers seven to ten – consists successively of experienced MPs: Suzanne Kröger, Julian Bushoff, Tom van der Lee and Songül Mutluer.
Also read this article from last summer: Party members GroenLinks and PvdA are voting en masse for one joint electoral list and election programme