Pieter Omtzigt has not even been back to work for a year after a burn-out, as he is of students in the television program College Tour asked if he wants to start his own party. “I am not a Tesla that goes from 0 to 100 in 3 seconds,” says Omtzigt. He cannot or does not want to give an unequivocal answer, it is the spring of 2022. “Let me take it easy and see what I can handle.”
More than a year later, the cabinet has fallen and elections will be held in November. The question that hung over the Binnenhof immediately after the end of Rutte IV: what does the popular Pieter Omtzigt do? Will he start for himself, join another party, or stop? This Sunday he made through an interview with Twentsche Courant/Tubantia announced that he will participate in the elections for the House of Representatives with a new, own party: New Social Contract.
In the interview he says he has enough energy for the storm that awaits him now. The substantive pillars of the party will be tackling the administrative culture and improving social security. And no: he does not like to become prime minister, he will soon enter the House as party leader.
The fact that Omtzigt is now participating with his own party can have a major influence on the course of the elections. He was previously employed by research agency I&O Research probed on 46 seats. According to the researchers, he has the potential to draw voters away from almost all parties, especially from BBB, SP, VVD and PVV.
Twenty years in the House of Representatives
Pieter Omtzigt (49) has been in the House of Representatives for twenty years, almost his entire working life. The first eighteen years for the CDA, since two years as a single player. He is an econometrician, studied at the University of Exeter and in Rome and obtained his PhD in Florence. In addition, according to his LinkedIn page short lesson at the University of Amsterdam, in financial econometrics and statistics.
He owes his long political career mainly to himself and his supporters – and not always to the party. Omtzigt made his entrance into the House of Representatives in 2003. He is then in an unelectable position, but if a number of CDA MPs move on to the cabinet, he will still be allocated a seat.
In the first seven years of its parliamentary membership, the CDA was the largest coalition party. Omtzigt is still relatively unknown to the general public, he speaks about taxes and pensions and does not come to the fore much. In the faction he is already getting the reputation of someone who does not allow himself to be controlled. The party top regularly tries to blow Omtzigt’s whistle when he goes against the party line, former group member Eddy van Hijum said earlier in NRC.
It is more common in the years that follow that Omtzigt is put in an ineligible position and still enters the House with preferential votes. After the fall of the Rutte I cabinet (VVD, CDA with tolerance support from PVV), a collaboration that Omtzigt was against, he was initially not even put on the draft electoral list. A personal campaign and support from his supporters still earn him an (ineligible) place on the list. Thanks to preferential votes, again, he manages to get a seat.
Hardly changed
What has been striking all these years: whether the CDA is in the coalition or in the opposition, Omtzigt does not seem to behave differently in debates. This is unusual in the House of Representatives, where many coalition members of parliament almost automatically follow the agreed line. The CDA doesn’t know what to do with it.
In opposition years, his attitude was appreciated by fellow party members: a Member of Parliament who persists, asks questions, wants all the facts on the table and is not easily satisfied, you can make a profile with that. But in a coalition? There are CDA members who find it uncomfortable and difficult. Behind his back, Omtzigt is being complained about by party members and cabinet members. The party continues to try to call him to order.
How exactly this works will become clearly visible for the first time in 2021, when the Council of Ministers decides minutes release of meetings from 2019. The Supplementary Affair has already been exposed by then, thanks to the work of Pieter Omtzigt, among others. The minutes show how ministers spoke about Omtzigt, and also about other members of parliament from coalition parties. They are called “activist spokespersons.” It can be read in the documents that CDA member Wopke Hoekstra, at that time Minister of Finance, says that he and fellow party member Hugo de Jonge, then Minister of Health, “put a lot of time and energy into sensitizing Mr Omtzigt, with limited success.”
Being ‘serviceable’
The beginning of the end of Pieter Omtzigt as a CDA MP starts earlier: in 2020, when an internal party leader election is held. In the final round, Omtzigt narrowly loses to Hugo de Jonge, with a difference of 258 votes. He gets the second place on the electoral list. But if de Jonge stops as party leader a few months before the elections, it is not Omtzigt but Wopke Hoekstra who succeeds him. In a statement on Twitter, Omtzigt supports that decision, writing that he wants to be “subservient” to the party.
Read also: Pieter Omtzigt is scathing about the CDA in an internal memo
In the months that follow, he campaigns little for Hoekstra. Omtzigt has its own posters, its own story. A month before the 2021 parliamentary elections, he announces that he is slowing down, he is overworked. But while Omtzigt wants to seek shelter, the opposite is happening.
After scout Kajsa Ollongren allows herself to be photographed in the formation with minutes of the formation talks, which read: ‘position Omtzigt, function elsewhere’, it is only about him for months. The suggestion that is aroused: Omtzigt is seen as such a nuisance that he should be given a position outside the Chamber.
In addition, his party is also having an investigation into what went wrong in the internal party leader election, and why the CDA was able to lose so heavily in the parliamentary elections. Omtzigt writes a 76-page document about his own experiences. He sends screenshots of WhatsApp conversations that would have been conducted by employees and in which he is called a “bitch dog” and “psychopath”.
Omtzigt writes that he has felt “not always appreciated” and “on a number of occasions even downright unsafe.” He also complains about being “unfairly passed over as party leader”. If the document via The Limburger comes out, Omtzigt cancels his CDA membership. The image that sticks: Omtzigt has been bullied out of the faction. The CDA tries to process his departure and all the fuss about it in silence. There are crying employees who feel shortchanged by Omtzigt, it was not always easy to work for him, they think. At the presentation of the evaluation report, committee chair Liesbeth Spies says that many people in the party have to say sorry to each other. “So also Omtzigt itself. There is reciprocity.”
Approachable and distant
Omtzigt is seen as a difficult person to work with not only in his own group, but more broadly in the House of Representatives. His behavior is erratic and unpredictable: friendly and approachable one minute, aloof and cold the next.
Omtzigt shows himself dualistic in parliamentary debates, behind the scenes his line with the ministers responsible for handling the Supplementary Affair is short, during the period that he is still a CDA member. They sometimes see Omtzigt asking indignantly where the answers to parliamentary questions are, while they had been in contact about this the day before.
But no politician who wants to say something about this with name and surname, it always happens behind his back. Omtzigt is seen as untouchable because of his popularity – if you say something about him, you are selling yourself short, it sounds. He is known as someone who can give criticism well, but is less able to take it.
How differently is Omtzigt appreciated by the outside world. There he is known as headstrong and a sharp controller of power, someone who stands up for citizens who have come under oppression. And also as someone who wants to get to the bottom of the matter: if Omtzigt is at the interruption microphone in debates in the House of Representatives, there is a good chance that he will ask for more documents and facts. He is seen as a political conscience. And as someone from outside The Hague, Omtzigt lives in Enschede, who stands up for the region.
Great support
He is a great support for duped parents in the Supplementary Affair, and not only for them. Significant is an excerpt in College Tour, of the son of the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia who was murdered in Malta. She exposed corruption in the highest political circles of the island and was killed by a car bomb.
Omtzigt investigated the matter on behalf of the Council of Europe. “It is difficult to describe how alone we felt until Pieter Omtzigt got involved,” says the son of Caruana Galizia. “Suddenly justice came into view.”
Omtzigt is praised for his commitment and his listening ear, although according to people who work(ed) with him, this is also a risk: he can get carried away by it. Writes in 2017 NRC that Omtzigt actively contributed to a fake witness sharing disinformation in a meeting with relatives of the MH17 disaster. The man used a text message that Omtzigt had prepared. After the publication, Omtzigt tweeted that he acted “carelessly”. He stops as spokesman on behalf of the CDA on the file.
On the day that Omtzigt returns to the House of Representatives after his burnout, he has not been there for sixteen weeks, he tweets a photo of himself surrounded by one journalist and three cameramen. “This is how it looked all morning,” he writes. “Unfortunately that was not easy. The idea of a quiet first substantive working day – with limited staff now – fell into the water a bit with many cameras.”
Journalists frown upon reading that report. Because what Omtzigt does not add: the evening before he had called (photo) journalists himself to say what time he would be in the Chamber, and where he would enter. It is characteristic of Omtzigt: when it suits him, he likes to be in the spotlight, but he prefers to keep his finger on the light switch himself.
Also read this interview from 2020 with Pieter Omtzigt: ‘Politics should again be about real problems, not urgent debates’