Finally, Pieter Omtzigt’s New Social Contract has also presented the election manifesto. Omtzigt’s ambitions are not bad: he wants to thoroughly renovate the board of BV Nederland. The region is not forgotten.
What can you expect from a two-month-old party with many inexperienced politicians on the list that presents a vision of the Netherlands? A lot, as becomes apparent on Tuesday when Pieter Omtzigt’s New Social Contract finally makes the election manifesto public. He promises a thorough renovation of what he believes is a dilapidated house of the democratic constitutional state in the Netherlands.
According to Omtzigt, everything starts with better national governance. His party, which consistently scores high in pre-election polls, wants to tackle the concrete rot in democracy with the establishment of an institutional court, the arrival of a corrective referendum and a new, more regionally oriented electoral system. This would allow each region to provide a number of MPs. The Netherlands should no longer be governed as if it were a company, with citizens as clients and attention only for the short term. According to Omtzigt, our board has become influenced by performance and market incentives. Managers, accountants and lawyers determine the policy. Administration, legislation and implementation suffer as a result. NSC wants a government that takes fundamental rights and democracy as a starting point and thus creates more trust.
Omtzigt’s choices do not come as a surprise to everyone. The man who sat in Parliament for the CDA for almost 20 years wants to put a stop to migration. A maximum of 50,000 migrants are welcome per year. The nitrogen law is being scrapped, farmers can see for themselves how they carry out the government’s task. But more mega stables are not welcome in our country. The kilometer charge and large funds such as the Nitrogen and Climate Fund will be abolished.
Omtzigt realizes that he will soon have to live up to high expectations and immediately issues a profit warning. All plans are impossible to implement in four years, he acknowledges. What was destroyed in fifteen or twenty years simply cannot be repaired in such a short time. Apart from that, many voters will also wonder exactly what role he sees for himself. However, on that point the leader of the brand new party is much less transparent.