Today marks ten years since Marcel Thijsen was sworn in as mayor in Tynaarlo. De Gelderlander had work to do in a municipality where, in his own words, ‘many people had died politically’. And while Thijsen himself had been one of the leading players in a political riot years before.
Although Thijsen (1968, Wijchen) grew up in a Catholic home, he became politically involved with the Labor Party. “Ensuring balance in society, a people’s party: that’s what I fell for at the time,” Thijsen explains in 2024. He saw the PvdA nationally losing its connection with ‘the people’. “You can unite around abstract ideas, but the man in the street didn’t feel that.”
And so Thijsen – who after years of council membership was now an alderman for the PvdA in Wijchen – resigned his duties. Together with Paul Loermans and Twan van Bronkhorst, Thijsen founded a new party: Kernachtig Wijchen.
“That caused a shock wave,” Loermans laughs about fifteen years later. “Marcel was not appreciated that he left, but he was not the only one. I do not believe that this made working in local politics more difficult. It was purely a difference of political insight. They were also able to do that at the PvdA to see.”
Kernachtig Wijchen immediately became the largest during the first elections. It is not surprising that the brand new party chose Thijsen as alderman. “He is a strategic thinker,” explains Loermans. “I experienced him during those years as a politician who achieves his results.”
In 2014, Thijsen thought he’d had enough. If the municipality of Tynaarlo appears to be looking for a mayor, he applies immediately. “His arrival was quite a change,” says Jurryt Vellinga (former Leefbaar Tynaarlo councilor and now alderman). “He is a striking man, with an outspoken manner.”
Thijsen is in some cases ‘un-Drents’. “He can be very direct,” Loermans and Vellinga both say. He is not always appreciated for this clarity, but Loermans does see it as one of his strengths.
“If we here in Wijchen say: ‘That might work out’, then you can be sure that it won’t happen. Marcel was always clear. It’s yes or no, and if it’s not possible, he won’t keep the seems like it could be.”
This directness, in combination with the founding of his ‘own party’, has earned him the nickname ‘the Red Fortuyn’ in Gelderland. Loermans can laugh about it. “With the red they refer to his PvdA background. And Marcel can be wonderfully short-sighted, just like Fortuyn was. But I don’t think he is that red, Marcel is more of an old-fashioned social democrat.”
Thijsen adopted the name as a ‘beggar’s name’. “But I’m not necessarily proud of it. I think that Fortuyn was no longer open to others in his time. And if you no longer have that, I don’t think you fit in with public administration.”