At the party congress of the VVD on Saturday it is especially clear what the party does not want. Not collaborating with the ‘runners’ of the PVV, and not with the ‘road viewers’ of GroenLinks-PvdA, says party leader Dilan Yesilgöz. The VVD front woman can count on loud applause and shouting in the room in Nieuwegein when putting her political opponents away.
What Yesilgöz also doesn’t want, according to her speech, is that the next elections are about asylum. She almost completely avoids that subject. In her speech it is about defense, about geopolitics, about the economy. But she doesn’t really come to concrete plans.
Last week Yesilgöz finally excluded that she wants to rule with the PVV again, after Geert Wilders dropped the cabinet at the beginning of this month. That step can count on broad support from her supporters: in a survey that RTL Nieuwspanel held in recent days among VVD voters, 78 percent were before.
But in Nieuwegein there is a feeling that the party of the rain is in danger of getting into the drip. If the PVV is not an option, then GroenLinks-PvdA leader Frans Timmermans seems to be the logical partner to achieve a majority. But Yesilgöz replies to a comment from the Hall about Timmermans: “I would find pure poverty if the choice consists of PVV and Timmermans.”
‘Left-radical activists’
Yesilgöz himself makes no effort to make a possible collaboration with GroenLinks-PvdA easier. A few days after the cabinet trap, she said in it Financieele Dagblad that GroenLinks-PvdA is a “normal party”. With that she seemed to put the door ajar. Now she continues to repeat that the PvdA has been extradited to the “extreme left-radical activist part of the supporters of GroenLinks”. Yet Yesilgöz does not want a campaign that is ‘hard and ugly’. She says it as if she has no share in it herself.
There is a substantial difference between her aversion to the PVV and her aversion to GroenLink-PvdA. With the PVV it is ‘impossible’ to rule, with GroenLinks-Pvda only ‘very complicated’. At the VVD they have suffered from the collaboration with the PVV, it sounds from the group. A Member of Parliament who wants to continue to recall anonymously: “I have picked so much shit in recent months. Then Faber said again that Zensky is a dictator and you have to do something again.”
‘Only seven weeks’
History is also being rewritten a bit in Nieuwegein. When the cabinet was still, the story of the VVD was that you could make good agreements with the PVV – other than with NSC, for example. But now VVD members say that the PVV was unreliable in about every area.
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For the VVD it is now important to implement as quickly as possible as quickly as possible of the measures from the coalition agreement, in particular in the field of asylum. Member of Parliament Wendy van Eijk says: “We actually only have seven weeks, because soon it will be summer recess and shortly thereafter election recesses.” The most important thing for the party is the Asylum Measures Act, which former asylum minister Marjolein Faber of the PVV took far too long.
That the VVD people no longer have to work with Faber and the PVV is, according to some, a liberation, it sounds. But the right-wing majority has disappeared, and many VVD plans are suddenly difficult to get through the room. Member of Parliament Claire Martens says: “It is Balen, you are working on plans, in my case for the economy, and they are in danger of being delayed. With the economic left -wing PVV that was already challenging and who knows what the result will look like soon?” Wendy van Eijk had just found a “mode operandi” to work with the PVV MPs. Now they are unpredictable again, she says.
Pro-Israel
With regard to Israel and the war in Gaza, Yesilgöz is still in a difficult position: she has always been Ferm Pro-Israelic, while members are becoming increasingly critical towards the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yesilgöz becomes more critical, also at the congress. She says that the “suffering of the Palestinians” does not leave her untouched. “I support the existence and right to self-defense of Israel, while I am critical of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s cabinet. Let’s not demand each other that we become one-dimensional.”
The strong pro-Israeli part of the party is very present during the congress. The group uses “GroenLinks rhetoric” says VVD member Florentijn van ‘t Verlaat about Israel criticism. When a VVD member of Yesilgöz asks to promise to never participate in a coalition that imposes sanctions on Israel, she parries the question. The VVD is not for “sanctions against Israel as a whole” but is not against targeted sanctions against individuals such as ministers of extreme right -wing parties.
Yesilgöz also knows that after the elections she will probably have to talk to parties that are much more critical of Israel than herself. “Please do not give me all kinds of red lines before the formation has started at all,” she says to Van Verlaat. The VVD leader is already looking ahead to life after the elections on October 29.