Do you think you put the word ‘people’s party’, which forms the core of the VVD, in the spotlight, you will come to Monday On 1 sitting at the table with NOS reporter Kysia Hekster, the quick Olcay Gulsen and presenter Hugo Logtenberg, who you thought would serve out the approaching end of his contract with the talk show graciously dozing. No, it was not the hoped-for successful media appearance of VVD MP Daniel Koerhuis, after he had seen at Schiphol on Sunday how hardworking the Netherlands fell prey to fear and disgust in an endless queue.
‘I saw a crying family from Leeuwarden with three children who were afraid of missing their holiday. Yes, I think that’s bad’, Koerhuis started. Complaining about mismanagement of our national pride is something you don’t do as a VVD member. You leave the whining about ‘modern slavery’ of the minimum wage (and chased away) suitcase carriers in the depths of Schiphol to the grubs of the PvdA – Attje Kuiken was also a guest for a reason.
No, Koerhuis had his own argument during the ‘terrible’ holiday woes: ‘I cannot explain that Lelystad airport has been ready and closed for two years now. That should be open for holiday flights from Schiphol,” he had tweeted. Revived the VVD lobby for that small airport in the polder and showed compassion for the suffering supporters in line – bam, who said this MP cannot multitask?
That the Lelystad promotion made no sense in response to Schiphol’s staff shortage, Koerhuis had expressed prior to On 1 apparently not worried. Hekster, who had just returned from the war in Ukraine, had raised her eyebrows at his speech: ‘I have spoken to refugees who have waited fifty hours at the border. They have turned around to go to the hospital with a sick child.’ Yes, much worse, Koerhuis agreed, but: ‘If the Dutch want to go on holiday, they should be able to do that.’
Entrepreneur and media personality Olcay Gulsen had listened with amusement and briefly took over the role of moderator: ‘Let’s go to the solutions.’ Koerhuis looked around a bit restlessly. Solutions? ‘We built Lelystad to avoid problems like this.’ But, the awake Logtenberg suggested, that airport can handle ‘at most ten thousand flights’ a year. Schiphol has half a million of them. ‘We must focus on regionalisation. Eelde, Eindhoven, Rotterdam-The Hague can take over hundreds of flights,” Koerhuis tried to divert attention to his stalled Lelystad offensive.
‘You do not mention raising wages at Schiphol as the first solution?’ Did Logtenberg’s colleague Nadia Moussaid also start nagging? ‘In the coalition agreement we will increase the minimum wage’, and no, did you see Koerhuis thinking, don’t ask how many euro cents that increase will be, because then my house of cards will collapse.
He clenched his fists around his glass of water, his only grip on this table of incomprehension.