There is a row of police officers on József Nádor Square in Budapest, last Saturday. Silent, with tight faces. Thom Van Campen, Member of Parliament of the VVD, comes along to the Pride parade. He doesn’t stand. Only in a side street he says: “This was the first time of my life that I see the police and think: they are not for my safety.”
About two hundred thousand people participate in the Pride, who had wanted to stop Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. At the Pride organization, the idea is that the counter demonstration of neo-Nazis, which the Orbán’s government has allowed, can get out of hand. That Pride participants may be arrested, or get high fines.
Van Campen, in a blue polo shirt and a beige cotton pants, there is two other MPs from the VVD, Eric van der Burg and Rosemarijn Dral, and three employees. Their plan is to walk behind the purple truck of the Hungarian Liberal Party Momentum, with a DJ on it and huge boxes. They make up rainbow flags on each other’s cheeks, Van Campen rolls up his legs: he wears pink socks with a rainbow heart, bought for this pride on the women’s department of Uniqlo. “Guys,” he says. “We meet one thing: we are gone by violence. We are not going to provoke.”
But is not violence, there are no arrests. Along the road are two men with a sign on which a ‘heteropride’ is announced, there are also two men in black clothes holding up a white cross and at the end there are seven men with shaved heads behind black banners. Thom van Campen has been walking for hours, and danced a lot. From the truck, Destiny’s Child, David Guetta, Sean Paul, Britney Spears, Cassie sounds. And a lot of Beyoncé. “You don’t get the gays happier,” he says, “then with Beyoncé, Queen Bee.”
Ruttian cheerfulness
In the Lower House, also at other parties, Van Campen is known for its almost Ruttian cheerfulness. And what he is much better at than Mark Rutte: imitation of The Hague politicians, including his own party, also Rutte. In his area, people are often laughed, and sometimes singing: if Van Campen has discovered that it is someone’s birthday, or almost. “He is a pacemaker,” says Laura Bromet of GroenLinks-PvdA early this year. “If he is there, it is always fun. I’m on him.”
On Thursday, November 23, 2023, the day after the elections, Van Campen looks pale and gloomy. The fact that the PVV has become the largest party with 37 seats has arrived hard with him. He doesn’t want to say much more about it.
It is where this story starts. In the VVD, Thom van Campen (35) is a talent, and with that party you gradually get more and more tasks that are seen as important and influential. He has recently become a member of the VVD and in the Lower House vice -chairman, instead of Roelien Kamminga who became mayor in Groningen. And at the same time, VVD members, and other MPs, know how little he should have from the right-wing conservative ideas of exactly those parties with whom the VVD had started to negotiate a cabinet from November 2023: PVV, BBB and NSC. What does it look like, if you still participate in it?
In the time of those negotiations, Thom Van Campen says in the corridor, what pretty much every VVD member at the time says: he is “a democrat.” “Then you have to do something with such a result.”
Abdominal pain
That ‘something’ is the outline agreement on May 16, 2024, which a debate is a debate in the main hall a week later. In the café of the Lower House, another week later, says Van Campen in a conversation with NRC that he is full of courage. What has been agreed about agriculture and nitrogen, then his subjects, can help him to pull the Netherlands ‘out of the legal swamp’. “And with these parties we can take steps with asylum and migration. People feel powerless about it, that makes them furious.”
He did have “abdominal pain” for a while. “I know that we are now working with a party that does not tolerate members. With a leader who has made statements that my stomach turns around. And I heard what Caroline van der Plas said in the debate about LGBTI and raising children.”
In the debate about the outline agreement, Van der Plas of BBB talked about the “normal sex education” that the Cabinet-Schoof wants, and about “the craziness” that is “poured out of children when they are five or six years old”. “They already learn how to perform certain sexual acts at the bottom of the body of another person …” Many MPs, especially from the PVV, BBB and FVD, laughed hard. Van der Plas himself too. “Chairman,” she says, “Isn’t that normal, is it?”
The BBB group laughs at Caroline van der Plas’ contribution about ‘normal sex education’ photo Peter Hilz/ ANP
She also said in the debate that “an A has since come to the letter tray: LGBTIQA+”. And: “Sorry, maybe I am too ignorant for it, but I have no idea what the A stands for.”
Thom van Campen himself was also in the room. In the cafe he says that he had felt “reluctance.” “Perhaps mainly because of the laughter in the benches from the right. It is about something so vulnerable. About children, about sexuality. About minorities.”
For a while he is quiet, he gets tears in his eyes. Then he says: “Maybe I am making it too heavy. Maybe it is only kindergarten behavior, level poo and pies. But I found it so disrespectful for teachers. We get all emails here with so-called examples of sex education in the classroom and for some of us the idea comes from a conservative-religious corner, from abroad.”
It’s about something so vulnerable. About children, about sexuality
Van der Plas received a lot of criticism on the ‘Letterbak’. She later said that she hears from Queers herself that they “don’t want to be reduced to a letter.” That she knows a lot of gays: there are a lot working at the group and two BBB State Secretaries are gay. And that they “just want to be gay,” and don’t have to stand out if necessary.
Van Campen says: “I understand that. But I know that it is a phase. I thought so when I came out of the closet when I was sixteen. Then you don’t want to show how vulnerable you feel. The madness of all kinds of bare types on a pride, you will find that a banalization of your orientation.” Until Van Campen carried with the VVD boat in 2010 at the Pride of Amsterdam. “On that day I started to realize: freedom must be fought, you sometimes need people who force a breakthrough. And that is what the madness, the hysterical of such an Amsterdam pride, stands for: freedom, may be yourself.”
Oxford English
Thom van Campen is from Doetinchem. He has two sisters. His mother was a doll player, later she had her own fashion store, his father was a teacher in special secondary education. A Protestant family. Van Campen made a confession at the age of nineteenth, he is still religious. At the School for Journalism in Zwolle, he heard “at the minority that was not left”, he became a member of the VVD, on the list for the city council and in the time he did an internship at the NOS in Brussels, a seat was released for him. He didn’t have to take it right away, but the NOS no longer wanted him as an upcoming city councilor as an intern.
In April 2009, Rutte was as a VVD leader-he was not a prime minister yet-on a working visit in Zwolle. As Rutte did more often, he looked around at young VVD people who did not say anything to him on his own, started talking to Van Campen and later called him. “He wanted to know why I had become a member of the VVD, he said I had to go through. It was fantastic.”
The VVD group before Mark Ruttes last debate. Van Campen spoke to him later that afternoon. Photo Dirk Hol/ ANP
In June 2024, Rutte has his very last debate as Prime Minister in the Lower House. It is about the EU and because Van Campen is about that on behalf of his group, he addresses Rutte. He reveals that Rutte has thought for a while that Zermatt, where he was going to ski every spring, was in Austria, and he talks about ‘the characteristic Oxford English’ of the Prime Minister who had once arrived uninvited in Brussels in an Angela Merkel conversation with the Greek Prime Minister. Rutte had said, “So? Where are we?”
Everyone laughs. Also Rutte. His English is characterized by a highly predominant Néderlands accent.
“I have,” says Thom Van Campen in January of this year NRC“A lot of admiration for that man. But an example of” I want to be that way, I put on that, “I don’t have.”
In the debates about agriculture, it is striking throughout the year how much irritation there is between VVD member Van Campen and Van der Plas of BBB. And also between a member of a MP of a different coalition party, Harm Holman of NSC, and Van der Plas. Van Campen and Holman can again visibly handle each other and with Laura Bromet from GroenLinks-Pvda. It is increasingly high between them and BBB. At BBB they find the group around Bromet Klef, with that party the idea is that VVD and NSC are longing back to agriculture of the 1950s, with ‘flowers in the meadow’ and ‘a single cow’. According to VVD and NSC, BBB Nederland is ‘hostage’ with the ‘foolish idea’ that food shortages arise if there is less cattle.
Breath
But in February of this year, on a working visit to the EU in Brussels, Van der Plas and Van Campen are close to each other in a cafe, together with other MPs. There is a lot of laughter. On the last day of the visit, Van der Plas is told that BBB MP Lilian Helder is boarding, she has a hard criticism of Van der Plas. Van Campen tries to comfort her in the van to the station. “Fucking you, Caroline.”
In the spring, Van Campen stops agriculture, the VVD group chooses him as vice-chairman of the House of Representatives. He continues to make the debates about Europe and gets emancipation.
In mid -June there is a debate about that, in a small room. The cabinet has already fallen. Van Campen sits next to Martine van der Velde of the PVV. She holds a story about ‘trans-identifying men’, transvrouwen, who, according to her, use violence against other women. They are very strong, she says. “And they often just have a penis.” Van Campen, arms over each other, looks tight in front of him, occasionally he shakes his head, squeezes his lips on top of each other. What she claims, he says, was investigated by the University of Leiden and it came out that the problem is not there. He calls it “prisons-wander.”
“On social media,” he says in Budapest after the Pride, “I was then the women’s hater.”
According to Van Campen, what is behind that PVV story is the same as what Viktor Orbán floats at his aversion to the Pride: “Propaganda that is constantly preached by large conservative currents in the US, and also in Russia. It’s all about minorities and then you start with the transpersons, nice and easy.”
Thom van Campen does not want to say whether he is relieved about the fall of the cabinet with the PVV in it. “That is the case … you know, you just, just like everyone else in my group, I put my signature under the outline agreement. And after that I really didn’t have my breath all the time.”