Before the summer, the House of Representatives will hold a hearing with the first scouts in the formation of 2021, D66 Kajsa Ollongren and VVD member Annemarie Jorritsma, and with former House Speaker Khadija Arib. The House of Representatives wants to find out what exactly was said in a conversation between these three just after the elections to the House of Representatives, in which it would have mainly been about Pieter Omtzigt, then a member of the House of Representatives of the CDA.
The formation quickly got stuck in 2021 when the photographed note ‘function elsewhere’ showed that Omtzigt had been discussed in confidential conversations as a problem that needed to be solved. The fact that Ollongren and Jorritsma had already spoken to Arib about Omtzigt as a problem was only revealed on 10 June by a reconstruction by Nieuwsuur.
In a special meeting on Wednesday afternoon, the House of Representatives Committee for the Working Method decided that such a public hearing will be held, and that the three will speak one by one. A group of four MPs is preparing for the session: Caroline van der Plas (BBB), Joost Sneller (D66), Nicki Pouw-Verweij (JA21) and Olaf Ephraim (Group Van Haga). Van der Plas had suggested that there should be a kind of ‘mini inquiry’ into this matter, so that the three could be questioned under oath. But there was not enough support for that from the other MPs.
D66 and CDA pleaded for a ’round table discussion’ with all three at the same time, so that it would not become an ‘interrogation’, but there was not enough support for this either.
The meeting on Wednesday also discussed the conversation reports made in the external investigation into the cabinet formation that was presented in February of this year: according to Nieuwsuur, all those reports have recently been destroyed by the House of Representatives. Chamber President Vera Bergkamp confirmed this. She said it was agreed upon, but that the four scientists who conducted the study still have the records. She was going to ask them if the House of Representatives could still see them.
The cabinet formation of 2021 was unprecedentedly chaotic and ultimately lasted 299 days: the longest formation in Dutch political history.