Opinion

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Going, going, gone

Monday 15 March 2010

The weekend newspapers and current affairs shows were full of the latest round of political exits. Hanneke Sanou sums up.

Monday’s news that junior economic affairs minister Frans Heemskerk won’t be coming back as a Labour MP comes hot on the heels of what seems to be turning into a small exodus of politicians.

Meanwhile Wouter Bos’and Camiel Eurlings’decision to give up politics altogether and focus on their family obligations has been met with surprise, bemusement and understanding.

In Saturday’s Volkskrant, philosopher and writer Stine Jensen thinks it’s ‘refreshing’that men apparently are no longer their job. However Jensen says, if it had been a woman she would not have been applauded for her decision. ‘People would say she couldn’t hack it’.

In the same paper, Radboud university gender historian Stefan Dudink agrees that the men’s decision far from being emancipatory only serves to 'confirm the disparity between men and women’s roles’.

Trouw meanwhile focuses on the former cabinet’s political legacy. ‘The cabinet failed to bring stability to the country and did little to diminish social unrest. Now Bos has drawn his conclusions. Perhaps (Jan Peter) Balkenende should do the same’, the paper writes only to further blight the CDA leader’s prospects on Monday by polling regional and local CDA pundits who are blaming him for the loss of hundreds of seats in the local elections.

‘Farmers are turning away from the party’, one is quoted as saying while others openly state they think the Christian Democrats should have replaced Balkenende.

In a comment NRC warns that Bos’s obvious disgust at having to share government responsibility with the Christian Democrats and Balkenende’s statement that another Labour-Christian Democrat coalition would not be ‘credible’ hold some danger for future negotiations.

Parties should not mutually exclude each other just because the leaders don’t get on. Another reason, says the paper, for Balkenende to pack his bags.

Bos’s successor Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen is widely held to be an excellent choice for the job of prime-ministers if Maurice de Hond’s polling results are to be believed. Several papers mention the ‘Cohen-effect’: a non-divisive style of leadership.

The mayor’s perceived and often maligned panacea for mainly Moroccan delinquency symbolised by the phrase ‘having tea with Cohen’ so beloved by Telegraaf readers was mentioned in Nova. Anti-immigration party PVV’s Geert Wilders, when asked how many times the words ‘having tea’ were going crop up in the run-up to the elections, said ‘many, many times’.

Historian Pieter Gerrit Kroeger in the Nederlands Dagblad thinks the Christian Democrats will also brand Cohen as someone ‘who talks but shies away from courageous decisions’.