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Herb Prooy: We, Spekman

Thursday 23 February 2012

Herb Prooy thinks PvdA party chairman Hans Spekman is not a winning personality. Or two.

I am the PvdA. That is what PvdA party chairman Hans Spekman said when Job Cohen announced his departure as party leader.

Spekman’s grandfather once formed a branch of the SDAP, a forerunner of the PvdA. He’s lived and breathed social democracy from the cradle and he’s been party chairman for a month. These are all indisputable facts and lo, the party has been made Spekman flesh through them.

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It’s not for nothing that in every interview Spekman reiterates that he was chosen by 82% of the party membership. The question is whether this is because the members thought he would make a fine leader or whether the other candidates – what were their names again? – were so..forgettable. For your information they were Piet Boekhoudt (9.8%) and René Kronenberg (8.3%), two men as colourless as they were unknown.

According to Spekman he got his mandate by promising to exit the crisis by taking the next turn on the left. Many PvdA member are now wondering which crisis he meant exactly: the economic crisis or the party leadership crisis. The Spekman solution for both crises is as shoddy as his sartorial style: copy the SP political programme, steal SP voters and lead the PvdA in the approved SP manner i.e. with a firm hand.

Urgent advice

That is why ‘We, Spekman’ decreed on Monday that it will not be the elected parliamentary party members that will decide who among them will step into Cohen’s shoes but the membership. The parliamentary party is strongly urged to go along with this. Because We, Spekman don’t like pussyfooting politics. We, Spekman think electing a new leader should be a spectacle with party faithful at each others throats in the public arena.

The result will be that for lack of an alternative, We, Spekman himself will become leader with 100% of the votes. And then, after the elections, presiding over himself in his one man parliamentary party, he will be totally justified in saying: I am the PvdA.

Herb Prooy is an entrepreneur in the field of ‘software as a service’

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