'Labour needs a strong leader'
Monday 08 June 2009
The Labour party (PvdA) needs a clear, strong leader and serious discussion about its direction, elder statesman Jan Pronk said on Monday.
The former minister was speaking about the PvdA's poor showing in the EU parliamentary elections, in which it lost four of its seven seats.
While current party leader Wouter Bos is a good minister of finance and a good manager 'he was not the leader of the Labour party over the past few weeks,' Pronk told news agency ANP.
'A strong leader is what gets people to the ballot box,' he said. French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel were examples of strong leaders, he said.
© DutchNews.nl
Readers' comments
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It is leadership and personality that the average citizen wants in a potential prime minister or president in fact.
We have the situation in The Netherlands that we have some strong party platforms in the large traditional parties but no real leaders and at the very same time, you have some parties with limited, xenophobic and frankly speaking dangerous and distructive policies - and relying alone on their party's personality (and of course that does not make them a real "leader".
The Netherlands needs to search deeper for some real political "leaders" within the two or three main established parties to give any chance for cohesion and advancement. If not, the desparate and confussed will automatically gravitate towards the only personality around - currently a xenophobic mad-man.
By Solkhar | June 8, 2009 3:39 PM