On Wednesday Maxime Verhagen said he didn’t want to lead the Christian Democrats, on Thursday it turned out that he did but that his candidacy was blocked by party chair Ruth Peetoom. Meanwhile Mark Rutte’s coalition partner, leaderless and rudderless, is doing abominably in the polls. How did it happen and what can be done to save it? NRC interviewed the party’s spin doctor PG Kroeger.

Pieter-Gerrit, or PG, Kroeger is the Christian Democrats’ speech writer and strategist. His analysis of the party’s dramatic electoral loss forms the basis of the party’s debates on reform this month.
According to Kroeger the pattern that used to dominate Dutch politics has changed radically since 2010. No longer are coalitions formed around the large denominational consensus party that was the CDA. It has become a party like other parties and a small one at that.
Culture shift
‘The election results marked a culture shift. The party has lost touch with the people. They don’t recognise its language and images and the party never noticed what was happening’, Kroeger says.
Always a regional party, surrounded by ‘a rural tranquility’ as Kroeger puts it, the Christian Democrats forgot that 70 % of people in the Netherlands live in cities. The party tellingly lost two thirds of its voters in Almere and went from 10 to 3 % in Amsterdam.
Kroeger warned the CDA top in 2009 not to be complacent but met with a reluctance on the party’s part to leave its ‘comfort zone’. ‘Jack de Vries, a possible leadership candidate, said he thought the 40 main cities would be lost to the party and that we should concentrate on the rest. But that would mean getting an average 58 % of the vote in these places in order to win 40 seats.’
Words and images
Instead of aiming for that unlikely result it would be better to concentrate on new words and images to establish a rapport with the electorate, Kroeger maintains. ’80 % of the people don’t know what Pentecost means and 80 % think Easter is about bunnies and eggs. And nobody knows what is meant by stewardship. If you tell people that we don’t own the world but that we are meant to do good with it nobody listens but if you say that we have the world on loan from our children everybody understands.’
Kroeger doesn’t think that in the 18 months since the elections things have changed for the better. The party is still reeling from the shock and will have to learn to defer to larger parties, he says.
‘Politicians who have worked all their lives for the party cannot be expected to change from one day to the next. A new generation of politicians is needed as are changes in mores within the party. What type of leader that would require? An explorer. A person who will discover the Netherlands again and who will make people discover the CDA.’