Challenges and Growth Spurts: The Future of JA21 Party and Joost Eerdmans

Joost Eerdmans has often been thinking of Jan Marijnissen, founder and figurehead of the Socialist Party for decades. “He said: ‘You are as good as your last match’”, the JA21 party leader told a room in Amersfoort on Saturday, which was filled with between 100 and 200 members and interested parties.

JA21 has been in the Senate with three senators since the provincial elections. Converted to the House of Representatives, that would be six seats, Eerdmans said in his speech, which kicked off the JA21 campaign. Improving that result: that is what he is aiming for in the elections in November.

Whether that will work is the question. The party that was founded at the end of 2020 by a group of representatives who were fed up with the Forum for Democracy and split off is rumbling. There is criticism of the lack of internal democracy and the power of the party leadership. Two of the three MPs announced in August that they did not want to be on the JA21 candidate list again.

Painful

As if that wasn’t painful enough, those two MPs – Nicki Pouw-Verweij and Derk Jan Eppink – appeared in Deventer on Friday alongside Caroline van der Plas and Mona Keijzer, as new additions to BBB. Because they switch immediately, JA21 only has one seat left in parliament. That’s for Eerdmans. In addition to Forum for Democracy, he was already active for the CDA, the LPF, EenNL and Liveable Rotterdam.

It was not the only loss: a week earlier, two JA21 members in the European Parliament – ​​Rob Roos and Rob Rooken – had already resigned from the party. Both continue under their own title. As a result, JA21 also has only one parliamentarian left in Brussels. The split-off party itself is now the victim of a series of split-offs.

JA21 increasingly revolves around the two founders: party chairman and list leader Joost Eerdmans and Annabel Nanninga, who has been in the Senate and the Amsterdam city council in recent years, but is now number 2 on the list of candidates for the House of Representatives. That announcement, together with the election program, is snowed under by all the split-off news.

Radiate tranquility

“We are just really having a hard time now,” says Nanninga on stage, after which she expresses confidence that the party will become “stable again”. That seems crucial, because precisely this stability was an important spearhead of the party when it was founded. Unlike its predecessors on the radical right flank, JA21 wanted to radiate calm.

The issue is particularly pressing because the right has only become busier since the establishment of JA21. There are plenty of options for the right-wing voter: Van der Plas with BBB, Pieter Omtzigt with New Social Contract, and then there are FVD and BVNL, the party of ex-FVD member Wybren van Haga.

According to Nanninga, the distinction between JA21 and other right-wing parties is clear. BBB calls them too soft on asylum policy and Omtzigt’s NSC certainly does not want to see them as a threat. “That is a left-wing party that wants to implement redistribution politics. That is a fundamentally different idea than ours.”

Judging by the stories of Eerdmans and Nanninga, the average JA21 voter is a happy citizen – not an angry one – with a middle income who does not want to pay too much for his or her petrol at the tank and wants to be able to eat meat or go on a flying holiday without feeling bad .

Also read this interview: Joost Eerdmans about FVD and Pim Fortuyn

Growth spurts

The spearheads in the program are largely the priorities that the party has allowed to predominate in previous campaigns. The main two: the construction of more nuclear power stations and a strict asylum policy, in which every asylum seeker is received outside Europe.

Other proposals also serve the right-wing voter. Income tax will be equalized for low and high incomes and inheritance tax will be virtually abolished. The landlord levy for housing associations will return and the maximum speed will go back from 100 to 130 kilometers per hour.

‘Right-wing course, realistic plans’ is the campaign slogan with which Eerdmans summarizes his argument. And those splitters? Those are growth spurts of a party that is coming of age, the party prominents in the hall in Amersfoort swear, not the last convulsions.

“My eleven-month-old grandson also fell a lot,” says Bob van Pareren, former FVD member, until recently a member of the Senate and Member of Parliament for JA21. “And it’s starting to run now.”

“It’s the same as seeing a child get measles and saying: he’s going to die,” says Marco Pastors (ex-LPF, now Liveable Rotterdam and JA21-list pusher in the most recent Senate elections).

Of course it is annoying, says Pastors about the news of the transfer users, “if such a truck drives through your garden”. But this will overcome JA21, he is convinced of that. “Livable Rotterdam also lost eight seats in his first term. That is possible, that is part of it.”

2023-09-02 18:07:53
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