A parliamentary majority of 102 seats yesterday voted down a motion by Henk Krol stating that the Netherlands should once again become a country in which the heavily guarded PVV leader Geert Wilders can cycle to work again. In addition to the government parties, PvdD, PvdA and GroenLinks also turned against the call.
In the debate on freedom of speech and the beheading of the French teacher Samuel Paty, independent Member of Parliament Henk Krol submitted a motion that was put to the vote yesterday afternoon. The motion called on the government to “make the Netherlands normal again so that Mr Wilders can cycle on the street without security, should he feel like it”, and compared it with “our relaxed cycling prime minister with an apple in his hand” who thus “sets the tone for how safe we as the Netherlands want to be.”
Krol’s call did not survive the weekly votes: only SP, Van Kooten Arissen, the SGP, FVD, 50PLUS, DENK, the PVV and Van Haga voted in favor – together good for only 48 seats. That the other parties did not support the text, FVD party chronicler Chris Aalberts understands well: “Maybe this is because other parties thought that you could not arrange this with one A4 sheet.”
Nevertheless, FVD and PVV are disappointed that the motion did not make it. Nicki Pouw-Verweij, number 3 on the election list in March, states that voting down the motion proves that we “have fallen deeply as a democratic country,” and Wilders himself cannot hide his disappointment: “So they would rather see me at the knife of a jihadist,” writes he in a tweet he pinned to the top of his account.
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