Feedback 29 november 2020
Last update 18:11
Kaag spoke out against those “radical socialists”. GroenLinks and the PvdA clung to it, so they were also part of that.
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At the start of her campaign it became clear how oiled her campaign team is. The look and feel of the D66 website is completely minimalist, warm and business-like hipster. The films are perfectly put together, with a diversity of neat, clean, friendly-looking people. All as calm and safe as an interviewed policymaker stuffed with beta blockers during an interrogation by the benefits committee.
Her performance in Buitenhof (6 Sept.) was also completely in the new campaign style. There is nothing to criticize about her appearance, it is again business hipster, pastel, modern, not confrontational and I also want a necklace like that. Her rehearsed answers came out just a little too monotonous. It was only when she spontaneously started to give answers that I became fascinated. Kaag’s intelligence is hard to beat. She tackles the problem and knows how to give a thorough answer time and time again. As we would expect from someone with such an international track record. She must also have a good vocal coach, I texted to a party member of hers, but it was still the start of a process.
Of course, that process also has some obstacles and obstacles. There are also pitfalls, which are especially deep if your own team dug them for you. At the recent D66 congress, her speechwriter let her fall flat-legged by pulling out a political-historical frame from the archives that he or she wished had been forgotten as much as the associated anti-feminism: Thatcher.
Kaag spoke out against those “radical socialists”. GroenLinks and the PvdA clung to it, so they were also part of that. The caricature was almost completed by the beautiful blue dress, the perfectly coiled hair and the strikingly pro-non-ceer statement. The socialist story was subsequently covered in various media. After all, it clashed with the central slogan of khaki and mauve colored liberalism. D66 had gained social insights during the crisis and now called everywhere that they would not drop anyone and that it was time for a new policy. A perfect partner for the Social Democrats and the Greens in particular, but economically still vaguely right enough to link up with the warm right of the VVD, colored like my Groesbeekse stewed pears: purple-red on the outside, but white on the inside.
For Thatcher there was the Great Contrast, that between “socialism” and “freedom”. We know, of course, that socialism is different from communism and that in the modern world socialism mainly means social democracy. After all, the only people who really want to wage a Marxist revolution are the often smaller, fragmented communist clubs of rolling tobacco smoking men. Apart from a historical origin in Das Kapital, this radical idea has little to do with the large, modern social-democratic movement that has ensured a neat old age, access to education for everyone, a safe workplace and the emancipation of women and minorities. . Nevertheless, in her unbridled moderation, Kaag chooses to deliberately describe socialism as radical and in that capacity to associate it directly with the green and social democratic parties of our country.
Thatcher did not want to know about anything that would have a touch of “social” or any suggestion that organizing something centrally through the government might be quite practical. No no no! No surprise was her friendship with US President Reagan, and an old long-playing record still skips in the minds of Republicans that socialism is the devil. Because imagine if all Americans would have had accessible health care during the Covid pandemic. Thatcher would have warned people to just get on with it. Or, as Kaag said, that things are getting better and better is thanks to people themselves. Crisis reveals character. We don’t want wavering politicians who run away when it comes down to it.
In contrast to, for example, Lilianne Ploumen, who has been active and relatively activist in our own country for years, Kaag only returned from a career abroad a few years ago. The two women are of the same caliber, but Ploumen is visible in that capacity, Kaag not like that. Ploumen writes a book and it lands in the country. Meanwhile, Kaag is still busy expressing her message in-house in such a way that the audience no longer hears a difference between rehearsed and spontaneous. The top diplomat still has a lot to make up for in terms of profiling and political recognisability.
Nobody doubts Kaag’s knowledge and skills. When she was approached for her minister post after Zijlstra, a sigh of relief went through the country, because someone was finally recruited who did know what was going on. And also the woman that Rutte had said she could not find, because he had been looking for quality. An outcome that can be described flawlessly in the words of the popular philosophical thinker Alanis Morissette: Isn’t that ironic?
But D66 and Kaag now go through the world like radishes. Red on the outside, white on the inside. A metaphor that I thank my dearest former professor of Central and Eastern European Studies, Hans Renner, who fled Czechoslovakia himself at the time of the Prague Spring. My association with the red raw vegetables is not the first. It is joked in various articles, cartoons and cartoons that in fact all cabinet parties have shifted from the right to social democracy. Strangely enough, they do not realize that in these times of pandemic and impending economic crisis this can actually work to their advantage. It is the PvdA that is struggling to cash in on that profit and hustling through all the media with a large, carnivalesque, socialist Zie Je Wel parade. Especially in February of course. Nicely planned, just before the elections.
On the contrary, Kaag and her campaign team believe they should oppose that more left-wing story and disqualify it as Thatcherist socialism. They not only cause confusion through the contradiction in their own campaign message, but above all they give an unfair kick to future coalition partners. It bears witness to as little political-historical knowledge as to strategic insight. And then beautiful, ambitious plans remain free.
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