ElectionsWhat does a party do when competitors plunder its ideas and voters also walk away? At the SP they don’t seem to know the answer exactly. So there are simply protests, against his SPs. And may a Belgian ‘comrade’ encourage the supporters.
If the party needs you, you come. And so on Sunday morning Lia Basjes from Wieringerwerf boarded one of the fifty SP coaches to the Prinsjesdag Protest in The Hague. “It’s a matter of solidarity,” she says.
Upon arrival at the Koekamp, party members are all given a protest sign. SP flags are flying as far as the eye can see. And of course the soup cart is present. Because the world may be changing, but the SP is sticking to its trusted recipe.
Basjes also knows that the SP has sometimes been in a better position. And at the same time she sees how other parties have embraced typical SP themes such as poverty and housing. “Honourable,” she thinks, “but you don’t gain anything from it.” Because the SP may often be right, but it does not yet look like the party will be able to capitalize on those triumphs. According to the polls, voters favor newcomers such as BBB and New Social Contract. Difficult, she thinks. “Something that is good, why don’t we remain faithful to it?”
‘Fighting is not always easy’
This struggle is also palpable at the party leadership. Lilian Marijnissen is on stage making a fuss about all those parties that have suddenly ‘canonized’ the theme of social security. That’s fine, of course, but she is afraid that it will remain just words. And so she calls on her fellow party leaders: “If you are serious, join our ideas.”
SP leader Lilian Marijnissen during the Budget Day protest at the Koekamp, in the run-up to Budget Day. © ANP
However, the SP’s ideas always go a step further than those of the competition. Many parties want to increase the minimum wage gradually, the SP wants to increase it to 16 euros per hour in one go, Marijnissen emphasizes. More party leaders are pushing for cheaper groceries and public transport, but only the SP wants to abolish VAT completely. And the nationalization of energy companies and the introduction of a new health care system is also hardly gaining traction in The Hague.
But the fact that other parties are more moderate is no reason for Marijnissen to remove their sharp edges from the SP spearheads. In the polls, the party currently has 3 to 5 seats, compared to 9 parliamentary seats now. Marijnissen wants to ‘fight’, she says, even though ‘all that fighting is not always easy’.
Solidarity to the ‘comrades’
Raoul Hedebouw, leader of the Labor Party of Belgium (PVDA), takes the stage, not to be confused with the Dutch namesake. The PVDA is the ideological sister of the SP and also has Maoist origins. But more relevant today is that the Belgian SP is doing well. The party has experienced a steady rise in recent years, reminiscent of the rise of the SP in the Netherlands at the beginning of this century, under Jan Marijnissen. At the time, in 2006, it obtained 25 seats. A record that the SP has never equaled.
Participants in the Prinsjesdag Protest demonstrate in The Hague. The SP wants the cabinet to reduce the cost of living for people. At the same time, the protest was the party’s campaign kick-off in the run-up to the House of Representatives elections. © ANP
Hedebouw came to The Hague to show solidarity from Belgium to the ‘comrades’ of the SP. He tells how he himself was inspired years ago by the approach of the SP, and of the ‘Wizard of Oss’, Jan Marijnissen, in particular. “When we were still very small, we studied how the SP handled things in the Netherlands.”
According to him, the ‘popular way’ of doing politics and ‘going from door to door’ was especially important for the success of that time. The SP party must hold on to this, even when things go wrong, Hedebouw believes. The social struggle is paramount: “Elections go up and down. You must have faith that ruptures will occur.”
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2023-09-17 16:19:14
#voters #leaving #ailing #remains #fight #banners #soup
