She is a former child refugee who wants to reduce immigration, has opened the door to the far right and could be the Netherlands’ first female prime minister. At a packed party conference in Rotterdam on Saturday, Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, leader of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), launched her campaign for November’s elections with a call for liberty and security.
“From my parents, I learned to cherish freedom and stand up for others when their freedom was threatened,” she said. “But we face losing ever more of this ‘oxygen’, with ever less understanding for one another and politics operating increasingly from distrust. It’s not for nothing that our manifesto is called: giving space, defining borders.”
For 13 years, the VVD, under prime minister Mark Rutte, has been custodian of the Netherlands, a small country which has punched above its weight in international trade and politics. Where will it go after him? Will it move to the right, in coalition with some extremist elements; will it try a radical tack under “centrist outsider” Pieter Omtzigt; or will it look left, to Frans Timmermans, former European Commission vice-president, in a green-left alliance?
In a splintered political landscape, where a government will be formed by a coalition of three or more parties, leadership is a primary theme. For a generation, this will be the first election where Rutte does not end up automatically in charge, and yesterday Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, 46, who has been justice minister since January 2022, made her pitch to bright lights, streamers and the Dolly Parton song 9 to 5.
Raoul du Pré, political editor at the national daily De Volkskrant, said: “Of course, the VVD hopes she has the ideal profile. She’s a woman with a [migrant] background, very much presented as self-made. As a child, she fled to the Netherlands, grabbed her chances and now is on the way to the PM’s residence. That’s the story.”
Even before she became justice minister, Yeşilgöz-Zegerius had built an astonishing media profile. On a talk show in 2016, she showed her grandmother Sara’s Louis Vuitton bag and told how she and her politically active Turkish Kurdish parents had fled Turkey when she was eight. They took a “rickety” boat from Bodrum to Kos with what fitted in that bag, then settled in Amersfoort, 30 miles south-east of Amsterdam.
By the time she was elected to parliament in 2017, after working as a VVD councillor, she had 45 TV appearances under her belt. Political journalist Sheila Sitalsing said: “As a councillor, she’s been a guest on all the programmes your average MP would kill to appear on.”
Yeşilgöz-Zegerius started her career with the Dutch Socialist party, then the Labour party, but found her feet in the centre-right VVD. She embraced being called a “pitbull in high heels” for her campaign to ban street harassment, and talked openly about her marriage, battles with an immune condition and hesitation about having children. Last year, she cut off a lock of hair on live TV – choosing a section from the back – in support of women in Iran. “She’s a talk show darling,” says du Pré.
As justice minister, she has criticised the “woke agenda”, extreme-right politicians and conspiracy theorists, and launched a Europe-wide anti-crime drive. When the government fell in a row over immigration, she said family reunification should be restricted, arguing that she would not have had the chances she had in a country with more refugees.
Recently, she told rightwing tabloid De Telegraaf that, unlike Rutte, she would not rule out forming a coalition with Geert Wilders’s PVV, the far-right and anti-immigration party, and she repeated this today.
Carola Schoor of Leiden University’s politics programme said: “She’s a tough lady. A lot of people like her. And she has an agenda that will appeal to people who maybe don’t want a woman, or someone from Turkey, as prime minister.”
But this tactic could backfire, said Léonie de Jonge, assistant politics professor at Groningen University. “Lots of research shows that when the centre-right tries to compete with the far right, voters go with the original and not with the copy,” she said.
Meanwhile, although Yeşilgöz-Zegerius has called for a more “listening” government, she will want to distance herself from the VVD’s legacy: a childcare benefits fiasco in which thousands of people, often dual-nationals, were incorrectly labelled fraudsters; illegal government data-gathering; and earthquakes caused by gas extraction.
After her speech, as she stood in an immaculate pink suit and heels surrounded by press, she was asked how she rated her chances of becoming the first female Dutch PM. “I don’t know, but I’m doing my best,” she said. “It’s up to the voter.”
