Wijnand Duyvendak resigned his parliamentary standing on Thursday in the wake of the controversy stirred up by his activist past. Two weeks earlier, he had confessed that during the 1980s, he took part in a break-in to a ministry to steal plans for nuclear power centres.
11 September
Femke Halsema, GreenLeft's chairwoman, reacted angrily to the first revelations about her colleague. It makes clear that the political climate, and attitudes to illegal actions in 2008, is totally different to those of the 1970s and 1980s. In the past, such actions were usually dismissed as 'youthful transgressions'. But following the September 11 attacks in the United States, and the murder of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, that's all changed.
Investigative journalist Peter Siebelt has been writing for years about what he calls 'the excrescences of leftist activism' and he believes that Duyvendak has a lot more to answer for.
"I keep in regular touch with colleagues abroad, who are experts in combating terrorism. If I tell them who we have sitting in our Lower House, they look at me as if I've come from another planet."
Hammer blows
By way of example, he mentions the Socialist Party's Krista van Velzen. In the 1990s, Krista van Velzen let fly with a hammer at a nuclear submarine in the Faslane naval base in Scotland. She was arrested and earned herself a criminal record. Her Socialist Party (SP) colleague, Arda Gerkens, explains why this has never been a problem for the SP.
"The big difference with Wijnand Duyvendak is that Krista has always been honest. Both the party and the voters have always known about her actions. We have never tried to keep them secret. With Wijnand Duyvendak, the situation is different. First, I find break-ins and the intimidation of people far more serious than the actions of my colleague. But more than that, the voters never knew about Duyvendak's past. GreenLeft knew about it, but chose not to make any of the details public. That's the big difference between them and the SP."
Panic
Femke Halsema's initial sharp reaction has not been well received by everyone in her party. GreenLeft's European MP, Joost Lagendijk, thinks his party's upper ranks reacted in far too panicky a manner to the news of Duyvendak's illegal past. In a newspaper, he says:
Fischer
Across the border, the German politician Joschka Fischer is the classic example of a politician who has profited from his activist past. At the beginning of the 1970s, Fischer was the leader of the left wing, radical Revolutionärer Kampf. The movement participated in several protest marches which often ended in violence that left several police officers severely injured. There's a photograph of Fischer taken at the time, wearing a crash helmet and fighting. Despite all the coverage of his activist past, the Green politician has now made it all the way to Foreign Minister and to the Vice Chancellorship of Germany.
* RNW translation (ng)
Tags: 9/11, activist, GreenLeft, Joschka Fischer, Krista van Velzen, MP, Pim Fortuyn, Wijnand Duyvendak