The party that has swept to the forefront of Dutch politics needs no symbol: instead, it has the face of founder Pieter Omtzigt gazing benevolently into the future.
At the first members’ meeting of the New Social Contract (NSC) party last week, 800 people had a name badge with a monochrome portrait of Omtzigt on the back. When their leader stood to give a 40-minute speech on a central dais, he was lit with blazing white light from above and the applause was rapturous. Clearly, it is Omtzigt’s personal charisma and profile as a prominent, occasionally troublesome, backbench MP that have propelled the three-month-old NSC to the top of polls a week before the Netherlands’ general election on Wednesday 22 November.
Since membership opened three weeks ago, the centrist party has amassed 7,200 members and this meeting in a former carriage shed in Amersfoort, European city of the year, is their first chance to meet one another and their leader. “I have trust in Pieter,” one told Dutch news cameras, appearing to speak for all.
But the MP who provoked the fall of a previous government and has made a reputation of standing up for the victimised against powerful institutions’ mistakes claims to be slightly dazed by events. “I’m very surprised about the speed at which all this is going,” he told international media. “I mean, you’re looking at a party which had five members three weeks ago. And now we have 7,000. This is the first time we meet and in two weeks we have an election.”
He might sound a classic politician doing a good line in faux-humility, but this 49-year-old from the eastern town of Enschede is a little different. He has “a firm preference”, for instance, for leading his party from parliament rather than becoming prime minister in the event of his party becoming the largest in the Dutch parliament. (Although, when pressed by journalists in Amersfoort, he avoided giving a firm “yes” or “no”.)
Omtzigt had a 19-year career as an MP for the Christian Democratic Appeal, a traditional government party, before playing a key role in uncovering a scandal over childcare benefits in which 31,000 parents were falsely accused. With a couple of other MPs, he hammered the government with questions and freedom of information requests, eventually revealing that senior figures had known about and buried the scandal, neglecting to rescue these families from financial and personal ruin.
The only person in the tax office to be sacked was its legal expert who blew the whistle: Sandra Palmen, now an NSC candidate. The controversy eventually brought down the government in 2021, and Omtzigt’s newfound image as an outsider was confirmed when, in the coalition talks that followed, it was suggested he get a job “elsewhere”.
After a period out of politics, Omtzigt returned as an independent MP and, when a poll in July suggested he might win nearly a third of parliament if he set up his own party, he did just that. Named after his 2021 book “a new social contract”, the NSC claims to stand for a new kind of governance in the wake of four governments led by Mark Rutte notable for a series of scandals that shook voters’ trust in the political establishment.
“The main purpose of founding this new party was that we’ve seen a number of scandals in Dutch politics over the last few years and the common denominator is that there is a disbalance in power,” he told journalists in Amersfoort. “So we propose a reorganisation of the Dutch state. We think neoliberalism has gone a bit too far: we’ll still remain a market economy – we’re a centrist party – but the neoliberal tendencies will be reined in … We need a new kind of politics for normal citizens.”
Giving interviews in English, French and German (and unsuccessfully offering Italian), Omtzigt is a shrewd politician used to handling tough questions – “I’ll cut out the first part of your question, if you don’t mind.” And he is quick to normalise his ideas within the European context. He wants a European opt-out, like Denmark, on EU topics such as migration and environmental policy, a multi-member constituency system like the Swedes or Danes have, and broad agreement on curbing immigration along the lines of the deal recently struck in Germany.
He also wouldn’t say no to the sort of success seen by Emmanuel Macron. “Your French colleagues know how it feels to have a new political party in the centre,” he tells a French journalist in Amersfoort. “We have quite different policies from Macron. But it is quite centrist, what we are doing.”
While he sees common ground with the GreenLeft/Labour alliance led by the former EU heavyweight Frans Timmermans on social issues, Omtzigt takes a firm rightwing line on immigration, the subject that caused the current coalition to fall. Under the NSC, he has said, there will be a two-status system that distinguishes between refugees fleeing political persecution or war, and wealthier economic migrants, who can expect a cooler reception.
“In 2010, we had about on average 20,000 net migrants,” he said. “That’s perfectly possible in the Netherlands. You’re very welcome. But that has increased to more than 100,000 [which] is too much, so we want to lower that to about 50,000.”
Omtzigt also said he was concerned about the number of international students in the country and the anglicisation of Dutch higher education.
“Forty percent of the new first year students at Dutch universities come from abroad and then go back because we teach in English. And this is one way of getting a labour shortage in crucial sectors because you’ve not actually educated your own population,” he told reporters.
His policies appeal to a broad voting spectrum, with members including those who have previously backed the Christian parties, Labour, the FarmerCitizenMovement (BBB) and the far-right Forum for Democracy.
Rob Mengerink, 70, a retired teacher, said he was backing Omtzigt because the country needed a change. “On the one hand, everything [under the last government] looked good and people were rich and happy, and Rutte was enthusiastic,” he said. “But some things just weren’t right and Omtzigt helped to expose the problems. It’s all about bringing systematic change.”
There are some niggling questions, though. Conny van Tuil-Blankestijn, 60, from Veenendaal, who works for a humanitarian NGO, raised the issue of who would end up as the country’s leader in the event of a NSC victory – if not the man emblazoned on her membership badge. “I would like to know who will become PM, and whether that is someone from another party or someone from the NSC,” she said.
She is not alone in this question, and, according to Léonie de Jonge, assistant professor in European politics at Groningen University, it’s potentially a big problem. “Omtzigt is unclear about whether he would want to be prime minister. That is highly unusual. Voters who end up voting for NSC have no idea who the party has in mind as PM in case they become the biggest party (which means that they will get to initiate coalition talks). There is definitely a big risk in this strategy.”
It is not clear, added de Jonge, how Omtzigt’s rhetoric about the importance of moving away from personality-driven politics sits alongside the badges decorated with his image. “You see it by just looking at the election posters: most parties opted to print a slogan of the party logo, but NSC printed Omtzigt’s face,” she said. “That is ironic because he said before that he thinks that elections should all be about the content not the people.”
A lot is riding on him, not least Dutch voters’ belief in the value of good leadership and democratic accountability. “In the last years, there has been a steady loss of trust in government – the way it has gone from crisis to crisis, the childcare benefits scandal … the lack of openness,” said Joke Haaijer, 53, from Soest in the central Netherlands and European director of an international NGO. “This gives us hope for the future.”
