The youngest and longest serving MP in conversation: 'Pim Fortuyn was a very important moment'

Summer evening conversation Habtamu de Hoop (PvdA), a Frisian farmer's son born in Addis Ababa, is the youngest member of parliament. Kees van der Staaij (SGP), who adopted his two children from Colombia, the longest serving. "I thought your maiden speech was the best of this class."

SGP'er Kees van der Staaij gave a speech about the book Van Strange Smetten Vrij at secondary school in Amersfoort in the early eighties.about the Center Party. He still remembers the sentence with which he ended: "The Center Party will rise, shine and sink." He had grabbed a stack of party flyers and tossed them in the trash. His teacher was not impressed. He thought it was "populist". Habtamu de Hoop of the PvdA took part in a debate competition in the fourth grade of the havo and it was his last turn to choose a political party. Only the PVV was left. “I put on a white wig and made the most provocative statements.” He won. After that, when he had "ghosted" a paper on Nietzsche for civics and nearly sat down, his teacher only wanted to help him with a good enough grade if he joined the debating club.

You might become a politician by accident, is the message of Habtamu de Hoop's story, with the ravioli with ricotta and lemon in the Potterhuis in The Hague. Kees van der Staaij says that he still takes "attributes" with him to attract attention – if an important debate in the House of Representatives takes a long time and he and his small party only get the floor when one of the last gets the floor. “At school, I once came into the classroom on crutches to give a talk about the disabled.”

At the end of the afternoon Kees van der Staaij was the first to enter the seventeenth-century Potterhuis, on the Dunne Bierkade in The Hague. This is where Paulus Potter painted his Bull, Jan Steen lived there with his family. Snacks are available in the library, but Van der Staaij only has eyes for the books. “Abraham Kuyper! It's insane what that man wrote!"

He also pulls out Gentlemen of Tea from Hella Haasse. That novel taught him a lesson, he says. “People can get sour without realizing it. Dissatisfaction can just creep into your life, being happy is not automatic. You have to keep weeding your garden.”

We are still waiting for Habtamu de Hoop. He is the youngest Member of Parliament: 24 years old. Van der Staaij is now the longest serving MP: 24 years.

We want to talk about the political culture in The Hague, and about the other things that bind them: Van der Staaij and his wife Marlies adopted two children from Colombia: Michaël (21) and Camila (18). As a baby of a few weeks old, De Hoop was abandoned in a cafe in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. He never knew his Ethiopian parents, he does not know exactly when he was born. He was taken to an orphanage and shortly afterwards he was adopted by a peasant couple from Wommels, Friesland.

We pour orange Crodino and want to sit down. But Van der Staaij prefers to look at the books. After half an hour, De Hoop enters, sweating – he still had to be in the House of Representatives and hastened. At the entrance of the Potter house he was mistaken for the photographer, who also comes later. Such things happen to him all the time, he says. He thinks it's because he's still young that people have a hard time placing him.

De Hoop also takes Crodino, he chooses the red one, according to the color of his party. "I cannot do otherwise." Van der Staaij: "Fortunately that I chose SGP orange." De Hoop also looks at the books and says he is not much of a reader. "I'm trying, but I really have to commit." His latest book was The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel, about social differences and the future of democracy. He loved that. But he mainly watches political documentaries, and Netflix. Kees van der Staaij grew up without television. "I'm not much of a series fan. A book! You can browse and read there.”

The tongue of the wise

Van der Staaij talks about his maiden speech in the House of Representatives, June 1998: about the Experiments Act City and Environment. A somewhat boring, technical story, he thinks. Member of parliament Eimert van Middelkoop of the Reformed Political Association (GPV), later merged into the ChristenUnie, was next in line. He had quoted from the Bible: “The tongue of the wise brings forth sound knowledge, but the mouth of the fools pours out foolishness.” "He said," says Van der Staaij, "that I would meet both wise and foolish in the House of Representatives."

Van der Staaij looks at De Hoop. “But a nice personal story, that was not common then. You had the most beautiful maiden speech I had heard from this batch of MPs.”

That story, on April 22, 2021, went viral soon after he spoke. De Hoop told by heart how he had been left in the cafe as a baby. His mother, he thinks, had put it on the counter. "She has, as it were, ordered a cup of coffee and left." In his maiden speech he said: “Who brought me into the world is unknown to me. But those who gave me the loving upbringing that enabled me to stand in this place today, there is no doubt about it.”

Habtamu de Hoop now says: „It was very personal, I don't like to do that. I don't want to be a pretty story. But it was an opportunity to tell me why I had come here. It wasn't because I had done everything so well myself. Equality of opportunity is not in your DNA, it is about who and what you have around you. So also because of the football coach in the village who gave me self-confidence when he let me become captain.”

Was he nervous about that speech?

De Hoop: „I am never so nervous in front of a group. A conversation with one person feels more vulnerable. I've always had that.”

Beforehand, De Hoop had read the text of his speech to his parents. "I'm a sober farmer's son, my parents don't like emotional bigotry." But they liked this.

He had only been in the House of Representatives for a few weeks at the time, he had not yet received his salary. He had hardly any money, because he had gone into debt before the election campaign: “I had run newspaper advertisements, bought billboards, made posters. I really wanted to be chosen.” So he delivered his maiden speech in the C&A suit he already wore to his high school parties, wearing the shoes his father had married in thirty years earlier. „Attje Kuiken [now PvdA party leader] walked up to me and said: 'Habtamu, those are really trampled shoes, are you going to get new ones? You are now a Member of Parliament.' I said: 'Attje, I would like to, but I haven't received a salary yet.'” With his first salary he bought two suits, and also shoes.

Photos Daniel Niessen

'Nice, such an Indoman'

In the dinner room of the Potterhuis, one floor below, Kees van der Staaij asks for a minute of silence. There is salad on the table. Then he says: “Funny what you just said, that you find talking one-on-one more exciting than in front of a group. I have it the other way around. On a party day, I can't look people in the eye one on one. Then when someone looks grim, I worry: what is that person thinking?”

Van der Staaij had already said in the debate room of the House of Representatives how beautiful he thought the maiden speech was, and that there was a link between them through that adoption.

Why did Van der Staaij and his wife choose Colombia?

“I think there was a lot of documentation about Colombia, a lot of babies came from and Marlies had Colombians in the family. Recently we had dinner with the people with whom we were staying in a hotel at that time and who had a baby on the same day from the same orphanage. We said to each other that now we could have had each other's child. You can't imagine anything with that now. At that time, we first got a photo, and we immediately wanted to go through fire for this creature.”

Habtamu de Hoop says he never asked his parents why they couldn't have children of their own. “My father was 39 when I came, my mother a few years younger. You couldn't adopt everywhere when you were a bit older. Maybe that's why they chose Addis Ababa."

His parents had told him about the adoption early on. “I was five or six. I could get so angry later when people asked, who are your real parents? I found that offensive to them. These are the people who fed me, drove me to football. Those are my parents. And for myself I thought: do I have something that is not real?”

Van der Staaij: “Of course you immediately notice it because of your skin color. My wife was sometimes told, when strangers looked at our children: 'I think it would be so nice to have an Indoman. Mine is just a cheese head.'”

Every year we celebrate the day my parents saw me for the first time. Then we go to an Ethiopian restaurant

Habtamu de Hoop

Did he himself ever talk about the adoption in the House of Representatives?

"Recently there was a debate about foreign adoption and whether it should be stopped." An investigation had shown that there had been many abuses during adoption between 1967 and 1997. “I found it difficult, I realized: it's weird if I don't say anything about myself. I did that briefly. I said we thought it was important to know that the natural parents really couldn't take care of the child. As an adoptive parent, I would not like to tell my child that the parents did not have enough money. Then you might as well give money yourself. But I didn't want to be normative, I don't want to speak for others.”

The Hope nods. “I find it very difficult politically that the best thing that happened to me, my adoption, has been something terrible for others, because people have given up their child involuntarily. My story is not the norm. But it's hard when there's a negative cast about adoption. That hurt my parents too, as if they did something wrong.”

Not De Hoop himself, but another PvdA member did the debate about adoption. “You were mentioned in that debate,” says Van der Staaij.

“Oh, look at that. I consciously try to keep myself aloof because I am not very objective about it. I found it very intense when foreign adoption was put on hold . Nine times out of ten, parents want the best.”

How does he pay attention to his origin?

“Every year we celebrate the day my parents saw me for the first time, on December 8. Then we go to an Ethiopian restaurant. We always look back at the videos my father made of those first days.”

'Gee, excuse Kees'

His brother was later adopted. He is from Nasaret, about twenty kilometers from Addis Ababa. “When my parents had been married for thirty years, in 2019, we went back. The cafe where I had been abandoned was no longer there. In the orphanage they had put a thick book on the table for us, with all the names of the children and the day they had come in. By the day with my name there were about thirty children and by eight names was a cross. They had died. We played soccer with the children of the home, we brought them shirts and I realized how lucky I was. At that time I was a presenter of Het Klokhuis and a councilor. It felt like an obligation in politics to give something back for my happiness.”

What did the orphanage look like?

“According to my mother, it looked much better than it did more than twenty years ago. Then babies were on top of each other. But I still saw thirty babies in one room, Jesus.” He is startled and looks at Van der Staaij. "Gosh, excuse me, Kees."

Van der Staaij and his wife returned to Colombia with the children in 2010. They went to the hospital where they were born and the children's home. “We thought it was important to be very open about it early on. They knew they had come by plane and they thought that was quite normal. They once heard about people expecting a baby and one of our children asked, "When is the plane coming?" So there was still some work to be done in the area of ??information.”

Our children knew they had come by plane and they thought that was quite normal

Kees van der Staaij

He looks at The Hope. “You are only a few years older than my son. On the day he was born, I was standing by the Twin Towers in New York. Which would collapse later that year, on 9/11.”

Habtamu de Hoop and his brother were the only children of color in Wommels for a while. “But when I started to speak Frisian, I no longer had to prove that I was a farmer's son from there. It has never bothered me, I see it as an enrichment: I am a Frisian boy but also black, so I can put myself in the shoes of many people. The only thing I really found difficult is Sinterklaas.”

De Hoop does not say: Zwarte Piet.

“I've always suppressed that a bit. In the course of time I started to speak out about it, but in Friesland the threshold is somewhat higher than in the Randstad. In 2020 I went to the Black Lives Matter demonstration in Leeuwarden. I was a councilor of the Labor Party at the time and my group did not agree that I should go. I said: children are excluded from this from an early age and therefore December 5 is a shitty day for many children. The counter-argument was: When I was young, I was fat and I was also bullied. Get over it. ”

Kees van der Staaij Photo Daniel Niessen

Official secret language

A black labrador enters the dining room and lies down by the table. De Hoop says that he first saw Van der Staaij at the Binnenhof in Rutte's Night, on 1 April last year in the debate about the 'function elsewhere' memorandum. “Because of corona, we were not all allowed to sit in the benches at the same time and I had planned it so that I was there when it was Rutte's turn. And when you supported that motion of no confidence, Kees.”

Van der Staaij looks unmoved.

“We looked at each other and said to each other: 'Gosh, if the SGP even supports it, it could become very exciting'. And at the ChristenUnie I saw the faces getting stiffer.”

The ChristenUnie had just announced that they would not support the motion of no confidence, Gert-Jan Segers did not know that the SGP had made a different decision.

Van der Staaij: „I think it was the most difficult affair in my political period. It was something very exceptional to support such a motion, but the values ??at stake weighed heavily. And we already knew then that the old coalition would continue to support Rutte and that, if we did too, we would be the only non-coalition party to do so.”

Two days after the debate, when Segers withdrew his confidence in Rutte in Het Nederlands Dagblad , Van der Staaij texted Rutte that the no-confidence motion was not intended personally, and that he wanted to explain his exceptional voting behavior again. The following week they drank coffee together.

In the House of Representatives, De Hoop only knows the political culture as it has been since 1 April, with fierce conflicts and hard outbursts – such as the threat from Forum for Democracy MP Van Houwelingen that his D66 colleague Sjoerdsma would have to answer to a tribunal. Van der Staaij saw things change in more than twenty years. What was the most defining event for that changing culture?

Van der Staaij thinks for a long time, then says: “Pim Fortuyn was a very important moment. What particularly stands out to me is the spectacular nature of the unforeseen. It went quite well economically, but beneath the surface there was discomfort that we had no idea about. So now we keep asking ourselves: do we have the image sharp? Are we missing something? And with the LPF, the language of the street entered the House of Representatives. Everything changed, it had to be flashier, faster, more popular. Everyone wondered: don't we speak too much official secret language?”

Has Van der Staaij himself started to speak differently?

“Yes, and we started calling focus groups. People from our supporters who had little interest in politics but who were at the heart of society, such as the police officer, the pre-vocational secondary education teacher. We let them reflect: do we as SGP have the right points? Has our language come across? So yes… such a speech about the City and Environment Experiments Act, my maiden speech, I would have done it completely differently ten years later.”

Because of the Fortuyn Revolt?

"Yes!"

It can't be very difficult for a former presenter of Het Klokhuis to speak clearly, right?

De Hoop: “I think that is my strength, yes, that I conduct politics in my own language.” He was a toddler when Fortuyn was murdered. “I have never consciously experienced another prime minister than Mark Rutte. My generation is used to a right-wing majority, but I have the feeling that young people are now sick of it too. I think it's my job to give them a voice and to show confidence. It now often seems as if the left is only a small part of it. But if Rutte is no longer there, there will be opportunities again. I find that very exciting.”

Does Van der Staaij see it that way too?

“The PvdA had done quite well in Rutte II by The Hague standards, also for people with a low income. I don't have a good answer for being judged so mercilessly in the elections in 2017. I hear: the PvdA couldn't explain it to the truck driver around the corner. You see a tendency that parties have less and less natural supporters and then the following applies: whoever enters the living room has already achieved a lot. So politicians try to be visible and express themselves radically. But how should you then start working together again for good governance in the Netherlands?”

And then, to De Hoop: "I often have the idea that people are too good to vote left."

De Hoop: „Do you have to have it bad to show solidarity? Wouldn't that be terrible?"

He doesn't believe it either. For dessert, delizie al limone , he says he loves his work in politics. And that his heart "jumped" every time he walked into the old building of the House of Representatives, which is now being renovated. "You felt the history."

The Hope is just getting started. How long will Van der Staaij remain in politics?

"I feel like I'm closer to the exit than to the entrance."

That is what Rutte also says: that he is over halfway.

"Oh yeah?"

De Hoop: “You never know with Rutte.”

Maybe not with Kees van der Staaij either?

"I think you have to weigh it every time, and every time it becomes less obvious to continue."

"