Governors of the earthquake municipalities apologized this week for the way the money was distributed. They made agreements about the amount of money with the Ministries of Economic Affairs and the Interior. “What was intended as something extra has ended in a serious hangover,” said King’s Commissioner René Paas on Wednesday evening in an emergency debate in the Provincial Council.
He called the course of events a miscalculation. “It was an embarrassing display. We looked too optimistically at something that we could have sensed on our clogs. This is how a competition arose on Monday in which people became each other’s competitors. That was nobody’s intention, it was horrible to see.”
Children’s heart center away from Groningen
Tonight’s flare demonstration is not just about the natural gas troubles. Groningers have the feeling that they also had to deal with another disappointment this week. Minister Kuipers of Public Health announced on Tuesday that the children’s heart center of the Groningen UMCG to want to close.
That concern is concentrated elsewhere in the country, despite the more than 250,000 protest signatures that were collected. The top man of the UMCG will join the demonstration tonight and calls on others to join in, including for the children’s heart center.
According to Merel Jonkheid of the Groninger Soil Movement, all these issues are reason to expect many people at the torchlight procession, which she co-organised. The last major demonstration in 2018 saw between 8,000 and 10,000 people showed up. They choose not to go to The Hague, but simply to stay in their own province.
“We would like to be a stage for Groningen,” says Jonkheid. “We don’t want people to drive all the way to The Hague. Let The Hague come here, then they can show how seriously they take us.”
Digital torch
For people who can’t make it tonight, there is the possibility to light a torch digitally to show support. By 10 am this morning, more than 35,000 people had already done so. The front page of the Dagblad van het Noorden today consists of a thousand portraits of Groningers who with a clenched fist are photographed.
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