Since the coronavirus managed to split society in the Netherlands (and also the rest of the world) at the beginning of this year, doctors, the business community and entrepreneurs have collided. Our health care minister Hugo de Jonge decided early on for the health side. As a result, the economy seems – for the time being – doomed.
At first, entrepreneurs tried to deal creatively with the corona crisis, but they now have the water at their lips and they want to return to the ‘old normal’ as soon as possible, as far as that is still possible. The Telegraph writes that the business community and entrepreneurs are put against the wall in front of the powerful healthcare minister Hugo de Jonge. As a result, there seems to be less and less space and freedom of movement to keep a company, pub or shop profitable.
Hugo de Jonge refers all these allegations to the realm of fables and concludes that, according to him, there is NO contrast between care and economics:
“That is really extremely incorrect. It is precisely in line with each other. […] Recently there has been very intensive contact between my ministry and employers. ”
It is true that those contacts exist. But usually those contacts are started by desperate entrepreneurs (call a Royal Horeca Netherlands, for example) and not by the minister himself. Because the latter prefers to wait and mainly (sometimes on his own initiative) talks to the healthcare sector. That is a choice, but don’t pretend that De Jonge and enterprising Netherlands are “in line”.
To the sounds that things would not go smoothly between De Jonge’s Ministry of Health and employers’ organization VNO, he responds as if he is crawling back into his shell: “I can’t do anything with that, sorry”, said an extremely substantive one The Young.
