Vera Bergkamp will never get Wilders’ genie back in the bottle

Feedback February 12, 2022

The question is, what is offensive? You can discuss this for a long, long time, and I fear that will happen

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Chamber president Vera Bergkamp wants to put an end to the ‘roughening of the parliamentary debate’. She calls freedom of expression ‘a great good’, but according to her this is not a license to say what comes into your head. She no longer wants to allow ‘unnecessarily hurtful expressions’, such as ‘crazy’ or ‘idiot’ during parliamentary debates. Apparently there are also offensive expressions that are not ‘unnecessary’, but apart from that I completely agree with her. You should not insult others. Not because they have a dissenting opinion, nor for other reasons.

The question is, what is offensive? You can argue about that for a long, long time, and I fear it will. If a Member of Parliament should say: ‘I do not share your point of view’, that should of course be possible, otherwise you can abolish the debate. But now suppose he (she) says: ‘Your proposal makes no sense and I reject it completely.’ Is that possible? Most people will think so. Yet in the opinion of some it is no longer a very big step to: ‘Your proposal is idiotic and you are crazy.’ Can the President of the House prohibit such statements? As far as I’m concerned, yes, but other views are also conceivable.

The Rules of Procedure of the House of Representatives already give the chairman the opportunity to take action against offensive language. Then let Bergkamp do that. She can deprive someone of the floor, right?

But a chairman who takes action if a member of parliament goes too far is probably a passer-by. Gerdi Verbeet did not intervene when PVV member Geert Wilders called minister Ella Vogelaar ‘crazy’. Anouchka van Miltenburg did nothing when the same Wilders called the then D66 leader Alexander Pechtold ‘pathetic, miserable and hypocritical’. And only recently, Bergkamp himself watched idly as Wilders once again described Prime Minister Mark Rutte as ‘not so good’.

These are just three examples, which could easily be multiplied by many others. The much-praised Khadija Arib, the previous Speaker of the House, was not nearly as vigorous as her reputation suggests. In 2017, when she led the debate on the government statement, Wilders (he again) talked about ‘hundreds of Allahu akbar screaming headscarves’. Arib just let it pass, when she could have said something about it.

The pattern is always the same: a Member of Parliament (remarkably often, although not always, Wilders) scolds a fellow Member of Parliament or says something that is unacceptable and the chairman does not whistle him/her back. I don’t think this development is reversible. Something that has been going on for a long time (‘crazy’ dates back to 2007) is hard to change. Bergkamp can say that ‘the genie has to go back in the bottle’, but I foresee that unfortunately that will not work anymore.

MPs who want to call someone ‘crazy’ or whatever will just keep doing it. If the President of the House says that this is not allowed, they will shrug their shoulders. They will take any sanctions – under protest – for granted. In the eyes of their supporters, they are probably a hero.

The real problem is that such MPs are elected at all. Neat MPs automatically adhere to the rules of decency. Or at least apologize if they don’t. Non-decent MPs think: you can kill me. I am not criminally liable. I’ve been elected, my constituents are behind me, I say what I want.

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