Dear Jaga,
I wish more Dutch people agreed with you. Presently there is a group of people who follows a
Jarosław Kaczyński,
Viktor Orbán,
Heinz-Christian Strache,
Donald Trump and a
Benjamin Netanyahu course in which in everything and anything which has to do with Islam, Muslims or Muslim countries inside or outside the Netherlands and the EU is insinuated.
Sigrid Kaag is suspect, because she is member of a center left, pragmatic liberal, secular political party, because she has a connection with the Arab and Muslim world and because she is a progressive woman.
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Things always have to be put in perspective and explained, because news media often give a distorted version, opinion and report of reality, because the different factors, elements, subjects, entities and personalities (human beings) which made or make a situation, development or happening aren't mentioned. Unfortunately we have limited quality research journalism today, which minimalizes the quality, the whole truth and the totality of a news subject, political development or diplomatic meeting like this one in Iran.
Sigrid Kaag explained that her mission in
Iran went like it did as it did. She couldn't enter
Iran without a headscarf and said she simply was there on a diplomatic mission as the representative of the Dutch state and that she had tough negotiations.
Geert Wilders and
Thierry Baudet didn't care about that and called her a
dhimmī. Earlier she visited
Saoudi Arabia without a headscarf, because she wasn't forced to do so. That was part of the rootcause of the criticism towards minister Kaag.
Dhimmī
A
dhimmī (Arabic: ذمي ḏimmī, IPA: [ˈðɪmmiː], collectively أهل الذمة ahl ul-ḏimmah/dhimmah "
the people of the dhimma") is a historical term referring to non-Muslims living in an Islamic state with legal protection. The word literally means "
protected person". According to scholars,
dhimmis had their rights fully protected in their communities, but as citizens in the Islamic state, had certain restrictions, and it was obligatory for them to pay the jizya tax, which complemented the zakat, or alms, paid by the Muslim subjects.
Dhimmis were exempt from certain duties assigned specifically to Muslims, and did not enjoy certain political rights reserved for Muslims, but were otherwise equal under the laws of property, contract, and obligation.
A dhimmi pays his respect to a SultanUnder sharia, the dhimmi communities were usually subjected to their own special laws, and exempt from some laws applicable to the Muslim community. Historically, dhimmi status was originally applied to Jews, Christians, and Sabians. This status later also came to be applied to Zoroastrians, Hindus, Jains and Buddhists.
Critics of
Sigrid Kaag were furious, because in their eyes, she didn't represent Western-European, non-Muslim and Muslim women who do not wear a headscarf (and struggled for that) by wearing a headscarf in Iran and thus bowing for
the Islamic Theocracy of the Mullah's of the 2nd Supreme Leader of Iran
Ali Khamenei and the ideology of
Ayatollah Sayyid Ruhollah Mūsavi Khomeini, he founder of
Iran as an
Islamic republic and the leader of its 1979
Iranian Revolution. Critics see Iran as the funder and scatter of Radical Shia Islam in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the West, as the force behind the non-Shia, Sunni Muslim Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, where Hezbollah supports the
Houthi forces who control the capital
Sana'a together with
Iran.
European conservatism, populism and nationalism entered the Netherlands during the late eighties and early nineties with the voice of
Frits Bolkestein in the conservative-liberal VVD (Peoples Party for Freedom and Democracy), which for 70 years now stood for classical liberalism in the Netherlands. Today you have a political movement and ideology on the Netherlands which is closely related to the British Tories, the American Republicans, Independent conservatives in the USA, Tea Party people, and the governments in Poland and Hungary. I said it before and say it again it is no surprise to me that both Geert Wilders and Thierry Baudet spoke in Hungary for Nationalist Hungarian audiences. In the past conservatism was represented in the Netherlands by mainly religious Calvinist and Roman-Catholic political parties which represented the interests of the Dutch Reformed and Roman-Catholic populations.
For
Geert Wilders and
Thierry Baudet the center left, female, progressive ministers of the pragmatic center left liberal democratic
D66 party,
Sigrid Kaag,
Kajsa Ollongren,
Ingrid van Engelshoven and
Stientje van Veldhoven are
the ultimate enemy. But also the center right, conservative-liberal
VVD ministers and the ministers of the center right christian democratic
CDA, and the ministers of the Confessional, christian, social conservative
Christian Union (
CU) are suspects in the eyes of
the rightwing populists and
conservative christians and
conservative secularists, who distrust everything of
the progressive D66 party.
What kind of party is the
D66 party?
The ideology of
D66 is a highly contested subject within the party. The question is tied to the reason for its existence. There are two currents within the party: the radical democrats and the progressive liberals. These two currents, although sometimes antagonistic, currently complement each other, as both emphasize the self-realisation of the individual. The Radical League and the Free-thinking Democratic League, two early twentieth century parties are historic exponents of these two traditions.
Radical democratsThe first party congress emphasized
radical democratisation of Dutch society and
the political system.
Its ideal was a two-party system. To obtain this it wanted
to reform the electoral system after the American first past the post model. The electoral reform was gradually moderated, now the party favours German-style mixed member proportional representation. In this system, a national party-list election is used to make a first-past-the-post election representative to the nationwide vote. This radical democratisation was combined with a pragmatic and anti-dogmatic attitude towards politics. Hans van Mierlo, the party's leader between 1966 and 1972 and between 1986 and 1998 and the party's figurehead, was an important exponent of this tendency within the party.
Progressive liberalsD66's progressive liberal counterpart has historically been much weaker than its radical democratic current. Under
Jan Terlouw, between 1972 and 1982, D66 began to emphasise new issues like the environment, public education and innovation. He called
D66 a fourth current, next to social democracy, Christian democracy and the conservative liberalism of the VVD. In 1998 the group "
Opschudding" called for
a progressive liberal course for the party. In the party's manifesto, adopted in 2000, the party explicitly adopted
a progressive liberal image. National political reasons explain the usage of the label social-liberal since the more right-wing
VVD describes itself as the liberal party.
IssuesSome of the party's most important policies include:
-
D66 is in favour of a mixed economy combining market economics and government intervention.
D66 is also a proponent of increased flexibility in the labour market and tax-cuts for the lower and middle classes.
-
D66 proposes to increase government spending on education and innovation, for instance increases in teachers' salaries. Also,
D66 wants the education sector to be deregulated and introduce more competition in the sector.
- The environment is an important issue for the party.
D66 favours more investment in sustainable energy.
-
D66 is a social liberal party. The first Kok cabinet, in which it participated introduced several liberal reforms in the past, such as the legalisation of euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and prostitution.
-
D66 is a proponent of democratic reform. It favours electoral reforms such as a binding referendum, abolition of the Senate, and direct election of prime ministers and mayors.
-
D66 favours a
Federal Europe and more
European cooperation on issues such as the environment, immigration policy, and foreign policy.
- In exchange for an agreed upon mutual support from centre-right legislators in the second Balkenende cabinet,
D66 helped them implement social security and healthcare reforms, which included discouraging early retirement, reforming the disability benefit system, and introducing market forces into
the Dutch healthcare system. (For more on that compromise, refer to the "
1986-now" section in this article)
Women are a dominant force in
D66 next to Parliamentary leader and party leader
Alexander Pechtold. The most dominant parliamentarians are the female parliamentarians
Pia Dijkstra and
Vera Bergkamp. This is next to the
D66 ministers I mentioned above here.
Vera Bergkamp was the Director of
COC Nederland (
the oldest LGBT rights organisation in the world).
Pia Dijkstra was a television (news) presenter before she went into politics. From 1988 to 2000 she was news anchor of the main Dutch public news broadcaster NOS Journaal.
D66 is a member of the Liberal International and of
the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (
ALDE).
D66 joined
the Liberal and Democratic Reformists (
LDR)
group in
1989, became a full member of
the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party (
ELDR) in
1994 and a full member of
the Liberal International in
1986.
Relationships to other partiesIn the recent decade's general elections, political commentators positioned
D66 at the centre of the political spectrum and that most inclined to progressive reform. This offers the party a lot of possibilities for co-operation with others in the Dutch political landscape. Historically,
D66 has co-operated in cabinets with the Labour Party (PvdA). They were in four cabinets together (Den Uyl, Van Agt II, Kok I and Kok II); and they formed a shadow cabinet during the early seventies. The relations with the PvdA came under heavy tension three times: in 1981 when
D66 decided to continue to govern with the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), after the PvdA ministers had left the first Van Agt cabinet; in 1989 when PvdA formed a third Lubbers cabinet without
D66; and 2003 when
D66 joined the second Balkenende cabinet.
Ideologically the social-liberal
D66 is linked to People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), although VVD is considered a party of conservative liberalism. This resulted in three coalition governments (Kok I, Kok II and Balkenende II). Both
D66 and the VVD are member of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) and their respective members in the European Parliament are affiliated to the ALDE Group; they have campaigned with the same ALDE programme in European Parliament elections; they have together formed electoral alliances and they have worked together in one VVD/D66 European Parliament parliamentary party. (Few people in the Netherlands know this, and the leftwing wing of
D66 is against close cooperation and don't like the fact that
D66 is linked to the VVD to much. To put it black and white D66 could be seen as the American Democratic party, and the VVD could be seen as a moderate version of the American Republican party, maybe the classical liberal wing or the moderate conservative wing. The big danger of
D66 is when
D66 party members and voters will switch side and vote for the Labour Party [PvdA] or GreenLeft [GroenLinks]).
The difficulty for the
D66 party leadership,
D66 parliamentarians, Provincial
D66 politicains and
D66 councillors is the fact that
D66 is extremely democratic, and that in
D66 the party members have a lot of power in
D66 party congresses. In other political parties like Labour (PvdA), VVD, CDA, GreenLeft, the SP (Socialist Party), CU (Christian Union), SGP, Party for Animals, the Party for Elders (50+) and Geert Wilders PVV, Thiery Baudets Forum for Democracy and the Immigrant party Denk (Think) the party leaderships and party organisations are much more powerful and dominant. It is the charm of the Democrats (how Dutch people also call
D66 sometimes) that they have a rich, pluriform, party democracy in which each subject is discussed, negotiated about and thoroughly thought through before put in election for the party congress or in negotiation with other political parties. Ofcourse as pragmatic people, the
D66 people on the local, provincial, national and European level operate on their own initiative, capability, experience and authority which is given to them by the
D66 congress,
D66 party members and thus the
D66 party organisation.
Jaga,
Sigrid Kaag is part of this very democratic, progressive, liberal democratic, (American)
pragmatic and
Free thinking party movement which was and is extremely liberal on issues as
LGBT rights (
Pro-Gay marriage),
Abortion (Pro-choice), Euthenasia (
Pro-choice in having the power about your own life), Pro
migrants, Pro
refugees, spending on
education, spending on
health care, and
equality for all. Therefor sometimes
Geert Wilders PVV and
Thierry Baudet see the
D66 party as
their main enemy. In parliament and in public debates
D66 often clashes with the
PVV and
Forum for Democracy.
You could compare it to the tensions in the
USA between
leftwing liberals and
rightwing conservatives,
Trump and
Clinton supporters.
Watch from 4:50, when Pechtold and Baudet clashArchrivals in debateCheers,
Pieter
