It must have been in 2015, thinks journalist Jan Dijkgraaf – at that time he sometimes gave training courses to entrepreneurs. On a cold autumn day he spoke – “for free” – with an ambitious VVD member from Amsterdam.
Dilan Yesilgöz had been a policy advisor for the municipality of Amsterdam for many years, now she was elected to the council of the capital. To supplement her meager income as a councillor, she had started a consultancy with a friend that was urgently looking for clients. The conversation – over coffee and then wine – was about business, but Dijkgraaf immediately saw Yesilgöz’s political potential. “At one point I said to her: what are you really worried about? They will put you high on the list in the next parliamentary elections.”
In 2017, Dilan Yesilgöz came in 19th place on the VVD electoral list and was elected to the House of Representatives. She had advanced to fifth place in the elections last spring. Now, after a few months of warming up as outgoing State Secretary for Economic Affairs and Climate, Dilan Yesilgöz-Zegerius (Ankara, 1977) has one of the most important posts in the new cabinet as Minister of Justice and Security.
First slip
Two days after her installation, she made her first slip when she was asked to respond to reports that irritated shopkeepers would open their business themselves, if the cabinet was not allowed to relax the lockdown. Was the new minister going to give the hard-hit entrepreneurs a ticket? She looked frugal and said: “Compliance is more what you and I make of it than the police have to go around there.”
MPs were outraged. “The policy stands or falls with the willingness to enforce,” said D66 MP Hanneke van der Werf. The next day, Yesilgöz backed down with a cleverly worded note to parliament. The minister wanted to say that “everyone has a responsibility to comply with the measures,” she wrote. “Of course, it can be maintained where necessary.”
Connoisseurs were not surprised. Yesilgöz, say political colleagues, combines political shrewdness with a fine nose for the views of the man in the street. “She is very good at expressing what many people secretly think,” says SP MP Michiel van Nispen. “If there was a complicated debate in the House about bringing back IS brides, Dilan said: ‘We don’t want those terrorists in the Netherlands.’
Yesilgöz’ political lightning career rests on two pillars, says journalist Jan Dijkgraaf: “Always say ‘yes’ to requests from the media and then shout very hard right-wing things.” In 2015 she became a table lady at Studio Powned and she sat next to Thierry Baudet (not yet a politician at the time) in the studio. In addition, she was a regular guest at WNL, where she was critical of migration and the excesses of Islam. Partly because of this, says Dijkgraaf, she grew into a kind of ‘mascot’ of the growing right-wing populist movement. Dijkgraaf: “Many people thought: this is a VVD member who does dare to say things.”
Yesilgöz certainly did not receive her right-wing views from home. Her father was a Kurdish trade unionist of a leftist nature, the family had to flee from the Turkish military regime in the 1980s. Yesilgöz initially became a member of the SP, switched to GroenLinks and then to the PvdA. Because of the “patronizing racism” of the left (she used the term in an interview with de Volkskrant) the Amsterdam policy officer chose the VVD.
Also read this interview with Dilan Yesilgöz from 2016: ‘Left-wing politicians always think: there are victims, and we have to save them’
Heated debates
In the Amsterdam council (2014-2017) she modeled herself into classical law and order-VVD member, Alderman Rutger Groot Wassink recalls. As party leader of GroenLinks, he had heated debates with her. “I spoke to her once after a debate. Then we found that it wouldn’t hurt either of us by crossing swords.”
As a Member of Parliament, Yesilgöz also distinguished himself mainly in the VVD field: safety. “She was constantly in the picture on the justice portfolio with certain themes,” says CDA MP Anne Kuik. She consistently argued for the hard line: whether it was about jihad brides in Kurdish prison camps or about the (adopted) prohibition of community service for committing violence against police and aid workers.
Yesilgöz was also able to handle other portfolios, such as Groningen gas extraction or media. “It strikes me that she picks it up very well every time,” says Kuik.
According to VVD colleague Jeroen van Wijngaarden, Yesilgöz is underestimated. “Of course Dilan is politically handy. At the same time, she is a heavyweight when it comes to substance.” Wijngaarden liked to visit her room in the Binnenhof; there was always something delicious on the table. Other colleagues also liked to come by – for fun or to let off steam. When everyone had gone home, she was still sitting over the files. “Dilan didn’t come across it all,” says Wijngaarden. “She comes from a family of go-getters.”
Yesilgöz’s work ethic is not a luxury in her new job. Since 2010, when the police moved from the Interior to Justice, Justice and Security is by far the largest ministry with more than 100,000 employees. Moreover, a department that has been plagued by affairs for years – which often led to the resignation of ministers from the VVD house. Minister Ivo Opstelten and State Secretary Fred Teeven stumbled in 2015 about the so-called ‘receipt affair’, about a controversial deal with a drug trafficker. That affair also cost VVD minister Ard van der Steur his head in 2017. In 2019, State Secretary Mark Harbers (also VVD) had to resign because he had provided incorrect information about crime among asylum seekers. Less striking, but at least as alarming, was the departure of almost the entire administrative leadership of the department. On Monday it turned out that the old cover-up culture at Justice and Security has still not disappeared. An alarming report about problems at the police departments that control weapons licenses was not sent to the House, but disappeared in a deep drawer.
Double crisis
Yesilgöz will not only have to be a good manager of her department. The rule of law is facing a double crisis. The escalating drug trade undermines society. At the same time, confidence in the rule of law has been severely damaged by the still proliferating Allowances affair. Yesilgöz will have to navigate between action and the rule of law, between one of the pillars of VVD policy and the wishes of coalition partner D66. “To solve the enormous problems we face, J&V no longer has to rely on incidental toughness, but on policy that actually works,” says D66 member Van der Werf.
SP member Van Nispen hopes that Yesilgöz will listen more often to the ‘field’: the police officers, lawyers and judges who have been warning for some time about the dangers of a ‘tough approach’ that has gone too far. Neither Yesilgöz, nor Minister of Legal Protection Franc Weerwind, nor Secretary-General Dick Schoof have received any legal training. That should not be an insurmountable problem, says law graduate Van Nispen: “But Yesilgöz will have to work very hard.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 1, 2022
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