The NSC party leadership put serious thought and discussion into disbanding the party, Eddy van Hijum said on the NPO Radio 1 program Met het Oog op Morgen on Tuesday. In the end, they decided to push through. The motivation is great, he said, NOS reports.
Van Hijum, currently the NSC deputy prime minister in the caretaker Schoof I Cabinet, was nominated on Tuesday to lead the party in the upcoming parliamentary elections. The party members can still vote on it, but the only other NSC member openly interested in the position – Diederik Boomsma – withdrew after Van Hijum’s nomination.
But for a while before his nomination, it was uncertain whether the NSC would exist this election. “We have had an enormously turbulent 1.5 years behind us, in which there has been a lot of fuss and people have lost their trust,” Van Hijum said. “And the question was: are we going to continue with each other, or has this experiment failed? We really asked ourselves that question very intensively.”
Van Hijum also asked himself whether he wanted to continue in the NSC. He decided that he would and accepted the nomination to be party leader. “I really think that I can do this job with the group of people we have.”
According to Van Hijum, the NSC is very motivated to continue to fight for a good government culture and solid democracy. “What we were founded for is still relevant,” he said.
The NSC was founded by Pieter Omtzigt ahead of the previous parliamentary election in November 2023. The party won 20 seats in parliament straight out of the gate and eventually joined the Schoof I coalition with the PVV, VVD, and BBB.
Since then, the NSC’s support has plummeted in the polls. In Maurice de Hond’s latest poll, published on June 7, the party only had one seat in the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of parliament.
Omtzigt had to take leave due to burnout and eventually left national politics altogether. His replacement, Nicolien van Vroonhoven, also decided she did not want to lead the party in the upcoming election.
As successor, Van Hijum does not intend to constantly consult Omtzigt, he said. “We will still call. He is a friend and the founder of the party. But we have to make do with the group of people we have now.”