Tough talker

Date: 17/09/1998

FOR better or for worse, Jozias van Aartsen cannot help but be seen as Frits Bolkestein's representative on earth.

Once again, following the long negotiations to put together a left-right 'purple' coalition in the Netherlands (a process known as the formatie), tough-talking Liberal Party (VVD) leader Bolkestein has chosen to sit out the next four years of government.

In the absence of the combative free-marketeer in the one job he coveted, that of foreign minister, it will be up to the 50-year-old Van Aartsen to fight the increasingly assertive Dutch corner inside the EU's resurgent General Affairs Council.

Past experience suggests his will be a tough act.

In Prime Minister Wim Kok's first purple coalition between 1994 and 1998, Van Aartsen served as a formidable agriculture minister, ruthlessly cutting the pig population by 25&percent; after an outbreak of swine fever and winning parliamentary approval for a plan to restructure the industry.

Even before the formatie began, it was known that he would be offered a top job in the new government if he wanted one.

However, he made it clear that he only wanted to sign up to 'Purple II' if the government's programme contained “enough dynamism”.

In the end, Van Aartsen entered the foreign ministry as the first among VVD equals including Finance Minister Gerrit Zalm, Economic Affairs Minister Annemarie Jorritsma and Benk Korthals at the troubled justice ministry.

When the Labour Party (PvdA) was offered his former post, Van Aartsen remarked that this would be an interesting test for a party with “such unwise” views on farming. In the end, the job went to the social liberals (D'66).

Van Aartsen was destined for high office largely because he had the backing of party leader Bolkestein, but also because he had earned the respect of his Labour premier.

His performance at agriculture had impressed the moody Kok, a man who had become exasperated by the indecisiveness and circumlocutory talking style of retiring D'66 Foreign Minister Hans van Mierlo.

When he arrived at the agriculture ministry in 1994, Van Aartsen was a cabinet virgin. His ministry was one of the toughest tests a new boy can have. It had long been a fiefdom of the party which has ruled the Netherlands for most of the postwar years, the Christian Democrats (CDA), and was reluctant to change.

“He went there without the networks,” says a former colleague. These old-boy links with the farming community and food industry were considered essential if Van Aartsen was to oil the wheels and grease palms in the sector. “The funny thing was that he spent much of the four years there fire-fighting rather than dealing with a sleepy ministry,” adds the colleague.

It was the minister's bad luck - or political good luck - to have to deal first with the fall-out from the 'mad cow' crisis in the UK and then with his very own domestic agriculture drama in the form of swine fever.

His Draconian response did not win him friends among farmers, many of whom felt, as farmers so often do, that he had not done enough to compensate them for their slaughtered pig herds.

Van Aartsen's background hardly helped him. Unlike many of his CDA predecessors who came from a rural background, Van Aartsen was born and bred in The Hague. He was the son of a politician; albeit a member of the Protestant Anti-Revolutionary Party which was later incorporated into the CDA.

“They saw him as a Randstad man,” explains an aide, referring to the complex of cities in north-west Holland including Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague.

“He was regarded as the typical example of the cosmopolitan who did not understand their needs.”

Nevertheless, while he was losing friends in the fields, he was winning them around the cabinet table for shaking up an ossified ministry. “He had absolutely no time for sacred cows, if you will excuse the pun, and there were plenty of them both inside the ministry and outside among farmers,” says the aide.

A classic example of this was Van Aartsen's impatience with Frau Antje, an antique image of a smiling Dutch milkmaid which is used as a marketing ploy at international trade fairs to advertise Dutch farm produce.

Instead, worried by the collapsing market for Dutch products in Germany, he called for an updated four-year master plan aimed at improving the Netherlands' image on the German market without falling back on old stereotypes of clogs, windmills and cosy villages. Against this backdrop it is hardly surprising that, unlike his predecessors, Van Aartsen became well known among the public.

Unusually for someone of his background, he dropped out of college, leaving the Free University of Amsterdam in 1969 without qualifications. Fortunately, his political connections helped him find a job with the VVD faction in the parliament's second chamber, from which he rose within four years to head the party's research department.

While there, he caught the eye of VVD leader Hans Wiegel. Both were in their early thirties and - so legend has it - they co-wrote the Liberal political manifesto one wet afternoon.

In 1977, Wiegel became deputy prime minister and carried the 30-year-old Van Aartsen along on his coat-tails into the interior ministry. This is where his career proper began and, within six years of his arrival, he had become chief of staff to the ministry's secretary-general.

Not content to remain a civil servant, Van Aartsen never lost his inherited political 'nose'. In 1986, when the then VVD leader Ed Nijpels asked him to join the government following the death of a minister, Van Aartsen declined. Within five years, Nijpels was ousted in a palace revolution by the former Royal Dutch/Shell executive Frits Bolkestein.

The two men have been close ever since; a distinct advantage as Bolkestein dragged the party into the mainstream and into a seemingly bizarre but ultimately highly successful coalition with the left.

After Bolkestein, Van Aartsen claims the three people who have influenced him most are his father, former VVD leader Wiegel and his wife Henriette: a woman so formidable that she was known around the agriculture ministry as 'Hillary'.

Foreign ministry staff are said to be overjoyed to have someone like Van Aartsen in the ministerial chair after four years of the likeable but famously indecisive Van Mierlo. “He is very driven and can get to the bottom of a brief very quickly,” says an aide. “There are also no no-go areas for him.”

In his first two months at the foreign affairs tiller, Van Aartsen has combined traditional VVD loyalty to the Atlantic alliance and advocacy of strong defence with flashes of independence.

In August, he was one of the quickest to speak out in favour of Washington's controversial missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan in revenge for the bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. “We do not yet know all the details, but from what Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said I am convinced that the United States had adequate reasons and sufficient evidence,” he said.

NATO's call for a show of force over Kosovo was answered quickly by Van Aartsen and his fellow Liberal, Defence Minister Frank de Grave, with the offer of eight fighter jets and a tanker aircraft.

He has also, however, quickly demonstrated his determination to stand up for the small military powers by voicing concern over the creation of new 'contact groups' for Kosovo and Albania which exclude other NATO powers and, in his view, have been conspicuously unsuccessful.

Those worried that Van Aartsen will take an unnecessarily combative stance at meetings with fellow EU foreign ministers, particularly over the Agenda 2000 spending reforms, are probably right to be concerned.

He will press for a budgetary 'correction mechanism' to return 600 million ecu to Zalm's coffers “in a very tough way”, says an aide, and has already shown how little he thinks of the agricultural reform package in his previous incarnation.

The tough talk will be mixed with charm, however. As Wiegel commented when he heard that his protégé had become foreign minister, he will do well because he speaks many languages and wears “striped suits”.

BIO