‘Wilders has been convicted for this’
By RTL News ·0 minutes ago·Adapted: 0 minutes ago
© ANPRTL
Prime Minister Dick Schoof believes that PVV State Secretary Chris Jansen said this week that he supports Geert Wilders’ ‘fewer Moroccans’ statement. “You simply don’t make such statements, Wilders was convicted for this. This is simply not possible,” Schoof told the AD.
PVV member Chris Jansen, State Secretary for Public Transport and the Environment, said this week in the TV program Goedemorgen Nederland that he still supports Geert Wilders’ statement in 2014 about ‘fewer Moroccans’. “Absolutely, yes,” Jansen said. This was met with fierce criticism, especially when Jansen said that ‘as a person he can think whatever he wants’.
After the statement was broadcast on TV, Jansen wrote in a letter to the House of Representatives that ‘these personal views’ do not reflect cabinet policy and that he therefore distances himself from the statement as State Secretary for Infrastructure and Water Management. Wilders was convicted of group insult before the statement.
‘It’s just done’
Prime Minister Dick Schoof, who is in New York at the United Nations General Assembly, responded to the AD on the issue. “As a minister you have no private views. Three letters to Parliament have now been sent about this, but it is simply finished,” Schoof told the newspaper.
“Chris Jansen also knows that, he won’t repeat it again. Chris and I agreed on that quite quickly in the telephone conversation, by the way. And I admit that I didn’t give him much room to have a different view. “
Agema will discuss it
Deputy Prime Minister Fleur Agema (PVV) said yesterday that he would discuss the issue with other PVV members in the cabinet. She did not want to say what exactly the PVV ministers and state secretaries would discuss.
Agema did not want to say anything about the matter at all. Nor is it whether Jansen should actively distance himself from the prohibited statement or whether he should simply remain silent about it in the future. “I don’t say anything about my role as deputy prime minister. I don’t talk about this outside.”
‘No way’
Schoof leaves no room for any misunderstanding. “This is a text that everyone knows how sensitive it is, there is also a ruling by a judge. So: no way that a minister in my cabinet makes such a statement. And so it is good that he takes it back and never again will pronounce.”