Dear colleagues bright yellow! I’m about to do something crazy.’ We sign on May 15, around 1 am. The email that appears in everyone’s BNR inbox is one with a beautiful, yet melancholy message: our political reporter in The Hague Sophie van Leeuwen announces her departure. Together with her family, she exchanges The Hague for the Cape: Van Leeuwen becomes a journalist in Africa for RTL. A retrospective of our surf rock in The Hague.
And so an “old dream” of Van Leeuwen comes true. In 2004 Van Leeuwen became a member of the BNR family for the first time, at the time as a journalist. In 2008 you went abroad to work as an EU correspondent in Brussels. After two years she returned to work for Radio Netherlands Worldwide and Bureau Buitenland, among others. She has also worked as a correspondent for various French-language media, including France 24 and Radio France Internationale.
Return
The return to the BNR was finalized in 2018 when Van Leeuwen became a political journalist in The Hague. This not only resulted in the podcast Newsroom Den Haag with journalist Mark Beekhuis, but he also wrote – together with journalist Laurens Boven – the book Stilte op het Binnenhof, about politics during the onset of the corona crisis.
Orphan
“I feel like an orphan,” says Van Leeuwen on her last day of work in The Hague. “I slammed the door behind me after everything that happened. What the hell am I doing?’
His departure is also under discussion within the House of Representatives itself. Farid Azarkan, leader of DENK, says: “It has really been a roller coaster and I wonder how we could have gotten through this period without Sophie?” “Don’t be an outsider,” says House Speaker Vera Bergkamp after Van Leeuwen’s departure. “You have been a regular sight here at the Binnenhof. I always thought you were a very nice and sharp journalist. I’ll miss you.’
“What the hell am I doing?”
Politics and media
The fact that Van Leeuwen received several messages from MPs today indicates, according to her, that politicians and journalists are “very close to each other”. “You go through those big crises together and that creates a bond, whether you like it or not.” What journalists and parliamentarians have in common is that both have to monitor the government. “We’re in the same boat,” says Van Leeuwen. ‘I tried to approach everyone critically about content. But this also sometimes creates tension, because the media also keep an eye on the parliamentarians”.
Events such as the departure of then Minister Bruno Bruins in 2020, the corona crisis and the crisis of confidence, but also the fall of Kabul in 2021, are typical of the impotence that is also often present in Hague politics, thinks Van Leeuwen.
Impotence
«I was at the Council of Ministers with then Ministers Kaag of Foreign Affairs and Bijleveld of Defense. They were supposed to try to evacuate people there, but they had no control over what happened there. According to Van Leeuwen, this impotence also emerges from the fact that many other crises, such as the surcharge affair and the nitrogen crisis, have been going on for some time. “Very often they are not resolved.”
So it’s by no means unheard of on the African continent, but Van Leeuwen has never jumped at the opportunity to live there before. So until now. “Scary, it feels like it’s now or never, because the kids are still small,” she says about it. We, the editorial team of BNR, wish Sophie every success and prosperity in every case. Au revoir, Sophie!
Source: BNR
Fernando Dowling is an author and political journalist who writes for 24 News Globe. He has a deep understanding of the political landscape and a passion for analyzing the latest political trends and news.
