State Secretary Knops must have turned white when he heard the results of the Parliamentary elections in Curaçao at breakfast on Saturday. It was expected that the government parties PAR and MAN would lose ground. But that the victory of the MFK based on anti-Dutch sentiments with 9 out of 21 seats would turn out so great, he could not have imagined in his darkest nightmare.
Knops has partly proclaimed that in the end of his term of office he has to do business with Curaçao’s future prime minister Gilmar Pik Pisas. Of course, PAR and MAN are first and foremost responsible for their own defeat by paying too much attention to the economy and too little to the daily needs of the population.
But knowing how fragile the support of any government in politically hopelessly torn Curaçao is, the way in which the State Secretary recommended the Caribbean Body for Reform and Development has not helped the Rhuggenaath cabinet. It has given the MFK the opportunity to dismiss the coalition as slavish implementers of dictates from The Hague.
It goes too far to conclude that Knops is a better campaign leader for the MFK (plus 4) than for his own CDA (minus 4), the fact is that he seems to have learned little from the failure of predecessors. Gijs de Vries threw the then Prime Minister Pourier in front of the bus with which he helped Anthony Godett, who was denounced in The Hague, (although he had to outsource the premiership to sister Myrna because he was not ministerial due to a conviction for corruption).
In 2010, The Hague was operating so awkwardly that Gerrit Schotte could become the first Prime Minister of Curaçao who thought he could sell his country to a Sicilian Mafia boss in exchange for a million or more in bribes.
And now Knops has to work with Pisas, who makes no secret of rejecting the conditions that the Netherlands sets for support to drag Curaçao through the corona crisis. The two have previously crossed swords when Pisas wanted to cancel elections already called as interim prime minister in 2017 to prevent PAR and MAN from coming to power.
Then Knops (via the Reich Council of Ministers) won the prize. Four years later, the Curaçao against the voting advice of the State Secretary not to vote for parties that take a walk with the democratic rules of the game & # 8211; Pisas still got his way. As a result, they face each other again: one wants to renegotiate, the other emphatically not.
That will not be pleasant conversations. Yet both gentlemen are under an expensive obligation to close the most important deal in the existence of Curaçao.
SOURCE: DOSSIER KINGDOM RELATIONS
