Emile Roemer
Statement
Emile Roemer (1962) has been an MP since 2006 and Socialist Party leader since 2010. He was previously active in local politics and education.
"There is a lot of anger in our country", he has said in a recent interview, "but there is also a lot going on in the world. Take Brexit and Trump or the situation in the Middle East with the Arab Spring which has failed everywhere. ... But the biggest problem is that the Netherlands has suffered under neoliberalism for thirty years, thanks to policies that aim to make multinationals bigger and leave individuals to fend for themselves."
He calls for:
- Making sure that multinational businesses pay their taxes
- Halting what he considers to be the undesirable influence that Turkey’s and Morocco’s regimes have on Dutch citizens
- The cultivation and selling of soft drugs in the Netherlands to be regulated and legalized
- Pushing back on racial profiling
- Abolishing the European Commission
- Holding a referendum to limit the power of the European institutions
- A ban on new memberships to the EU; future expansion should always be approved through referenda
- Cutting Dutch contributions to the European bureaucracy
- Withdrawal from the stabilisation and growth pact; regaining complete control over national fiscal policy
- Reducing the impact of lobbyists in Brussels
- Expanding care for refugees in their home countries
- Schools to devote more attention to philosophy and religion to better equip students with self-reflection and an appreciation of ‘the other’.
