Finance Minister Sigrid Kaag's daughters want her to quit politics due to threats

D66 leader and Finance Minister Sigrid Kaag has doubts about whether she wants to continue in politics in the Netherlands, she said on College Tour. The threats she receives are very hard on her and her family. Her daughters fear that she will be murdered, the Volkskrant reports.

The television program played a video of Kaag’s adult daughters expressing their fears that their mother would become the victim of a political assassination. “I’m worried that my mother will end up like Elst Borst,” Kaag’s eldest daughter, Janna, said. Former D66 Minister Borst was murdered in her home in 2014 by a man with mental health problems who disagreed with her euthanasia policy. “It only has to go wrong once,” Janna said. “It’s not to be rude or anything, but I really want my mom to find another job.”

The video brought Kaag to tears. She stressed that she hasn’t decided on whether or not to continue in politics. Her ambition was to be the Netherlands’ first female Prime Minister. But the threats against her are getting her and her family down. Her whole family would be “relieved” if she gave up her current job and left the Netherlands, Kaag said.

Kaag lived and worked abroad for most of her adult life, including as a diplomat in Beirut, Vienna, and Khartoum and as leader of the UN disarmament mission in Syria. She only returned to the Netherlands in 2017 to be the Minister of Foreign Trade.

Her daughters have made their wishes clear. Her husband “varies in opinion,” sometimes asking her to “leave everything behind” and other times encouraging her to push through. “But if I said today: it has been great, he would be ready with the suitcases the day after tomorrow.”

In the video, Kaag’s daughters, who grew up abroad, talk about the “shock” they received when they moved to the Netherlands in 2017. Kaag had described the Netherlands as a tolerant country, but all they’ve experienced is hostility. Younger daughter Inas was the first to notice “fifteen people or so with a large torch” outside their house last year. “I was shocked. So this is the Netherlands.”

“I think we all had different expectations,” Kaag said about her family’s settlement in the Netherlands. She called it a “pity” that her daughters got to know the country through “the ugly lens of politics.” Her husband feels “out of place,” Kaag said. When she referred to “home” in the interview, she talked not about her house in The Hague but a home where they lived in Jerusalem.

Many politicians in the Netherlands are facing threats. The police received 1,125 reports of threatened politicians last year, almost double the year before.