Femke Halsema

Femke Halsema (Haarlem, April 25, 1966) is a politician in the Netherlands. She has been in parliament since 1998 for the left-wing ecologist party GroenLinks, Green Left. In November 2002 she unexpectedly became party leader, replacing Paul Rosenmöller .

During the first government of Jan Peter Balkenende she strongly criticized the new and very restrictive immigration laws.

At the end of 2003, she temporarily had to retreat as party leader because she was pregnant. On November 1 she gave birth to two twins: Suzy and Bruno. During her absence, Marijke Vos replaced her.

After entering the political arena again, in 2004 she started a wide ideological discussion within the party; breaking with the party's socialist roots, she claimed it was in fact 'the last leftist liberal party in the Netherlands.' Further, she stressed cultural and religious tolerance as core values.

In march 2005, she started pleading for closer coöperation between the three leftist parties in the Dutch parliament (the other parties being the SP and the PvdA). She asked PvdA-leader Wouter Bos to speak out in favor of a leftist government after the elections in 2007; however, he refused to do so, not wanting to alienate the christian-democrat CDA.

Background

Halsema graduated in criminology at the University of Amsterdam. From 1993 to 1997, before she joined GroenLinks, she worked for the Wiardi Beckman Foundation, the think tank of the Dutch Labour Party|, and from 1996 to 1998 at De Balie in Amsterdam, a well-known Dutch political-cultural centre. With this intellectual background she differs from her predecessor Rosenmöller, who left college to work in the Rotterdam Harbor.