Marc's Messages 3.0

Week of (pseudo)democracy

In the middle of the Dutch Week of Democracy democracy was at an all time low. In Utrecht, the city where I live, the fourth city of the Netherlands, a referendum was held to choose a new mayor. Only 9.3% of those entitled to vote participated in the election, and 16% of those who voted intentionally devalued their voting form. As the outcome of a referendum is only binding with a 30% participation, it was a clear disaster. How come? Are people not interested in democracy?

Foolishness to the Greeks

Next weekend a Connect team will travel to Greece and Macedonia, the area where the Gospel message first hit European soil about 2,000 years ago. I will join the Athens part of the trip, others will move on to Thessaloniki and Skopje. While preparing for this trip today, something interesting happened. When I called the Greek branch of Europcar to ask whether one could drive a rental car into Macedonia, the lady on the phone said: "Sure, you can take it all over Greece, so also into Macedonia."

Pim Fortuyn remembered

Yesterday it was five years ago that Pim Fortuyn was murdered, so there's a lot of analysis and reflection going on in the media. I still remember the crisis atmosphere of those days, the intense emotion among the population. Dutch World Radio wondered how Fortuyn himself would look back on this period, and decided to travel to Italy, where he had his second home, to interview him. If you can handle Dutch, make sure you check this out, as it's very well done. And shocklog GeenStijl has a movie clip of the funeral of the LPF headquarters in The Hague two days ago.

Here I am to worship

On YouTube I found this clip of musician Kees Kraayenoord doing a duet with our fresh Vice Prime Minister and Minister for Family and Youth Affairs André Rouvoet. He's probably the first politician to be caught in an 'intimate act' like this, and in my unlimited imagination I can see him lead the whole Dutch Parliament in worship: "Here I am to bow down, here I am to say that you're my God." Cool.

A new government

Yes, it's final now - we have a new government, with a first-time national role for the small evangelical party Christian Union, that more or less swapped seats with the outspokenly anti-Christian liberal party D66. Although I'm a political relativist, and cautious with so-called 'Christian politics', I have no doubt that God somehow is in the game.

When seaching my mailbox I bumped into an e-mail that I sent to Christian Union leader André Rouvoet in november 2002, saying: "André, God's hand is on your life. This is not meant to pimp you up, but be prepared that God will bring you even more to the front." It's not the kind of stuff I normally write to politicians. This was before he was elected 'politician of the year', and at that time it was quite unthinkable that the Christian Union would ever be in a position for government. So we better give this 'Daniel' some prayer back-up, he'll have a challenging time ahead (see reports here and here in today's newspaper).