Dilan Yeşilgöz

Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius (; born 18 June 1977) is a Dutch politician who has served as Leader of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) since 2023. She also served as Minister of Justice and Security in the fourth Rutte cabinet from 10 January 2022 to 2 July 2024 and previously served as a member of the House of Representatives from 2017 to 2021 and as State Secretary for Economic Affairs and Climate Policy from 2021 until 2022.

Early life

Yeşilgöz was born in Ankara, Turkey, on 18 June 1977 and migrated to the Netherlands as a child. Her mother is of Turkish origin and her father is Kurdish and originally from Tunceli, Turkey. Her mother, Fatma Özgümüş, is the director of the Netherlands Refugee Organization (VON). Her father, Yücel Yeşilgöz, is a criminologist and human rights activist. Yeşilgöz also has a sister who grew up with her and her mother and father.

Yeşilgöz's parents were active in the Turkish left and campaigned against the military regime of the National Security Council after it seized power in the 1980 Turkish coup d'état, calling for the restoration of democracy, individual liberties and human rights. Yücel Yeşilgöz fled Turkey and sought asylum in the Netherlands in 1981 after the regime persecuted him for his political activities. The rest of the family joined Yücel as refugees in 1984 when Dilan was aged 7, after they fled from Turkey through Greece and claimed asylum in the Netherlands to join him there.

After receiving her secondary education at the Vallei College in Amersfoort between 1991 and 1997, Yeşilgöz studied social and cultural sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she obtained a master's degree in culture, organisation and management in 2003.

Political career

Early activism

After fleeing to the Netherlands, Yeşilgöz and her family became involved in Dutch left-wing politics. She joined the Socialist Party in around 1999, where she later became a board member for the Amersfoort branch of the party. She also took up an internship at GroenLinks and started writing for the Labour Party magazine ''Lava'', the official publication of the Young Socialists. During this period, she organised demonstrations against the asylum policy of the VVD under asylum minister Rita Verdonk, which she would later come to support as VVD leader in 2023.

In 2006, Yeşilgöz moved to the municipality of Amsterdam, where she worked as an advisor to GroenLinks alderwoman Marijke Vos. In 2009, she chose to leave the SP and join the VVD. In an interview from 2023, she said was alienated from the left after left-wing activists and politicians treated her differently from other Dutch citizens because of her family background, viewing her as a "victim who should be saved" rather than an equal. At this time, she researched the policy platforms and manifestos of other Dutch political parties and came to the conclusion that the liberal values of the VVD most closely represented her beliefs and the political values promoted by her family in Turkey.

Elected career

From 2014 to 2017, Yeşilgöz held a seat in the municipal council of Amsterdam. She was placed fourth on the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy list in the 2014 municipal election. As a councillor, Yeşilgöz focussed on tackling and criminalising verbal aggression towards LGBT people and street harassment against women. She worked on this in the city council for three years, but proposals were always rejected by a majority. When she left for the House of Representatives in 2017, then-mayor Eberhard van der Laan praised her tenacity. He called it his farewell gift to Yeşilgöz that there would be an integrated approach to street intimidation in Amsterdam, based on a proposal she had submitted with Marijke Shashavari of the CDA at the time. A majority of the city council approved this proposal. ''De Volkskrant'' characterised her tenacious nature as a "pit bull with empathy".

Yeşilgöz was elected to the House of Representatives in the 2017 general election. She initially served as her party's spokesperson for justice and security, but her portfolio later included climate policy and energy policy. On 25 May 2021, Yesilgöz was appointed State Secretary for Economic Affairs and Climate Policy in the demissionary third Rutte cabinet, serving alongside Mona Keijzer. On 10 January 2022, she was appointed Minister of Justice and Security in the fourth Rutte cabinet.

The cabinet collapsed over disagreements about immigration reform on 7 July 2023, triggering a November 2023 snap election. On 12 July – two days after Prime Minister Mark Rutte declared he would no longer lead the party – Yeşilgöz announced her candidacy to become the next leader of the VVD. The party board formally nominated her for the position the following day, and Yeşilgöz officially became party leader of the VVD on 14 August. The VVD came in third in the snap election with 24 seats. Yeşilgöz became the party's parliamentary leader, but the duties were performed by Sophie Hermans due to Yeşilgöz's continued role as minister. In June 2024, opposition parties filed a censure and a no-confidence motion, neither of which received a majority, against Yeşilgöz, because she had claimed, following the cabinet collapse, that successive family reunifications resulted in thousands of additional asylum seekers per year. The actual figure was later revealed to be in the tens per year.

The Schoof cabinet was sworn in on 2 July 2024, bringing an end to Yeşilgöz's term as minister.

Political positions

As minister of justice and security, Yesilgöz advocated for criminal justice reform and strict policies against terrorism and organized crime. She supported laws to protect journalists who had been threatened for their work and supports deporting extremist imams from the Schengen area. In 2019, Yesilgöz called for a ban on "single shots" and heavy flares within the F2 category of the Fireworks policy in the European Union, a policy idea which was opposed by the rest of the VVD. She opposed a total ban on consumer fireworks as parliamentary leader in 2025, arguing that it would not address violence against first responders, as such incidents often involved heavy fireworks already prohibited by law. Yesilgöz also supported mandatory use of body cameras for police officers. Although from a refugee background, Yesilgöz has said she would pursue further controls on immigration if elected Prime Minister.

In 2019, Yesilgöz favored trying Dutch ISIS terrorists detained by Kurdish forces on the spot rather than be repatriated to the Netherlands. She also argued in favour of blocking the repatriation of ISIS members, an idea which was opposed by coalition parties D66 and ChristenUnie who argued they should face trial in the Netherlands.

In 2022, Yesilgöz delivered the annual Hendrik Jan Schoo lecture entitled "Doing What It Takes to Protect Our Democratic Rule of Law" in which she criticised wokeism, far-right politicians, and conspiracy theorists, and argued that the Dutch constitutional state is allegedly under pressure from left-wing activism. Yesilgöz considers Frits Bolkestein as her main liberal role model.

In contrast to her predecessor Mark Rutte, Yesilgöz said she would not exclude Geert Wilders and the PVV from coalition talks ahead of the 2023 Dutch general election. Following November 2024 Amsterdam riots targeting supporters of the Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv F.C., Yeşilgöz stated that religion should not influence public life. She said that organized or political religious movements can be a danger to society, giving Islamism as an example. She reiterated her support of reforms to the constitution's freedom of education. Ahead of the 2025 , Yeşilgöz presented a plan to boost the purchasing power of the middle class by lowering the energy tax and raising childcare benefits. For the longer term, she advocated scrapping benefits and tax credits, to ensure total income increases with hours worked. The VVD planned to couple social security to inflation rather than the minimum wage, and it proposed a bill requiring that future budgets provide greater purchasing power gains to workers compared to non-workers.

Personal life

Yesilgöz married René Zegerius in 2013. She is an Ajax supporter and a country music fan.

Although she has dual nationality, she considers herself Dutch and not Turkish. On the television program ''College Tour'', she stated in September 2023 that she had never had a Turkish passport and that she had only known for a year that she still had Turkish nationality. With this knowledge, she says she formally renounced her Turkish nationality, though it had not yet been granted by the Turkish government at the time of the interview.

Electoral history

Notes

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Yesilgoz, Dilan
1977 births
Living people
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam alumni
21st-century Dutch women politicians
Dutch MPs 2017–2021
Dutch MPs 2021–2023
Dutch MPs 2023–
Dutch people of Kurdish descent
Dutch people of Turkish descent
Female justice ministers
Ministers of justice of the Netherlands
Municipal councillors of Amsterdam
Leaders of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy
People's Party for Freedom and Democracy politicians
Politicians from Amsterdam
Politicians from Ankara
State Secretaries for Economic Affairs of the Netherlands
Turkish emigrants to the Netherlands
Women government ministers of the Netherlands