Rob Jetten: Ex-athlete setting the pace in Dutch politics

As a talented junior athlete, Rob Jetten once ran as a pace-setter for future Olympic champion Sifan Hassan. Now the 38-year-old is setting his own pace at the head of Dutch politics after a stunning win for his centrist D66 party in Wednesday's vote. Just like Hassan, who won the Paris Olympic marathon with an astonishing late surge, Jetten timed his own political run perfectly. With a positive message and youthful energy, Jetten dragged the D66 from fifth in the polls with a month to go.

Exit polls on Wednesday suggested he had won the election with 27 seats, beating far-right leader Geert Wilders into second place. "We have run a very positive campaign because we want to get rid of all the negativism in the Netherlands over the past few years," he told AFP. "I want to bring the Netherlands back to the heart of Europe because without European cooperation, we are nowhere," he added. Jetten has had a head-spinning rise up the political hierarchy. Entering parliament at the tender age of 30, he became leader of the D66 just a year later, the youngest ever to hold the post.

His carefully rehearsed lines and bookish glasses earned the self-confessed geek the unwelcome nickname of "Robot Jetten" in his early career. But he shed the glasses after laser eye surgery and adopted a less earnest demeanour that saw him impress in his ubiquitous media appearances during the campaign. "The best advice I got then was to tell your story as if you were sitting around the table with your mates," he said, referring to the early years.

A quirk of the calendar handed Jetten even more positive exposure. He reached the final of popular TV quiz show "The Smartest Person", filmed in spring but broadcast in the run-up to election day.

The quiz success was unsurprising for someone who, as a young boy, used to read two newspapers and watch the morning TV news before heading to school. "A geek. That is really what I was at age 12," he admits bashfully.

He grew up in Uden, a town in the southeast of the country. His parents were both teachers.

Jetten studied public administration at Radboud University in Nijmegen, which he selected on "late chooser's day".

"I wanted to make the world a slightly better place," he later told the university website.

Before entering politics, he worked as a consultant for ProRail, the government body that runs the Dutch public railway network.

Jetten, who is gay, has been in a relationship with Nicolas Keenan, an international hockey player for Argentina, since 2022. The couple plan to marry next summer in Spain.

"As a child and teenager, I was a keen games player. Football and athletics were my greatest passions," he said.

"But as I grew up and started discovering my identity, it was quite difficult not to identify with top-level gay athletes."

In politics, he was a rising star, appointed Energy and Climate minister between 2022 and 2024, despite his youth and relative inexperience.

But his party fortunes suffered, with the D66 slumping from 24 seats in parliament to only nine at elections in 2023.

Two years later, observers put his success down to being "less woke", less alarmist about the climate, and generally a more pragmatic politician.

From early on in this campaign, Jetten ruled out a coalition with far-right leader Geert Wilders, calling him "the biggest bully in the playground".

"As a democrat, I don't see how I could go into coalition with him," he said.

Unlike previous D66 leader Sigrid Kaag, who used to sigh "who are these people" when receiving messages on social media, Jetten often engages with opponents publicly.

It could all have been so different for the young runner, who represented the Netherlands at junior level.

"After a career in top-level sports, I wanted to go into the catering industry. It runs in my family," he told his university website. "Ideally, I wanted to have my own restaurant, on a beach in a warm country. But it all turned out differently.

"Not that I regret it: I now have the most beautiful job in the Netherlands," he said in the interview published three years ago. He might now have an even bigger one.

Agence France-Presse