Femke Halsema (Dutch: [ˈfɛmkə ˈɦɑlsəmaː] ; born 25 April 1966) is a Dutch politician and filmmaker serving as Mayor of Amsterdam since 2018. She is the first woman to hold the position on a non-interim basis. She was previously a member of the House of Representatives for the leftist green party, GroenLinks (1998–2011), and served as the party's parliamentary leader (2002–2010).
Halsema was born in 1966 in Haarlem, the Netherlands, into a Dutch social democratic family. The family later moved to Enschede, a town in the eastern Netherlands near the German border in the Twente region. Her father W. Halsema was a sport teacher and served as director of the municipal service for physical education, sport and recreation (Dienst lichamelijke opvoeding, sport en recreatie) in Enschede.
From 1982 to 1994, her mother, Olga Halsema-Fles, served as an alderwoman in Enschede for the Labour Party (PvdA), with responsibility for social affairs and employment. She was also a member of the Dutch Social Insurance Advisory Board (College van Toezicht Sociale Verzekeringen).
Halsema and her mother are of recent Dutch Reformed Church descent. Halsema's mother Olga Margaretha Bertha Fles was born in 1941 in Velsen-Driehuis near harbour town IJmuiden north of Amsterdam. Olga Fles' parents Cornelis Nicolaas Fles and Truus Corbee married in 1939 in the Noorsche Kerk, Nederlands Hervormd, a Dutch Protestant church in Hilligersberg, near Rotterdam.
In a 2002 interview with the Reformatorisch Dagblad (RD), a Dutch Protestant Christian Reformed newspaper, Halsema presumed members of her maternal family to have been "assimilated Jews", because two nephews of her maternal grandfather Cornelis Nicolaas Fles were named Abram and Izaak, whom she supposed had been tailors. Halsema referred to some families with the surname Fles in the region (Twente) Enschede being Jewish. But Halsema's own family is not related to them.
Olga Halsema-Fles’ family originates from Leiden, with a few ancestors residing in Rotterdam, amongst whom Abram and Izaak Fles, her uncles. Both Abram and Izaak Fles belonged to the Nederlands Hervormde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church). As such they were registered in the Rotterdam municipal archive. They worked as civil servants, married and died in 1961 in Rotterdam.
Abram, Izaak and Jacob are common first names in Dutch Protestant churches, chosen from the Hebrew Bible, next to New Testament names. Abram and Izaak Fles belonged to the Nederlands Hervormde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church), just like their father Izaak, a brother to Halsema's great-grandfather Cornelis Fles, and their grandfather was. Halsema's family tree in the maternal line shows, that all ancestors in this family Fles since the start of the 18th century were baptised in Leiden, a historical stronghold of Protestantism in the Netherlands. Before, in the 17th century all ancestors were baptised in Roman Catholic churches as was their first known forefather Johannes Fles (Flessinghe), born ca. 1640 in Sarbrug (Saarbrücken, Germany), who settled in Leiden, in Holland.
Dutch historian Bart Wallet included Femke Halsema in a chapter on contemporary Dutch Jewry in an entirely revised edition (2017) of “Geschiedenis van de joden in Nederland" ("History of the Jews in the Netherlands"). But after some genealogical research in 2020 Wallet published an article in the Dutch Jewish internet magazine Jonet "Waarom Femke Halsema toch niet joods is" ("Why Femke Halsema is not Jewish after all"), admitting his mistake, indicating he will correct this in the next edition of this book. The article was reprinted in the Dutch Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad (New Israelitic Weekly).
In 1983, Halsema graduated from the Kottenpark-college in Enschede with a Havo-diploma. Between 1984 and 1985 she attended the Vrije Hogeschool (teachers program for Waldorf schools) in Driebergen. In 1985 she started training as a Dutch and history teacher in Utrecht. In 1988 she left her training without graduating. After that she worked for a year in a Utrecht café. She then started studying general social sciences at Utrecht University, specialising in criminology. During these studies she had a number of jobs related to her specialisation. Between 1991 and 1993, she was an intern at the working group "police and immigrants" at the Ministry of the Interior and she was a student assistant for professor Frank Bovenkerk.
After Halsema graduated in 1993, she joined the staff of the Wiardi Beckman Stichting (WBS), the research institute of the Labour Party. She was seen as a rising talent in the Labour Party. In 1995, she published the book Ontspoord. Opstellen over criminaliteit & rechtshandhaving ("Derailed, essays about crime and law enforcement") for the WBS. In 1996, she travelled through the United States as a fellow for the German Marshall Fund. In 1996 she became an editor for the De Helling, the magazine of the research institute of GroenLinks. In the same year, she started combining her work at the WBS with work for De Balie, a political and cultural centre in Amsterdam, where she met Kees Vendrik, who before that worked for the GroenLinks in the House of Representatives. For De Balie, she led the project Res Publica about the meaning of the Constitution of the Netherlands for the modern society. She also joined the programme committee of the Labour Party for the 1998 election. She also published the book Land in zicht: een cultuurpolitieke benadering van de Ruimtelijke Ordening ("Land ho, cultural-political essays about spatial planning") with Maarten Hajer. She was asked to be a candidate for the Labour Party in the 1998 election.
In the autumn of 1997, Halsema left the Labour Party and the WBS. The direct cause was the authoritarian way in which the police had handled the protests against the European summit that was working on the Treaty of Amsterdam. The social democratic mayor Schelto Patijn had put 500 people in preventive detention. Her dissatisfaction with the course of the Labour Party had grown. In her view the party was unable to renew its social democratic manifesto and use the rising economic tide to invest in the public sector.
Member of the House of Representatives
In the 1998 election, Halsema was a candidate on the list of GroenLinks after being courted by Paul Rosenmöller. She was the third candidate on the list, making her the highest new candidate and practically guaranteed her a seat in the House. The seventh was her former De Balie-colleague Vendrik. GroenLinks more than doubled its seat total from five to eleven. In her first period in the House, Halsema was spokesperson justice, asylum seekers and home affairs. She became well known due to her opposition to the tougher migration law proposed by Job Cohen.
In the 2002 election, she was given the second place on the list. The party lost one seat. Halsema became vice-chair of the parliamentary party and among others spoke for the party in the first debate with the First Balkenende cabinet. In November of that year Paul Rosenmöller unexpectedly announced that he would leave politics. He asked Halsema to succeed him, and she immediately agreed. Ten days before the party congress she was announced as the only candidate for the party leadership and became top candidate for the 2003 election. The party lost another two seats. In addition to the party leadership she was spokesperson on areas of culture and media, healthcare, spatial planning and the environment. As party leader she had a more prominent position and put forth a number of private member's bills, including one concerning judicial review and another that sets a fixed price for books (together with the leader of the Democrats 66 (D66) Boris Dittrich).
Between October 2003 and January 2004, Halsema was on maternity leave. She got twins. Marijke Vos, the vice-chair of the parliamentary party took over as party leader. After her return to the House of Representatives, Halsema started a debate about the course of the left in general and GroenLinks in particular. She claimed that her party was the last "left liberal party in the Netherlands". She called for increased cooperation with the Socialist Party, the Labour Party and GroenLinks, aiming at a left-wing majority government after the 2007 election. She asked Labour Party leader Wouter Bos to speak out in favour of such a cabinet, but he refused in order to allow for a possible coalition of the Labour Party and the Christian Democratic Appeal. In January 2006, she was elected "Liberal of the Year" by the Youth Organisation Freedom and Democracy, the youth organisation of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), because of her new political course, in particular where it came to reforming the welfare state. In June 2006, she was the only candidate for the top spot on her party's list. During the campaign, she published Linkse lente (Left-wing Spring), a book co-authored by Michiel Zonneveld, which blends her political vision and personal biography. In the 2006 election the party lost another seat.